Pegasus, tome 1 - Les terres oubliées (GRUND ROMANS) (French Edition)

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V To the memory of all civilians dismissed as 'collateral damage' "The obliterated shall be remembered. Italian common saying Oxford Dictionary 21 Interrelations between myth and literature are perennial and very complex. Although myth is sometimes seen as a minimal narrative sequence, a condensed story-image, an 'elementary form' existing prior to verbal or any other expression Jolles , a collection of symbols that can be reduced to a permanent structure Bilen , or "un systeme dynamique de symboles, d'archetypes et de schemes, systeme dynamique qui, sous l'impulsion d'un scheme, tend a se composer en recit" Durand 54 , whose meaning can be put forth just as well through some other mediums — for example, in the form of drawings or "pictomyths" Vizenor 20 — it is undeniable that all that is mythic is most often expressed by means of literature Boyer , that is, either through oral recitations or through the written word.

This state of affairs justifies the often asked question: Conversely, it is impossible to overlook the importance of myth for literature. Many writers thought it absolutely crucial, as is illustrated by the famous statement of Jorge Luis Borges: We do 2 not need to go that far, or to claim, as Northrop Frye did, that myth furnishes literature with all its principal structures and defines narrative types, poetic forms, character types and patterns of imagery Anatomy ; nonetheless, we are bound to come up against myth at some point of literary analysis, for mythology, in the sense of a body of myths belonging to particular cultural traditions, has always been a source from which writers took themes, subjects, characters, situations, plots, scenes and images for their works, using them in many different ways.

Old mythic narratives are sometimes retold from the modern point of view e. Throughout the twentieth century, too, it has been "a fascinating and controversial subject for scholars and writers" Patai Always protean, polyfunctional, multivalent and "everlastingly elastic" Symonds , myth appears in a variety of forms, manifestations and avatars, defying any simple interpretation. Although studied by numerous scholars in relevant disciplines, from anthropology to literary criticism, an agreement about "what the term 'myth' means has never been achieved within any of these fields, let alone among them" Priebe As none of its features can be isolated as the 'essential one,' and no simple definition can cover all aspects of its nature, the only way to comprehend it is to take into consideration all of its important traits, shedding light on it from various angles simultaneously.

Mythopoeia in literature has been very rich in the twentieth century, with numerous writers using myth in their works, both as a structural element and as received thematic material. The 'mythic method' developed during the first decades of the century as a modernist reaction to the nineteenth-century conventions of realism, and has constantly grown and expanded ever since. It became a global literary phenomenon after the Second World War, spreading especially during the fifties, sixties and seventies, i.

During the same period, as a consequence of accelerated inter-cultural communication, differences between various national literatures diminished, as they tended to get closer and to 4 influence each other to a larger extent than ever before.

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However, in spite of such prominence of mythopoeia, few critical efforts have been committed to studying this significant stream of literary production on a comparative, inter-cultural basis. By examining en bloc mythopoeic novels from four continents and six different cultures, the present research helps shed more light on alternative but important branches of contemporary world literature. It compares and investigates the affinities of these works, and the profound similitude of their authors' horizons — in spite of the differences between their backgrounds — thus contributing to the understanding of the importance and development of a global mythopoeia.

The aim of the present study is threefold: Second, to investigate six novels written and published in the period from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies — i. The novels, which — although diverse in many respects — also share some important similarities, come from different countries — Algeria, Guyana, Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, France, and Brazil respectively — and are representative of mythopoeic writing in the mentioned period. Third, to draw conclusions from these examples about the applicability 5 of the proposed definition in regard to literary myth, about the place of myth in contemporary literature, about different aspects of contemporary mythopoeia in narrative fiction, and about the kind of criticism appropriate for analyzing it.

The thesis is presented in eight chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of the prominent theories of myth in the Western tradition, classifies them according to their usability, explores the reasons of the failure of myth criticism, examines terminologies of myth-like stories in small-scale societies, and proposes a new way of defining myth by delimiting its semantic field, hi the same chapter, I discuss mythopoeic writing in the third quarter of the twentieth century, and look into the significance and similarities of the novels which are the object of this study.

