Taboo or not taboo? [review of "forbidden knowledge: from prometheus to pornography" (shattuck, r.; 1996) [book review]

This is an important book that can inform reflection on such possible limits of the engineering profession. The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Literary Narratives,” deals with a variety of myths and stories associated with respecting or overcoming certain realms of knowledge. Prominent among these are the stories of Prometheus, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Frankenstein, Faust, the 18th century French novel The Princess of Clèves, Emily Dickinson, s poetry of self-containment, Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd, and Albert Camus‘s The Stranger. Part Two, “Case Histories,” begins by narrating stories of the nuclear weapons and human genome projects, and then returns to literature with an extended examination of the Marquis de Sade’s pursuit of pleasure through sexual transgression. Other types of forbidden knowledge seem to have more bearing on non-engineering on engineering experience. As the earlier brief overview indicates, this is primarily a literary book. Shattuck is good at explicating the lust for experience inherent in the modern sensibility, the fragility of subjective insight, and the paradox of pornography, the excitement of which depends on maintenance of the very boundaries it transgresses.