Language Myth Research Articles

Beauty and the Beast: Gendered and Raced Discourse in the News

This article explores the implications of the extent to which the mythic intrudes on the everyday in newspaper reporting, taking as a case study the drive-by shooting of two young, black women in Birmingham in 2003. An analysis of news headlines and texts demonstrates the use of mythical language and imagery in this case (as in other high-profile cases) as compared with the usual reporting of homicides in the press. Notions of innocence and guilt are explored through the construction of gendered and raced bodies in the case study. The article finds that this media discourse relies for its impact on the simultaneous and mutually dependent construction of fabular gendered and raced ideas; of exceptional innocence and purity (unusually) attached to black femininity (beauty) and of exceptional and volatile violence (usually) attached to black masculinity (the beast). Moreover, the discourse is constructed such that guilt for the gun crime extends beyond the individual perpetrators to the black community as a whole. While media coverage reflects a realistic fear of gun crime, the article concludes that media discourse in this case directs fear towards the black community/male as the dangerous 'other', and that this is crucially underpinned by polarized gendered discourse.

Czech Literature, The King with the Horse's Ears, and Its Translations by Karel Havlícek Borovský and Milan Uhde

Michelle Woods, in her paper "Czech Literature, The King with the Horse's Ears, and Its Translations by Karel Havlícek Borovský and Milan Uhde," analyses the adaptation and "translation" of the Irish legend into the Czech language in Karel Havlícek Borovský's 1854 epic poem Král Lávra and in Milan Uhde's 1964 play Král Vávra. The translation of Irish language myths and legends into English functioned as way of constructing and disseminating the notion of a great literary and heroic past within the language of the colonizer but also in dissent to the constructions imposed by that language. Woods focuses on how these legends were adopted and adapted by another culture, how these rewritings engaged with the domestic ideological context, and how this relates back to the Irish "origins." In her analysis, Woods questions why this legend spoke to the cultural and political needs of the given periods and how the evolving culture adapted and rewrote the legend to conform to its own changing needs.

The language myth revisited

The paper examines two attempts to offer a demythologised account of language (by Tony Crowley in Standard English and the Politics of Language and Peter Trudgill in Language Myths), and concludes that both theorists fall victim to the `language myth' identified by integrationists.

Cognition and the language myth

There is arguably a parallel between recent ideas within cognitive science about the distributed mind and the development within linguistics known as integrationism, turning on similarities between the critique offered by the former of the ‘classical’ view of mind and by the latter of the ‘classical’ view of language. However, at the heart of the integrationist attack on the classical view of language is rejection of the idea that natural languages are codes. This idea appears to be taken for granted by certain cognitive scientists as the basis for explaining not only how language is mentally apprehended by the individual, but also how it facilitates ‘second-order cognition’. It is suggested that the language-as-code idea, although prima facie endowed with the attractiveness of common sense, is untenable, and should not figure, at least in the role usually assigned to it, in any inquiry into either language or human cognition in general.

Who's afraid of Serotaspeak?

Drawing its inspiration from Roy Harris's The Necessity of Artspeak which investigates the ramifications of the language myth in Western discourse on the arts, this paper examines Sir Nicholas Serota's 2000 Richard Dimbleby Memorial Lecture entitled `Who's afraid of modern art?' as an example of artspeak in the service of the institution. My analysis takes account of the socio-cultural context in which the Lecture is embedded and views this context as paramount to a close reading of the text. I argue that Serota's discourse, located in the very public domain of television, illustrates what Harris characterises as the subordination of artspeak to the new supercategory of mediaspeak.

Retrait de Dieu et question du mal

Reference to myth and to the contribution of its symbolic figures characterises a considerable part of Jonas' writing and, in particular, that part influenced by the appalling Shoa. The events of Auschwitz, an extreme experiment in dehumanisation, impose on us a redefinition of philosophical categories and especially of the concept of God. There then arises the problem of the articulation of rational thought with the language of myth, which is often fantastic and imaginative. The A. proposes her an ethical-anthropological reading of the complex symbolism which Jonas appears to borrow from the Kabbala: the gesture of the Tsimtsoum, the withdrawal of the Absolute, which has renounced itself and its omnipotence in favor of the autonomy of man, sends back the latter to adopt infinite responsibility.

Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities by G. s> Smith V. Law A. Wilson , A. Bohr E. Allworth (review)

384 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 Kemp concludes by assessingthe impact of nationalismtoday. This is done by assessingitspotential within the apparentlyglobal economy. This is a valid exercise. However, this reviewer would have been happier had the author made more substantivecomment abouttherelationshipbetween thecommunist legacy and nationalism in the region today. These comments to one side, this book constitutes an important contribution to the field, and deserves the widestpossible audience. Department ofPolitics KARL CORDELL University ofPlymouth Smith, G.; Law, V.; Wilson, A.; Bohr,A. and Allworth,E.Nation-Building inthe Post-Soviet Borderlands. 7hePoliticsofNationalIdentities. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, I998. Xi + 293 pp. Figures.Tables. Notes. Index. [40.00; [14.95. EVENbefore the collapse of the Soviet Union, national identities were being reformed.Since the finalmonths of I99 I, therehas been a continued struggle, albeit predominantlypeaceful, between titularand 'stranded'groups.NationBuildingin thePost-Soviet Borderlands addresses the often conflicting nature of national identities, those relatingto the state, and ethnic identities,belonging to the group. As can be seen in many places across the former Soviet Union, such as with the Russians in Estonia and Ukraine, as well as the Abkhazians in Georgia, ethnic identities often do not fit within political boundaries. The authorsbegin by creating a conceptual and theoreticalbasis for investigating the constructionof nationalidentities.In particular,they arguethatthe Soviet Union was a 'federalcolonial' system and relied on post-colonial theories to explain the structurein which groups find themselves competing. Although the firstchapter takes a theoreticalview of post-Soviet events, the remaining chapters concentrate on specific case studies within the frameworkof three distinctaspectsof nation-building. Part one examines the role of history in constructing or maintaining national identities. Chapter two examines the effect national history has on national identities in Ukraine and Belarus. In particular, it looks at the Ukrainophile and Belarusophile historiography as opposed to that of the Russians. The authors find that while in Ukraine, there is evident conflict between the titular historiographyand the Russophile schema, there is little conflict in the Belarusiannational idea as it is based on 'the recycling of old myths' (p. 46). Chapter three focuses on the rival myths of homeland and competing notions of national space in Transcaucasia. Their findings show that primordialtraitscan be applied to currentevents in a way as to facilitate ethnonationalist conflict through the belief in the reality of these traits. Similarly, chapter four examines group history and identity in Central Asia. Primarily,this chapter shows the tension between culturaland political elites in nation-building. The second part concentrates on the ethnopolitics of group identities. Chapter five is entitled 'Nation re-buildingand political discoursesof identity politics in the Baltic states'. More specifically, the authors address the REVIEWS 385 nationalizing regimes of Estonia and Latvia. They conclude that although these stateshave been relativelystablesince independence, Estoniaand Latvia have alienated their minoritiesin a way that may eventuallyundermine these regimes. Chapter six investigatesthe politics of language in Ukraine amongst the various groups. The authors attempt to answer the question of why a nationalizing regime has not arisenwithin Ukraine by arguingthat the range of identity options are wider than in many other post-Soviet states. Chapter seven looks at the Central Asian states as nationalizing regimes. Particularly, the chapter compares the nationalization processes of the states within this region. They find that although many states have adopted undifferentiated citizenry policies, there are many unwritten rules that contradict and contravene the civic principlesof the new regimes.This isprimarilya resultof Soviet policies. Partthreeexamines the relationshipbetween languageand nation-building. Chapter eight is entitled 'Language myths and the discourse of nationbuilding in Georgia' and addressesthe language of ethnopolitics. Specifically, the authorsnote thatthere aretwo often conflictingdiscourses.While the state continues to perpetuatea historyof nationalharmony,the 'language-extrinsic' myths are used to construct an exclusive rather than inclusive Georgian identity. Finally, chapter nine looks at the effects of Uzbek language policies on minority groups. While the gulf between the titular nationality and the Russians has increased, Uzbek-Tajik relations have been mostly unaffected. This chapter exemplifiesthe complicated natureof ethnic relationswithin the post-Soviet space. Overall, thisbook bringstogetherseveralimportantaspectsof nationalizing regimes, specificallythe politics of history, social boundaries, and language. Clearly, readers benefit from the authors' research areas. Not only do the chapters offer a theoretical approach to post-Soviet...

Linguistic Contact Zones in the College Writing Classroom

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

Seeking a 'Symbolism Comprehensible' to 'the Great Majority of Spectators': William Lethaby's Architecture, Mysticism and Myth and Its Debt to Victorian Mythography

A central theme of the writings of the English architect and theorist William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931) is the conviction that architecture must fuse the ideas and strategies of multiple disciplines and world-views, and in particular, those of 'art' and 'science'.' Victorian readings of 'myth' demonstrated that such a fusion of 'art' and 'science' was not only possible, but that it also had distinct advantages. Foremost amongst these was the belief that the language of myth possessed a clarity and efficiency - the ability to speak in multiple ' tongues' and communicate with both 'man' and 'child' - which had been lost in modern language? Suggesting that architecture, 'to excite an interest, [both] real and general', must' possess a symbolism immediately comprehensible [to] the great majority of spectators', Lethaby applied Victorian observations on myth to the invention of a modern architectural language? In Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891), Lethaby achieved this by arguing that a modern architecture, like the mythic construct of the 'temple idea', must give representation to both the 'known' - rational observations of the phenomenal world- and the 'imagined' - subjective inventions of the artisan or architect.'