In Chapters Two to Seven I analyze these six novels, each in its appropriate context, and investigate their authors' views on myth, how each of them understands the concept in general, and how he adapted mythic materials and structures in his work. The last chapter, entitled "Afterthoughts," sums up the argument and draws conclusions. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities, and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Ambrose Bierce 90 One can study only what one has first dreamed about. As for names, the name that can be named is not the constant name. The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things. Lao Tzu 53 If every methodologically sound scholarly work is expected to begin with a definition of its topic, then the present study is bound to form an exception, at least for a while, as "the difficulty of defining myth is equaled only by that of any attempt to define literature" Bilen In spite of many efforts, nobody has so far been able to give a generally acceptable answer to a simple question: Like so many other basic concepts, myth appears impossible to define.

It seems to prove George Steiner's admonition that "in the humanities, aspirations to systematic definition end, virtually always, in sterile tautology" Passion This problem arises because different people have attached many different levels of meaning to the term 'myth,' and no definition has been able to encompass all interpretations. As a consequence, many critics state explicitly in their books devoted to the 2 In linguistics, for example, it is easy to describe abstract notions of linguistic analy sis such as phoneme, morpheme or lexeme, but far more difficult to find a sound definition for the seemingly self-evident concept of'word' Crystal Those who insist on defining it, like William Bascom "Forms" 9 , Alan Dundes "Madness" , Mircea Eliade Aspects , and Claude Levi-Strauss, inevitably come up with a far too narrow semantic field, which tends to answer only to their particular interests, or to those of their field of specialization.

Such definitions tend to use the term 'myth' in the meaning of "an all-purpose category of symbolic story" Leach and Aycock 96 , which it obviously cannot be. One of the reasons for this confusion is the universality of myth; as has been pointed out more than once, "there has been no culture which has not generated a set of myths uniquely its own" Vickery For example, Alan Dundes strongly expresses the view that only folklorists have the right to define myth and berates the "sloppiness" of scholars of other disciplines "these would -be mythologists" , whose practice, in his words, has "little to do with scholarship and intellectual rigor," for not accepting the rule that myth can only be "a sacred narrative offering an explanation of how the world and mankind came to be in their present form.

But this confusion is by no means new; actually, it can be traced back as far as written documents exist, which — in the Western tradition — means pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. In fact, it is precisely during this formative period in the development of European culture, when the foundations of many other key ideas and fields of intellectual endeavor were also laid, that the seeds of understanding myth, as well as of controversies about it — as we perceive the notion today — were planted.

Xenophanes of Colophon c. His famous statements, for example that Homer and Hesiod imputed to gods all that is shameful in humans, such as theft and adultery, or that horses and oxen, had they been able to paint and sculpt, would surely have represented their gods in their own image, i. Heraclitus of Ephesus c. He thought that narratives about gods, rooted in concrete perceptual reality, cannot — and so falsely claim to — explain the principles of cosmic order: Theagenes from Rhegium c.

According to his exegesis, Artemis symbolizes the moon, Hera air, Athena wisdom, and Aphrodite libidinousness Morgan Metrodorus from Lampsacus c. Thus, The Iliad is to be understood as an allegory of cosmic arrangement: Helen stands for Earth, which is surrounded by air Paris , ether Agamemnon , the sun Achilles and the moon Hector Morgan Some later schools accepted and developed this line of thinking.

The Stoics used Homer's and Hesiod's epics as proofs of their own pantheistic views. They tried to explain the apparent lack of ordinary logic in mythical discourse by postulating that myth is a deceitful discourse which expresses the truth in images Theon of Alexandria [I cent. For example, the struggle between Apollo and Python is simply a depiction of the dispersion by the warm rays of the rising sun of fumes and vapors, which, snake-like, creep low above the ground.

Other schools of interpretations of myth soon followed. The sophist Prodicus of Ceos V cent. B C was the father of the psychological approach. He rationalized mythic stories as psychological reactions of primitive humanity to natural phenomena.

A l l rituals and mysteries are, in his theory, connected with the benefits of agriculture and cattle-breeding; religion itself springs from the gratitude people feel for the goods they receive 10 from the earth. Just as the Egyptians believe the Nile to be a god, bread is in Greece worshipped as Demeter, wine as Dionysus, water as Poseidon, and fire as Hephaestus Waterfield Epicurus from Samos B C accepted Prodicus' idea in general, but turned his argument upside down. For Epicurus, myths are the ailments of the soul; they arose as a consequence of ignorance and the existential terror of the unknown and of death.

Democritus of Abdera c. Attacking "the madness" of mythmakers and the primitivism of their listeners, he tried to prove that only need, want, fear and folly lie at the source of mythical narratives: Critias of Athens c. BC and Euhemerus of Messene c. Careful analysis of mythic stories can help us, it is suggested, to recover the lost knowledge of historical development in ancient times. Euhemerus wrote the famous novel of travel lepd ctvaypcKpfj [Sacred Scripture! On the chief of them, called Panchaia, he allegedly saw a golden column with a long inscription from 11 which he learned that Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus had been great kings and were worshipped beyond the grave by their grateful subjects.

