UAA College of Business and Public Policy

Commerce Unbound: A Modern Promethean Story

Friday, March 31, 2017 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m., RH 117

Presentation by:
Jan Osborn
Assistant Professor, Chapman University Department of English

Commerce Unbound: A Modern Promethean Story is an experiment with integrating economics and ethics in a form that could be described as literary-critical economic nonfiction.

By mapping the modern world of commerce into our interpretation of Percy Shelley's “Prometheus Unbound,” we revivify bourgeois life as Shelley revivifies the Promethean story with his own take on the myth. In doing so we make Shelley’s purpose our own, “to familiarize” our audience “with beautiful ideal-isms of moral excellence” in their everyday lives of commerce.

Shelley’s point and ours is that any socioeconomic revolution, whether from the left or the right, will ultimately fail if it is fomented by despair, anger, and hate.