Course Description

This course offers an advanced and comprehensive introduction to a recent, ongoing, and controversial debate within the contemporary field of mythology which has argued for the need to view myth and mythmaking, as well as scholarly analyses and theorisations of myths and mythmaking, as political artefacts embedded in, productive of, and in turn produced by power/knowledge relations. Some contemporary scholars of myth and mythmaking (e.g., Barthes, Lincoln, McCutcheon), whose work will provide the intellectual framework for the course, have thus argued that the overly narrow categorisation of myth as ‘fictional story’ should be deconstructed in order to trace the political interests and effects that are at work in the maintenance of distinctions between truthful and false narratives and, further, that this self-imposed definitional limitation on the field of mythology should itself be constituted as an object of analysis. As such, these scholars have sought to expand definitions of myth to include any narratives or discursive forms, cultural practices, or historical events that are constituted publicly or privately as coherent and continuous, or as foundational for assertions of identity or identification, whether individual or collective. This course will, in taking the challenge of these scholars seriously, thus attempt to expand common definitions and classifications of myth in order to examine how historical and contemporary forms of mythmaking (whether in nationalist discourse, art criticism, oral storytelling, advertising, or psychoanalysis, for example) serve both as a mirror of prevailing social and personal identities and a powerfully coercive template for their formation. The course will be structured in two parts. The first half of the course will examine the emergence and scholarly analysis of the category ‘myth’ historically. The second part of the course will track the development of understandings of myths and their implication in the politics of identity through a series of case studies including, but not limited to: myth and colonialism; the Grimm Brothers’ fairytales and their relationship to German nationalism; myth and antisemitism; feminist revisions of myths and folktales; the ‘War on Terror’.