However, it was Plato BC whose influence proved to be the most influential one in the subsequent development of the usage of the term 'myth. Therefore, mythic stories should be cleansed of their immoral and illogical parts. Ironically, he himself was a great mythologian who created several famous myths, such as those of Er the Pamphylian, pervaded with Orphic ideas of metempsychosis in The Republic , of Eros in The Symposium , of the creation of the universe in Timaeus , and of Atlantis in Critias.

He treated his own myths as 'useful lies' necessary to counter the poets' dangerous ones. As for Aristotle BC , he declared that myths — at least those known in the Greece of his times — were corrupted in their historic transmission by poets, whose aim had been either to introduce laws and thus promote the common good, or to nurture their own selfish ends. However, he thought it possible to uncover the vestiges of ancient wisdom in myth by applying a careful analysis.

It is plausible that philosophy and arts were developed to a high degree in the remote past, and that all we have left of them are their remnants in myth 4 Some later historians, e. Aristotle was also the first thinker to connect myth with dreams and visionary experience. Apart from all these theoreticians, a number of so-called logographers, who compiled oral traditions and wrote them down during the sixth and fifth centuries B C , and mythographers, who continued to collect myths in the subsequent periods, were content to gather and systematize the available mythic material and preserve it for future generations.

At times they tended to indulge in genealogical minutiae or similar hair-splitting; nonetheless, their work was of remarkable quality and usefulness. Their interests did not lie in trying to understand mythic stories, but rather in enjoying their retelling as they were handed down from the past. Many Greek writers in the Alexandrian and Roman periods, such as the learned poet Callimachus of Cyrene c. In an era of all-embracing historical change, when ancient gods were rapidly losing their adherents, their retelling gradually altered, redefined and reformulated ancient stories, giving them the shape they were to retain for the next two thousand years.

This literary tendency was, like so much of Greek culture, exported to Rome, where a number of Latin authors adopted Alexandrian mythopoeic fashion in their works, among them such great luminaries as Virgil BC and Ovid 43 B C - A D The second crucial step in the development of the notion of myth in Europe came about as a consequence of the political and ideological takeover of the Roman Empire by 13 the followers of the new monotheistic religion.

Christianity, once established, introduced a far more radical approach, which was to change significantly the general attitude towards myth, right down to the contemporary period. Unlike the open-mindedness of classical antiquity in which it was a matter of polite behavior to worship in an alien temple while visiting a foreign city, where different religions and mythologies peacefully co-existed, foreign gods were easily adopted into one's own pantheon and often equated with indigenous ones, and mythic stories freely circulated among different peoples, the teachings of the church, like those of other monotheistic religions, tended to build an impenetrable wall between believers and non-believers.

This new attitude was characterized by a rigid dichotomy between, on the one hand, canonical biblical stories that were considered to be the truth, to the letter, and the only legitimate word of the one God himself; and, on the other, all other myths, all other stories about gods or events of ontological and cosmological significance, which were dismissed as false stories about false gods that only corrupt and puzzle the uninitiated and unenlightened. The New Testament makes it perfectly clear: Those who "will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths" 2 Tim.

In spite of the fact that such attitudes persisted throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, allegorical interpretation of classical narratives continued to be popular; it purported to unveil Christian truths hidden in the works of pagan poets such as Ovid. Dante himself, applying this kind of literary analysis, regarded Virgil not only as the greatest Italian poet, but also as a prophet of Christianity Howatson and Chilvers Although Renaissance humanism revived classical models of literature and resuscitated interest in old myths, they were still — even when taken to contain the profound wisdom of ancient sages or to be extravagant but important accounts of ancient history — regarded as just fables, as opposed to the fundamental truths of Christian doctrine.

As a consequence, being more and more intellectualized and less and less alive, they were downgraded into folk legends, fairy tales, and motifs to be used in literary works or in arts Seznec. This state of affairs began to change only in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when, induced by the growth of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the emergence of a new rational spirit of inquiry Feldman and Richardson xx , the next major step in the development of Western notion of myth was taken.

Now, for the first time, both Christian traditions and 'heathen idolatry' were being examined on the same level, and became objects of rationalist scepticism.

