Interplay Of Myth Research Articles

Rebels in Biblical and Chinese Texts: A Comparative Study on the Interplay of Myth and History

This study offers a new approach for studying biblical myth in two directions: first, by expanding the scope of investigation beyond the clearly mythological elements to other areas of biblical literature, and second, by drawing comparisons to classical Chinese literature. This article thus reconsiders the relationship between myth and history in both biblical and Chinese literature, while seeking to broaden the endeavor of the comparative method in biblical studies. Two examples are offered: (1) the story of Moses’s call narrative and his relationship with Aaron in Exodus in light of the story of Xiang Liang and Xiang Ji in the Shiji; (2) the story of Saul and David in 1 Samuel compared with the story of Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Both comparisons demonstrate the operation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s inversion principle. Conclusions regarding each of these literatures are presented separately, followed by cross-cultural insights and shared aspects in the study of myth, historiography, and religion.

Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth ed. by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke

Reviewed by: Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth ed. by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke Andrew Behrendt Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke, eds., Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth. New Directions in German Studies 22. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 408 pp. Who, really, was Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, imperial consort to Franz Joseph, better known as "Sissi"? In the excellent and engaging Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth, we learn the answer to this question: it is the wrong one to ask. Elisabeth the monarch died at an assassin's hand in 1898, but Sissi the symbol, clad in many meanings, is alive and well today, manifested kaleidoscopically in a "diverse constellation of consumer objects and cultural works" from across the globe (24). This volume, much more transcultural and interdisciplinary than its cover billing as German Studies/History would suggest, appraises the Sissi phenomenon in thirteen critical essays rooted in myriad analytical perspectives. It is a collection best read, in my opinion, from cover to cover, for this is the only way to fully appreciate how well its chapters cohere around its fragmented and protean subject. Editors Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke frame the twin [End Page 117] aims of the book around twin absences: the lack of a scholarly treatment of "Sissimania" and the nonexistence of a Sissi cult in the United States, despite her lasting cachet in Europe and Asia. They propose that the "explanation for the veneration of and popular fascination with the Empress very likely resides in the interplay of myth and memory" (3) and so divide the volume in two parts, "Memory" and "Myth." But ultimately the division matters little, precisely because of that interplay, which is palpable throughout. Part I ("Memory") is vaguely more "historical" in approach, with an unstated emphasis on material culture and memorialization, while Part II ("Myth") dwells more in the post-1950s contemporary. In Part I, Christiane Hertel's chapter examines the unstable monumentality of Ulrike Truger's sculptural tribute Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit. It fits nicely with Maura E. Hametz and Borut Klabjan's account of the cultural-political contestation of Trieste's Elisabeth statue. Beth Ann Muellner offers a critical reading of the Sissi Museum at Vienna's Hofb urg and an analysis at how visitors engage with its displays, leading fruitfully into Judith Szapor and András Lénárt's history of the Érzsébet cult in Hungary and its post-1989 commemoration at the former royal palace in Gödöllő. The iconic official portrait of Elisabeth painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter receives a subversive reading against her erotically charged carte de visite collection in Olivia Gruber Florek's contribution. Carolin Maikler looks at fashion designer/film director Karl Lagerfeld's forays into Sissi memory-work. To round out the section, Fei-Hsien Wang and Ke-chin Hsia provide a fascinating glimpse onto Sissi ("Xixi") fandom in China and the ways her image is refracted through the prism of post-Maoist consumer culture. Part II kicks off with a double feature, as it were, of essays arriving from both film studies and queer studies. Heidi Schlipphacke reads Ernst Marischka's Sissi films against the typical grain of Heimatfilm by revealing their themes of displacement and temporal queerness, followed immediately by Susanne Hochreiter's broader evaluation of Elisabeth as a queer icon. Anita McChesney gives a postcolonial reading of Lilian Faschinger's novel Wiener Passion to highlight the ways it challenges prevailing national images of the Austrian "imagined community." In her chapter, Elizabeth Black studies the stage and screen versions of Jean Cocteau's L'Aigle à deux têtes for the work's dreamy blurring of history and legend. Focusing on themes of the body, self-representation, and female autonomy, Kate Thomas compares the fate of Elisabeth to Queen Victoria and Princess Di. Finally, Susanne Kelley examines [End Page 118] how Sissi has been deployed in the construction of the Habsburg myth and the branding of Vienna as a tourist destination on both sides of the Atlantic. While the editors do a fine job introducing the project...

