The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

• Published in: Comparative literature studies (Urbana) 2012-03, Vol.49 (1), p.50-83
• Main Author: Hussein Ali, Zahra A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aeschylus (522-456 BC); Art criticism; Arts; Comparative literature; Despotism; Dialectic; Drama; Earthquakes; General Interest; Languages; Literature; Love; Mohammad, Sami; Political power; Sculpture; Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822); Speech acts; Tyranny; Visual artists; Visual arts; Writers
• ISSN: 0010-4132; 1528-4212
• DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.49.1.0050

Speculations on the human quest for freedom and the necessity of flinging open the floodgates of oppositional discourse have long been privileged themes in art and literature. Among Arab sculptors, no artist has taken up more seriously than Sami Mohammad the mission to perturb people with his reflections on these issues, and no artist has centered his aesthetics more resolutely on the task of thematizing them in order to unmask the dystopic conditions engendered by a floundering modernity. As a comparative study it postulates that aesthetically, Mohammad's concept of art, like that of Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound and Percey Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, is a dramatic envisioning of the nature of existence; that, like them, this vision is guided by a heightened political consciousness, the symbolic readings of the archetypal character of Prometheus, and an ethical ardor for humanistic values. Ali explores the semiosis and literary acculturations of four of Mohammad's major bronze figures in the round: Paralysis and Resistance (1980), The Challenge (1983), The Tied Man (1989), and The Earthquake (1990).