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In addition, the voyages of discovery from the early sixteenth century on "widened the mythological horizon," as adventurers, conquistadors and missionaries brought home reports about customs and traditional stories from many regions of the Earth; their travel narratives "proved more influential in the long run" for 15 mythological studies than the Renaissance humanistic tradition Puhvel The newly available information on beliefs and myths worldwide was used as raw material for comparison with classical mythology.

As a result, many new ideas and theories about myth began to appear. The real beginnings of an independent mythical hermeneutics are to be found in Giambattista Vico's L a scienza nuova ["The New Science! Vico was the first to interpret the concept of myth as something ancient and primitive, a phenomenon belonging to the distant past which gradually disappears with the development of civilization. The most interesting part of his theory considers the instinctive activity of the poetic consciousness — "the primary form of mind" — which generates myth.

Unlike animals who belong to the purely biological sphere and are strangers to anxiety or horror as a reaction to chaos, the first generations of the giants after the flood, although being "stupid, insensate and horrible beasts" Vico , were human enough to create myth as a response to environmental pressures and as an attempt to comprehend the world that surrounded them. In that respect myth, expressed through a language of metaphors and personifications, is 'a true story' which introduces the metaphysical significance necessary for humankind in order to structure experience.

In other words, myth, whose external literary forms are identical with its internal philosophic logic, is poetry in its essence, a vehicle of truth, and the source for the later rise of rational thinking. Without it we would have neither philosophy, nor any civilization at all. Vico's conviction that literature is, historically, born out of myth was taken over by many thinkers in the twentieth century, in whose opinion myth is not only the original literature of 16 humankind, but also the literature of the state of wholeness, before distinctions between art, science, philosophy, religion, law, etc.

In such a way Vico, and those who followed his ideas, stirred up interest in exploring small-scale "societies with no written language," because scholars who studied myth hoped to find in them "myth of a more pure and more living nature than is to be found in civilizations where it has been treated in a 'literary' form" Rudhardt Most other philosophers of the Enlightenment stressed primarily the 'crude' and 'irrational' traits of myth, opposing it to rational thinking, i.

They considered that the replacement of the former by the latter constituted the key evolutionary step in human history. German romanticists, flourishing mainly at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, formed what was called "the first real 'school' of myth" Feldman and Richardson in the post-Renaissance Europe. They introduced pioneering new theories which were profoundly important for most subsequent discourses on myth in various disciplines. In fact, even the very word 'myth' as a substantive in modern languages is a product of the Romantic age, appearing in French in Robert , in German in Grimm , in English in OED Righter 8 , and in Russian in Backes Romantic myth scholarship, based on the conviction of the superiority of imagination over reason, developed the claim of myth to totality and perceived it to be the ultimate 6 Many contemporary scholars adapt this stance; there are innumerable articles and books with titles like "From Myth to Reason" Vemant , or From Myth to Modem Mind Schlagel.

As the deepest ground of knowing humanity and expressing it, myth expanded "to encompass dimensions of the collective and historical by way of the genetic derivation of myth from the original proximity of man to nature preserved by the individual in his imagination and fantasy" Weissenberger Thus the mythopoeic imagination, in the romantic view, was associated with natural instinct, which was believed to be more developed in individuals unspoiled by decadent civilization and living in harmony with the natural environment.

Johann Gottfried Herder, the earliest of the German romanticists, thought that individual ethnic groups, assumed by him to be natural collectives in which humans must live, have their particular identities and characters whose main expression are their mythologies. He praised Scandinavian Eddas, and Chinese and Indian myths, insisting that they are just as worthy of studying as the myths of classical antiquity or the Bible. Myths grow naturally from collective, rather than individual, creative primal wisdom, and through organic historical processes develop as sublime spiritual power which always belongs to a particular nation and historical epoch.

Therefore, it makes no sense to reduce them to any universal source or principle, nor to try to explain them allegorically. They "can be understood only if livingly assented to in the spirit of those who created and believed" in them Feldman and Richardson Myth thus can never be simply true or false, but only relatively so, because its meaning cannot be referred to anything outside of myth itself.

In such a manner, Herder dissolved "the distinction between irrational and rational, between 'primitive' and 'enlightened' man," and postulated that his contemporaries must either find their own authentic myths or "assimilate the past in a way wholly true to the present" Friedrich Schlegel, hailed by Novalis as the apostle of the romantic movement, thought the imagination to be the primary faculty in our encounter with the world, and that reason is able to operate only after we have established a poetic relationship with our environment.

