Semiotic And Cognitive Interpretation Of The Postmodern Myth

Abstract

One of the systematically important concepts of postmodernism is the concept of myth. Meanwhile, among the distinctive features of the postmodern discourse are the rapprochement of high and mass cultures, the active mixing of literary languages, styles and genres, the citation, the game features, the emphasized poly variety and the increased irony. It’s the remyphologization of postmodern literature that provides the rapprochement of high and mass cultures. This process takes the form of styling and parodying the original myths, so that the postmodern text begins to resemble the myth structurally. In the postmodern myth an occasional unit turns into the category of "cyclic repetition": on the one hand, an event, recorded in a myth, is thought to be unique; on the other hand, this event is repeated regularly. Cyclical repetition of the original myth turns it into a model which provides the self-organization of a postmodern work. In terms of cognitive linguistics, this statement allows the myth to be interpreted as a dynamically represented frame or script. In case of establishing a similarity relation with the original myth, the postmodern myth is the styling of the original one, and the contrast leads to the parody of the primary myth. In the framework of this study the semiotic and cognitive analysis of the postmodern myth is carried out on the example of works by an American writer J. Barth.