Retelling Of Myth Research Articles

Mythical Metamorphosis: The Timeless Influence of Myths in Literary Realms and Retelling of The Ramayana by R. K. Narayan

Indian literature captures the rich historical, spiritual, and cultural fabric of Indian culture through its intricate web of myths and tales. Myths have been used as a literary canvas, a source of inspiration, and a way to preserve culture in anything from classical texts to modern works. The paper explores the many ways that myths and legends have influenced Indian literature, highlighting the continuing power of these ageless stories using a variety of allusions. Myths and philosophical ideas may be found in abundance in the Vedas and Upanishads, the fundamental writings of Hinduism. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, the legendary epics and great Indian classics, continue to inspire generations of writers. This paper aims to study the retelling of myths and legends in R.K. Narayan’s The Ramayana. The work shares a common fascination with mythology and seeks to explore the distinctive ways in which Narayan depicts myths and legends in his work, examining the theme, characters, narrative technique, cultural nuances and contemporary resonance that distinguish this literary masterpiece.

How to Retell the Chinese Myths in the Neo-Mysticism: The Analysis of the Chinese Mythology Game

Under the cultural wave of "neo-mysticism" in the 1990s, countries began to carry out "myth retelling" activities. It subverts traditional mythological values, deconstructs and constructs the meaning of traditional mythology, and embodies the value of contemporary mythology. In the context of contemporary neo-mysticism, the retelling of myth has been inextricably linked with the cultural production focusing on content and creativity. As a new mass culture consumer goods after film and television and music, with the help of the communication advantages of new media, the scope of cultural radiation of games is increasing and its influence is becoming more and more extensive. It becomes a global popular culture phenomenon. And it is also coerced into the whirlwind of neo-mysticism that swept the world. The wedging of myth enriches the cultural meaning and content creativity of the game, and completes a cultural communication with its global entertainment consumption. Therefore, this study focuses on the emerging trend of neo-mysticism. Through participatory observation of role-playing games - Honor of Kings and Lady White Snake, in-depth interview and questionnaire survey of game users, this study deduces and summarizes the techniques of myth retelling involved in the game, in order to provide reference for the mythological retelling of other art forms, and promote the spread of Chinese mythological culture under the trend of neo-mysticism.

‘Research Prospects in the peripheral view of Kartika Nair’s epic Retelling ‘Until the Lions’- Echoes from the Mahabharata’

Indian culture is based on two epics; The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. Every Hindu knows about these two epics, other religion people too. There is not any Hindu house which does not know and follow the rituals which are discussed in these two epics. The present generation takes interest to read Retellings of Indian myths which are written by the contemporary Indian English Writers. Indian women like to read Retellings of myths which are written by Indian women writers. Its reason is that it gives voice to marginalized women of the Indian myths. Females compare their unspeakable voice with the voice of marginalized women of the Indian myths which are discussed by Indian women writers through the retellings. This paper discusses the research prospects of one of the well-known epic retellings of Mahabharata Myth – ‘Until the Lions’. It is an experimental retelling of the epic Mahabharata; Karthika Nair writes poetry in the voices of those whose narratives remained untold. Through this epic, Nair attempts to conduct an “inquiry of power” through the eyes of those who do not possess it: most often, the women of the Mahabharata. The story of women we do not hear as much about who were either eulogized too much or were peripheral characters in the story or were powerless queens- Queen Satyavati, Yuyutsu’s Mother, Dushala, Kunti, Gandhari, Hidimbi are fascinating. This epic is the best example to get the knowledge about female experience through the female voice. The objective of this research paper is to discuss research prospects which are applicable to this epic of retelling by the researcher. The researcher applies the theory of feminism to discuss this epic of retelling. The research question is that; Is the peripheral view of Karthika Nair justified as the female voice of Female experience through this epic of Retelling?

Review of Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold—A Reading Companion, Second Edition

Review of Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold—A Reading Companion, Second Edition

General

One of my favourite undergraduate classes to teach is Greek mythology. At American universities, Greek myth is a popular choice for satisfying humanities credit requirements, and professors are faced with a double dilemma. On the one hand, students have very different levels of knowledge, ranging from, say, a science major with virtually no idea about the ancient world to a know-it-all myth-whiz Classics major at the other end of the scale. The second problem is the choice and organization of material. Tough decisions have to be made, especially if a professor insists on students reading ancient Greek and Latin texts in translation, instead of relying on a modern retelling of myth. Which tragedies to choose? Which sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses? The whole of Homer or just select books? The challenges are real, but the rewards are great. After the initial struggle with Hesiod's Theogony (despite collective grumbling, Hesiod is non-negotiable for me), witnessing the magic of Greek myth at work never ceases to amaze me. In a blink of an eye, the class is passionately defending or attacking Phaedra, or debating fate and the gods; and, of course, everyone is united in hating Jason. It was my early fascination with Greek myth that attracted me to study Classics (the main culprit was the generously illustrated Serbian translation of Gustav Schwab's Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece) and the crushing sense of responsibility for sparking that first interest in my students is only matched by joy upon seeing it work. I take mythology books very seriously because they are often the gateway to the Classics. Several books on myth landed on my desk this year and I'll start with three general introductions. None of these could serve as introductions to myth for children or young adults, but each could be an excellent first step for those wishing to know more about various scholarly approaches to Greek myths and cults.