Adam’s Angest: The Language of Myth and the Myth of Language

Adam’s Angest: The Language of Myth and the Myth of Language

Jungian and Mythological Patterns in Wakako Yamauchi's “And the Soul Shall Dance”

In this essay I will analyze her famous short story, And the Soul Shall Dance, later adapted for theater and television. In this analysis, I will employ the framework and language of myth and the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung, one of the founders of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. According to critic Joseph Russo, psychology is one of the disciplines that has most systematically offered us both theories and methodologies for making sense of the elaborate symbol systems that individuals and societies employ for their visions of what is vital in life. Here, I will attempt to demonstrate how the archetypal theory of Jungian psychology, supported with analysis derived from mythology and religion, can illuminate a significant aspect of Yamauchi's fine short story.

Medieval Spanish Epic: Mythic Roots and Ritual Language

Medieval Spanish Epic: Mythic Roots and Ritual Language

Diderot's hieroglyph: myth of language and birth of art criticism

The emergence of Diderot's critical discourse on images, in the wake of his encyclopedic experience, rests on a faith in the resources of knowing reason. His art criticism proceeds, and never departs, from an overall project of knowledge which implies that single and unique works of art can be subsumed under general rules as well as general conditions of unity and universality. This also means that art criticism can have a scientific basis, although this was never clearly evidenced in the critical prose of Diderot. This claim to a scientific basis relies on the renewed interest in the origin of language, thus implying that to grasp the essence of painting, one had to understand the way language was formed. That verbal thinking underlies the understanding of painting in the eighteenth century is not surprising. This essay will specifically stress that this particular dimension acquired its legitimacy through a mythical construction of the common origin of image and word elements, so as to underline that the enunciation of the truth on painting is structured like a fiction.

Medieval Spanish epic: mythic roots and ritual language

Medieval Spanish epic: mythic roots and ritual language

As farsas da linguagem em “Passeio Noturno”, de Rubem Fonseca

One of the relevant remarkable characteristics of Rubem Fonseca’s fiction is to disbelieve the “truths” of the characters, disbelieving the language which build them up. For this reason it is fundamental to go in contact with the reality through the ways of expression of the own protagonists that come out of different social urban extracts. The objective of this work is to exam the question of the farce articulated at the problematic of the reified and mythical language, in “Passeio noturno – parte I” and “Passeio noturno – parte II”. In the narrator-character (“I” as protagonist) of these short stories, the bourgeois coexists with the criminal. It is only the style that denounces them as the same “person”.

Living within darkness: psychiatric survivors and the protection of mythical language

Living within darkness: psychiatric survivors and the protection of mythical language

Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin's Athena

Ruskin's complex attitude toward women has long been important to feminist and Victorian studies; over a quarter-century ago Kate Millett published Sexual Politics and its famous attack on Ruskin's essay "Of Queens' Gardens." She charged Ruskin with promoting a sugar-coated but perfidious system of separate spheres for men and women. Yet shortly after Ruskin produced that idealized vision of housewife-queens in 1865, he created a new ideal queen in his mythological study The Queen of the Air (1869), this time elaborated from Athena. Through his mythopoesis, Ruskin disrupts both conventional gender categories and his own implication in them. Ruskin presents a series of binary oppositions that he immediately conflates: Athena and Medusa, air and earth, bird and snake, formation and destruction, science and myth, male and female. Ruskin documents the instability of his oppositions through a bizarre "natural language" where real-life creatures such as birds and snakes serve as eternal hieroglyphs, signifying universally recognizable abstractions. That seemingly fixed signs in Athena's hieroglyphic code inevitably change is clear from Ruskin's acknowledgment of Darwin's evolutionary theory. But evolution slips into a wild image of degenerative metamorphosis, where all the divisions that Ruskin has so laboriously noted dissolve. Since Ruskin identifies Athena with each seemingly opposed animal signifier in his language of living hieroglyphs, he subverts all linguistic difference and ultimately feminizes signification itself. Through myth Ruskin creates a mutable language, one where genders as well as signs become mobile rather than fixed.

Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin's Athena

Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin's Athena

Myth and reality of law, language and international organization in Africa: the case of African Economic Community

The contemporary African international community is afflicted by a linguistic dilemma. On the one hand, the African elites are constrained to accept the imperative of adopting the inherited colonial languages in order to gain easy access to the global international community currently dominated by the linguistic condominium of the erstwhile imperial powers. On the other hand, these African elites, propelled by nationalistic sentiments, express in legal instruments a sanguine hope of promoting their indigenous tongues to the rank of official/working languages, not only on the national, but also on the continental scale. This would appear necessary in order to avoid cultural or linguistic suicide. However, in concept and practice, the whole idea seems to have remained in the realm of myth.

Conflits et représentation mythique de l'espace

SUMMARY Recent researches in the Sepik region (Stanek, Harrison) have shown that the main forum of political competition between groups are debates (« stealing » of ancestral names), similar to those described by Gregory Bateson. These debates are compared with the internal political rivalries in the great community- houses of southern Gilbert Islands (Kiribati — Micronesia) where the founding relations (autochtony, ancestry and alliance) are expressed in the language of myth and space organization.