A Re-telling

Essays

Just to remind you the possible essay topics. For any question, either comment down here or ask me (or James) during next week's tutorial. Have fun.

In this essay you should examine the ways in which the category of ‘myth’ is produced and to what ends. Choose one of the following 3 quotations and discuss with reference to any of the myth theorists or theories covered in class in term 1:

1. ‘There may be the word “myth”, but the word names numerous and conflicting “objects” of inquiry, not a “thing” with its name written on it. Myth names a reality that we “cut out”, not one that “stands out”’ (Strenski 1987: 1).

OR

2. 'The category ['myth'] is often intellectually committed to an a priori clean distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, fabulous delusion and scientific lucidity, us and them, just as it is rhetorically wielded to reinforce these oppositions by coordinating them with a scale of moral, social and political values' (McCutcheon 2000:192).

OR

3. '...whenever someone calls something a "myth", powerful--and highly consequential--assertions are being made about its relative level of validity and authority vis-à-vis other sorts of discourse' (Lincoln 1999: ix).

Submission Deadline: 4pm, January 5th 2009
Word limit: 4-5000 words

And remember that it will be electronic submission via the Ble! Don't go with the essay to the faculty office because they won't accept it!

Annie tells stories too

Read the Annie's brand-new story at the usual place.

Hope

Six pomegranate seeds.

That’s all it took.

The things we don’t know when we finally give in. If only we did.

‘Persephone’. A rich, sylvan name. Fecund. Sylph-like. We try out these syllables on our tongues, tasting the fruit that dooms us to a cold dark world at least half the time.

‘Demeter’ altogether more real, determined, sharp somehow. It is her will that won’t be bent. She doesn’t eat—no hidden, forbidden fruit for her. She doesn’t sleep, dream, hope, relent until that which is hers is hers again. What is it to be a mother who yearns for what she will never keep? For that which was never hers to begin with?

And where do we begin?

With the gathering of flowers. Hyacinth, Narcissus, Anemone. Mythical names. A mythical girl who somehow stands in for all of us who are lost and who yearn for our mothers.

I miss her.

And the dark shadow lurks. Spectre. Lord of ghosts. Thief.

He rends the earth. Splits it in two. Swallows a whole life whole. Makes it his. But not wholly. Because six pomegranate seeds were not twelve. No disciples here then.

I miss her.

This is what everything means to me.

The vanishing point. That’s where Demeter roams. Wild hair, ravaged face. Tears that drip drip drip without awareness. It’s her body that is ripped in two. Always two. Her fate.

The gods think her grief is intolerable, failing all the while to notice that it is her grief. Others are stake apparently. The world pivots on a mother’s love apparently. Is Demeter still a mother? Her daughter gone. Hope is gone. She’s gone. Is Demeter a mother? A compromise must be reached for the sake of the other.

Persephone in her prison grieves too.
Perfect symmetry. If they could both but know it, maybe there would be some small comfort in a mourning that is shared.

But no.

Burning for comfort. Refusing comfort. There is none to be had.

The storytellers don’t notice her grief. Because it’s still, frozen, disbelieving.

Because of six pomegranate seeds. They mark six moments of (in)decision. Irrevocable. The law you see. There is a law that says No. The law. Of the name. Of the Father. Non. Nom. None. Not one. A compromise is always a decision.

She eats the seeds without thinking. Why don’t the poets see that that is the point? She does not know. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know that in saying yes she was yielding to the big No. The big zero. The vanishing point. That vanishing now marks the hours, the days, the minutes. Marks all of our time.

She returns from time to time. In dreams. It makes her want to die without death and without killing. To die up against her mother. To place her head on her shoulder, enter into her chest and double-lock herself in.

Instead, the back and forth. The interminable wandering. The dark, the light both flooding through her. Mostly in the dark. She never saw the light. Never sees it.

I miss her.

Henry tells a story

Henry has told a splendid story! And you can too!
https://www.ble.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_17098_1%26url%3D

Parodying

Following the discussions about language and retelling the classics, I thought I might put the marvellous Wendy Cope's limericks parodying the Waste Land on the blog, since we studied T.S.Eliot a couple of weeks ago. So funny and mordant, especially the end of the third...


Waste Land Limericks

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

 -- Wendy Cope

Challenged as I am computerwise, I couldn't find the real thing on the blog anymore. It's linked here.

Also, here's a link to an article which continues on the Rothko-Art-Money discussion. It's the Times Literary Supplement, so prepare for a dash of ponciness, but anyway, it touches upon those topics here and there. And the author used the word 'perfidious', which is a brilliant word that I didn't know existed in English.

Question

Thursday's tutorial question is as follows:

Are Jung's theories wholly explainable in terms of his psychology, national origin, and political commitments? What does knowing about the various anti-semitic statements he made make you think about his theories? Is it important to know the biography of a scholar in order to understand and assess his or her theories? In what ways is the discussion of Jung's biography itself a form of mythmaking?