Emphasizing that the task of literature is to cancel "the laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of human nature" Friedrich Schlegel, qtd. His brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, regarded mythology as the '"metaphorical language' of the human mind created according to the needs of the human being in which 'everything corporeal is animated' and 'the invisible is made to appear'" Behler Mythology, in his judgment, provides a complete view of the world and is the basis of both poetry and philosophy.

The staunchest advocate of myth among the romanticists, however, was Friedrich Schelling, who continued to elaborate his philosophy of mythology for several decades after mythopoeic concerns had faded out of intellectual fashion. His approach to myth, usually qualified as idealist and metaphysical, emphasizes that mythic thought is total and unified, and asserts myth as the highest point of art and a decisive key to the purposes of Absolute Spirit.

In words of one of his admirers, Schelling "replaces the allegorical interpretation of the world of myths by a tautegorical interpretation, i. In this manner German Romanticists associated myth and mythopoeia with eschatology and the aesthetic, and attributed an immediate mythic quality to the literary symbol. They believed that all great literature must possess an underlying mythology as "a 19 focal point" Behler , and that the reason why the poetry of their contemporaries was inferior to the ancient was the lack of an authentic mythology, which they then strived to construct.

In other European countries during the same period myth was also a major concern of romantic literature. Thus in England William Blake sought to create a new mythology which would suit the new era, basing it both on traditional elements from Biblical, classical, Cabalistic, British, Nordic and Indian mythologies, and on contemporary political and social events. In the works he called "prophecies" or "visions," such as The Four Zoas, Milton, or Jerusalem, he created new mythical figures e.

As the nineteenth century progressed, romanticism gave way to realism, which became the dominant literary movement of the age, while rationalistic views inherited from Enlightenment philosophy got the upper hand in all branches of western sciences and arts. Accordingly, in spite of the fact that a number of thinkers continued to search for and be influenced by myth, mainstream nineteenth-century literature adhered to the realistic school, while at the same time new sciences were, for the first time in history, developing fast enough to replace religion as the dominant source of explanation of the world that 20 surrounds us.

The thus created dichotomy, ironically, was not unlike the medieval one, with the difference that, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, scientific discourse managed to attain the level of the paradigmatic form of truth statement, while religious tales were more and more understood either symbolically, or only as a foundation of social morality. Two main group of theories on myth appeared: The representatives of the latter saw gods as symbols of nature; their interpretations are best described as "nature allegories tinged with a monomaniacal reductionism to one single type" Puhvel Thus, Adalbert Kuhn, "reducing mythology to meteorology" Ruthven 13 , postulated that the key to all world mythologies can be found in atmospheric phenomena, especially in thunder and storm, which early humans regarded as gods Vries ; similarly oversimplified explanations lie behind the fire mythology of Johannes Hertel, the moon myths of Georg Hiising, and the animal allegories of Angelo de Gubernatis Dorson Friedrich Max Muller's solar mythology is probably the best known of them all.

He thought that poetry was the original, intuitive, spontaneous human response to the world, whereas myth came about much later, as a result of what he called "disease of language" Vries Because the early language was capable only of poetic metaphors, myth arose when their original meaning was forgotten, in an attempt to justify figures of speech no longer understood. Tylor's view, myths had expository and explanatory functions in the time before the emergence of philosophy and science, as some sort of a childlike, crude philosophy of nature Segal Andrew Lang postulated that the fantastic elements in myths, which he called "barbaric," "absurd," "foolish" and "repulsive" stories qtd.

The reaction was not slow in coming. After the prevalence of realism and positivism in the nineteenth century, which claimed the vital importance of 'reality' and fostered ideas of scientific knowledge and evolutionary development, came a period of 'return to myth' during the years of Modernism. The end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century were times of quick changes, of a technological revolution, of remarkable economic growth, rapid industrialization and urbanization, which were followed by cultural disintegration and breaking up of traditional ways of living.

People found themselves in an era for which there were no set schemes, no historical prototypes, and where events 9 'Modernism' will be understood here as a general term for "different modernist tendencies" Nicholls viii and the "polyphony of ideas, issues, and discourses" Williams and Matthews 3 which made a remarkable break with the past in literature and other arts during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

A l l that brought about a turmoil of uncertainty, so it is not surprising that myths became so important in the literature of the period. Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated many later positions on myth, although his views are difficult to ascertain because of contradictory statements in different works.