Business School Internationalization Narratives: An Interplay of Myth and Realpolitik

The internationalization of higher education is one of the dominating imperatives in the higher education field. Universities and business schools keep vigorously ‘internationalizing’ despite associated irrationalities and at least partly doubtful benefits and outcomes. We take a narrative lens and suggest to understand the perceived internationalization imperative as the result of a diverse set of internationalization narratives. Assembling the economistic/profit and social-cultural/nonprofit drivers distilled from the literature with the overarching Humboldtian and utilitarian HE perspectives we derive the (1) pragmatic, (2) idealistic, (3) cynical and (4) illusionary narratives of business school internationalization, respectively. We interpret the current HE debate as intertwining these narratives in an inter- play of myth and realpolitik, generating a potpourri of justification and explanation fragments in HE policy and strategy debates. By disentangling these narratives and their mythical and realpolitikal elements we contribute a first step into reintroducing a more reflective voice in the HE internationalization debate.

Keats, Hegel, and Belated Mythography

This essay aims to contribute to a growing body of criticism devoted to the paradox of John Keats's peculiarly political aestheticism. Keats places a seemingly disinterested aestheticism squarely within the matrix of history, at a time when history itself was coming into its own as a philosophical category. Hyperion's figurations share the theoretical horizon of Keats's contemporaries in post-Kantian philosophy and betray a concern with one of the formative impulses behind Hegel's system-building: the interplay of myth and rationality. Reading Hyperion in comparison with a line of dialectical thinkers from Schiller to Adorno, I locate Keats's engagement with history precisely where he appears to suspend it: in those sculptural figurations of stasis in which the poem depicts, and to no small degree fetishizes, the archaic. An ironic myth of myth's demise, Hyperion exposes the fetishism latent in post-Enlightenment mythography.

Cascadia: The (Re)construction of a bi‐national space and its residents

This paper aims to demonstrate how globalization and discourses on regional/national identities cannot only create cross‐border/regional social spaces but also the criteria to select a transnational elite to occupy the cross‐border space reified by interplay of myths and logic. Using the case of Cascadia, we observe a construction of regional social space, taking place along the Pacific Northwest border of U.S. and Canada, through the process of globalization. In this socially constructed region of Cascadia, two often‐antagonistic groups are mutually benefiting from each other by creating a unique bi‐national space. On one hand, the neo‐liberal business community is redefining borders in terms of free trade while on the other hand the environmentalists are redefining borders in terms of eco‐systems. However, to create and maintain this regional identity and redefinition of transnational space an effective transportation conduit is required. Because transnational travel requires a high level of governmentality to control the flow of goods and people, the construction of Cascadia and its concomitant transportation corridor, the groups involved simultaneously are creating an “othering” process. Hence, this reconstruction of bi‐national space essentially shows how discourses on nationalism and internationalization co‐exist, reinforce each other, and are often sub‐processes of globalization.

The interplay of myths and realities

The interplay of myths and realities

Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts.

An important, provocative and original work, of great interest to Indian scholars, historians of religions, psychologists and historians of ideas, but accessible also to the cultivated reader. Even if one does not always agree with the author's interpretation, one cannot but admire her vast and precise learning, her splendid translations and exegesis of so many, and so different, Sanskrit texts, and her uninhibited, brilliant, and witty prose.-Mircea Eliade, University of Chicago This is . . . a book which is as rich in detail as the carvings of the great Hindu temples. It shares with them a delight in the interplay of myth and mundane experience, and above all an empathy with the Hindu preoccupation with the meaning of human existence in all its complexity.-G. M. Carstairs, Times Literary Supplement