Stories

Just to remind you that last time we decided for the last day of this term to be the deadline for your stories. So far we got only 2 of them: one is here, and the other you can find in the BLE (it was too long to form a post) if you log in, then click on the Myth and Mythmaking course, then click on 'Teaching Resources' and open the folder 'Demeter and Persephone'.

For those of you who still have no idea what this storytelling businness is (i'm sure there is someone...), I suggest you go back and read some previous posts in this blog, here and here.

I hope it's all clear.

Have fun.

UPDATE: now (Wed 3/12) there is a third story to read on the BLE!

Reliable Web?

About our conversations of last time on the reliability of the informations on the Internet, check out this article on the CNN website.

Second Order Signification?

From Prospect Magazine:

Reading Sarah Palin’s anguished interview with Greta van Susteren of Fox News just after the election, I had an epiphany: Palin is a poet, and a fine one at that. What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse.

Here she is, in a work I have taken to calling “The Relevance of Africa.” (Not a single word or comma has been changed, but the line breaks are placed where they naturally fall.) In it, Palin blends the energy of free verse with the austerity of a classic 14-line sonnet.

It reads: “And the relevance to me /With that issue, /As we spoke /About Africa and some /Of the countries /There that were /Kind of the people succumbing /To the dictators /And the corruption /Of some collapsed governments /On the /Continent, /The relevance /Was Alaska’s.”

A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake.

Guess What

Here we go with the questions:

Do you think that Barthes' theory of a second-order semiological system is a helpful way of looking at how 'myth' works? Do you agree with Barthes' when he says (p. 117) that 'myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us'. What contemporary examples of this 'double function' of myth can you think of?

Moreover, i believe it is time for you to start thinking seriously about essay topics... Prepare some questions if you need, and we can spend some time brainstorming about that.

Art for the masses?

A few very scattered thoughts on art. I would love to knit them together better but am trying to concentrate on my real homework (honest). Please feel free to comment below.

Following a psuedo-structuralist discussion we had in the smoking area about the marvel, or not, of Rothko "Is it red? Is it Burgundy? Does it matter?" I thought you might be interested to read this. The journalist writes how art is replacing the religious experience in this supposedly 'increasingly unreligious world'.

Rothko himself, who committed suicide in 1970 from anti-depressants, found painting to be a release from the pressures that life placed upon him and at the same time gained comfort from the feeling of solidarity from his admirers: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.", he said.

Many people ask the questions: what is art? Who gets to say? What is at stake? Is producing and experiencing art a purely aesthetic experience? Is art shaped by the world around us? and many many more...

On a recent rip to the Tate Modern armed with a new found interest in the links between art and politcs I bumped into one of our fellow class mates who had free entry to the Rothko exhibition. At £12.50 a ticket to what was previously a free exhibition in the same museum one has to question whether the next government will keep to their promise of free entry.

As we face the largest economic crisis since the 1930's sales of art are experiencing the same crashes as elsewhere. Read also at Press TV.

When art is produced purely as an item to be sold, rather than as an expression of the artists creativity, art becomes a slave to capitalist competition and consumerist contortions.

Barthes - Mythologies

hello everyone here is a link to Mythologies. its amazing read it. well you can if you like.

Mythologies by Roland Barthes, as selected and translated by Annette Lavers

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Music Spirituality world magic

Being (hyper)Historical

I was reading something related to our nice conversations of today and I thought to share a passage about history by Tomoko Masuzawa that I find very nice:

What if "being historical" is not a matter of recovering and reconstructing a richly nuanced narrative truth, full of "thick descriptions", of a certain wholeness of a past, but instead is a matter of more or less outwitting such a compelling narrative truth and letting some forgotten moments and contours of the past "flare up", as Walter Benjamin would say, in order to illumine and decompose the compulsive narrativity of history that dictates the ideology of the present?

You find it in the chapter called 'Culture' in M.C.Taylor's Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: Chigago University Press, p.91). It's in the library (many copies) for the most willing of you (A210.14 /826952).

By the way, coming back to my 'hypertext' historical theory (that the most lucky of you enjoyed today) think for a second about what I've just done: I copied a passage from a book (a passage chosen by me and eradicated from the context), posted it onto a blog, and i've hyperlinked it to other texts. For all practical purposes I've 'exploded' it to both a wider range of users and to a wider network of informations/meanings.

How postmodern of me.

And finally, the question(s)

I know you've all been impatient, but finally here are the questions for our next tutorial:

Under modernism, why are modernity and history opposed? What is at stake in setting these up as an opposition? What does de Man suggest might be the reason for this? How might de Man's reflections on the literature of modernity be applied to the modernist appropriation of myth? And what does this tell us about the relationship of the category 'myth' to modern conceptions of past, present and future?

Of course, if you want more questions, you will be given more.

See you soon.