Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Teaching Origin Myths, Material Conditions, and “the Bible as Literature”

Abstract

The first time I taught a world literature course, I encountered an expected but frustrating snag: students willingly analyzed foundational mythologies from around the ancient world—the Popol Vuh, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gilgamesh, the Koran—but they resisted applying a similar critical reading to the Christian Bible. Teaching this class in northern Texas, I anticipated that I would have a few students who considered any questioning of the Bible blasphemy. What I did not anticipate was that even the students who claimed they did not regard the Bible as a holy text were still quite uncomfortable calling it “mythology”—a term they did not hesitate to use with mythological texts safely in the realm of “Other.” And while not all students, even in Texas, may have this allegiance to the Bible (and some may feel the same discomfort deconstructing the other foundational texts listed above), origin “myths” are not confined to the sphere of religion. Instead, they often define state, nation, and ethnic background. Deconstructing and analyzing the formation of these “myths” highlights for students the way in which “nationality” or ethnicity—concepts that they often take to be inherent—are in fact constructed by and for a variety of reasons. As Homi Bhabha argues in his introduction to Nation and Narration, all cultures are hybrid and the idea of an originary moment that creates identity is in fact only a fiction used in order to make certain identity claims.