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Myth, for him, is "a concentrated image of the world" connected to the principle of irrational and instinctive chaos He thought that human beings psychologically require myth to address their spiritual needs through imaginative fiction Solomon and Higgins Nietzsche criticized Socrates as the champion of the spirit of science and rationality which pushed art, passion and myth into steady decline, and robbed classical culture of its natural creativity.

He wrote that the modern "mythless man" "stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grabs for roots," because he is so affected by "the critical-historical spirit of our culture," that, unfortunately, "he can only make the former existence of myth credible to himself by means of scholarship, through intermediary abstractions" Nietzsche's "interpretation of mythopoeia as the only means by which people and culture can be reborn is another idea with modern echoes" Meletinsky The modern world grown pale 1 0, mechanical and abstract, characterized by a lack of aura and by impotence Benjamin , needed some rich and imaginative form of life to revive it.

Many writers and thinkers felt exiled away from the "Being" Heidegger , and hoped to escape the "absolutism of reality" by way of myth, assumed to be the only possibility for humans to feel "at home in the world" Blumenberg , and the only chance of redeeming them "from the formless universe of contingency" Harvey Eliot , and as the answer to "agnostic secularism" found to be "more or less unendurable" Steiner, Presences Such idealization of myth in Modernism was a direct consequence, on the one hand, of the modern fear of history Rahv , i.

It is interesting to note that in each of the three 'revolutionary' periods in the history of European culture — the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modernism — the main tendency was to reach into the past for inspiration and ideas for renewal. In the case of the latter two, it was most notably expressed through the yearning for myth, yearning which is best described as "an aspect of a great longing for primitive mentality, for unity of being" Kermode Mythical imagination was understood to have "no separation of a total complex into its elements," i.

Those same years constituted "the period in which national and linguistic boundaries were crossed far more than previously" Hewitt 7 , and in which philosophical, literary and artistic ideas flowed much faster between different European and Western 24 nations. Modernism was also the time when, for better or for worse, "European civilization and culture exercised a practically world-wide hegemony" Quinones This primacy extended to the field of literature as well.

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As a result, Western literary genres and attitudes spread world-wide, to the detriment of many native literary traditions in different countries. In the domain of narrative fiction, the European novel and short story was accepted as the main outlet for literary production in cultures as far apart as Japan, China, India and the Arab world.

This was the beginning of the process which, for lack of a better denomination, can be called "globalization of culture" and "the emergence of a world literature" Moses x. The popularity of myth in Modernism has suffered from a fairly substantial shrinkage in the subsequent period, caused mainly by the post-structuralist critics' "incredulity toward metanarratives" Lyotard xxiv , their belief that the time of the telling of the great stories is now over, and their attempt to show that myth is a "rigid, 'totalitarian' structure, [ Myth was given the shadowy status of "a second order semiological system" Barthes , was understood to deal "in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances" Angela Carter, qtd.

Such hard views, however, rather seem to indicate that those critics were themselves indulging in what was called the "myth of mythlessness" Jewett and Lawrence Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty has aptly remarked that the "reports of the death of mythology have been greatly exaggerated" , as is witnessed by the presence and acknowledged importance of myth in contemporary literature. Such a situation is best described by Michael Bell's metaphor in which the 25 mythopoeic in contemporary world is likened to the alligators in Thomas Pynchon's novel V. In other words, as Hans Blumenberg has suggested, the attacks on myth constitute the essential mode through which it continually transforms itself and survives Throughout the second half of the twentieth century there has been a constant stream of literary production characterized by the use of myth.

Literary works that belong here display a variety of styles and have been labeled in different ways. They are by no means limited to Europe and the West, but come instead from many different parts of the world. Myth criticism is a special branch of literary criticism developed for examination of the complex interrelations between literature and myth. It arose in the first decades of the last century when the interest in myth suddenly increased and when the modernist critics, such as T. Eliot, propounded the idea that one of the main tendencies of the new literary movement was the revival of the mythic in the production of the new generation of writers.

At the same time, new theories of myth were formulated in other academic disciplines. In this way myth came into the focus of intellectual attention and became an object of study in many different branches of the humanities such as philosophy, ethnology, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, folkloristics, classics, and religious studies.

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Such a wide span of interest confirms the importance of myth in the twentieth century, and strongly suggests that it was an era in which myth was studied more and had more prominence than in any previous period in history. Early in the century, philosopher Henri Bergson put forth 26 what was called a 'biological' theory of myth. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Product details File Size: Grund October 3, Publication Date: October 3, Sold by: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Would you like to tell us about a lower price?

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