Myths, Erasure, and Violence: The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act

Myths, Erasure, and Violence:The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (bio) and Amanda R. Tachine (bio) the land-grab universities (lgu) project leaves us in awe and deeply curious. The result of years of meticulous research, LGU points to the fact that fifty-two land-grant universities in the United States would not exist without the dispossession of lands through the violent removal and killing of Native peoples. Much of the existence of these universities has relied and continues to rely on myths, erasure, and violence. We engage these concepts separately, yet it is worth noting that they are interconnected, forming an immoral triad in which each element builds each the other. Their beginnings are steeped in violence, they are marinated in myths, and their continuation is based in erasure. Bryan Brayboy and his colleague Jeremiah Chin have written about the importance of detangling origins and beginnings (Brayboy and Chin 2020). Origins are tied directly to cosmological events. For many Indigenous peoples, emergence is manifested in our origin stories, which are different from our beginning stories (Brayboy and Chin 2020; Vaught, Chin, and Brayboy n.d.). The conditions that make it possible for land-grant universities to exist begin with the violent separation (effectively the erasure) of Indigenous peoples from their lands, a process whose essence is a spiritual and ontological attack. Universities have established beginning stories (often denoted by "est." followed by the date of their founding), which are not the same as origin stories. The beginning stories of universities, pleasurable marinations of myths, omit the origins and write new stories that are rooted in the erasure of Indigenous peoples' connections to place. In our response, we link and unmask the myths, erasure, and violence. Myths LGU asks us to rethink what we have come to believe and know about land-grant institutions. Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone write, "Behind the myth [of gifts of free land] lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation" (2020, 1). This revelation challenges the beginning stories of these institutions through the meticulous analysis of how eleven million acres of land were set aside for their creation. We see the dangers of myths that emerge in this moment. The power of myth (Brayboy and Chin 2020) is not [End Page 139] in its initial telling. Power is in the initial retelling, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on. In each retelling, the myth edges toward "truth," and there we can see the ongoing harmful wreckage unfolding. The original peoples fade from existence, and the retelling of myths becomes the prevailing truth in their absence. Prevailing "truth" springs from what Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron call "genesis amnesia," the "naïve illusion that things have always been as they are" (1977, 9). As the original peoples fade away, historians interpret and analyze, universities entrench themselves and their stories, and time marches on. The myth becomes "truth." Lee and Ahtone have offered us a powerful opportunity to revisit the beginning, to question it, reimagine it, and rewrite it.1 We see and feel the tensions in that rewriting. Tensions reside in the fact that we are both scholars of higher education and have made arguments that Indigenous peoples earning degrees is one way for tribal nations and communities to strengthen and build capacity. We understand the inherent tensions in suggesting that schooling as a way to engage in self-determination. We also understand the messy practicalities associated with knowing that we are both Indigenous peoples and graduates of universities that received some of their land base from the Morrill Act and the other challenges concomitant with the beginnings of our universities. The myths have become truths. We are products of the myths and of lands that were involuntarily turned over for the larger project of higher education in the United States. We pause to wonder about who benefits from these myths. Language is important; words and text have the power to plant (and nurture) the seeds of myths, casting away groups of peoples and imaginaries. Candis Callison (Tahltan member) and Natalie Diaz (Mohave) provoke us to examine the power of language, its...

Amayana Myth Retold in Hubbu and Kitab Omong Kosong

amayana Myth Retold in Hubbu and Kitab Omong Kosong

Writing and Weaving: The Textual and the Textile in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene, III.i

Most often, Ovidian allusions are woven into Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590) without developing into an open re-telling of myths. One significant exception occurs in Book III, Canto 1: there the action comes to a temporary stop in order to make space for a detailed description of the tapestry in the hall of Castle Joyous, which depicts the story of Venus and Adonis. This article intends to offer a reading of that episode that focuses on the importance of materiality and self-reflexivity as keys to its significance at the opening of Book III, and in the larger structure of The Faerie Queene. Here, the descriptive powers of the poet are both foregrounded and questioned, in a double movement of ekphrasis which gestures towards a serious interrogation of the value of representation, both in poetry and the visual arts. Implicitly, it is the poet (and through him, the reader him/herself) that must question his/her role and participation in the gradual and often painful awareness of the body that is foregrounded throughout Book III.

Cobra Deities and Divine Cobras: The Ambiguous Animality of Nāgas

In South Asia, cobras are the animals most dangerous to humans—as humans are to cobras. Paradoxically, one threat to cobras is their worship by feeding them milk, which is harmful to them, but religiously prescribed as an act of love and tenderness towards a deity. Across cultural and religious contexts, the Nāgas, mostly cobra-shaped beings, are prominent among Hindu and Buddhist deities. Are they seen as animals? Doing ethnographic fieldwork on a Himalayan female Nāga Goddess, this question has long accompanied me during my participant observation and interviews, and I have found at least as many possible answers as I have had interview partners. In this article, I trace the ambiguous relationship between humans, serpents and serpent deities through the classical Sanskrit literature, Hindu and Buddhist iconographies and the retelling of myths in modern movies, short stories, and fantasy novels. In these narrations and portrayals, Nāgas are often “real” snakes, i.e., members of the animal kingdom—only bigger, shape-shifting or multi-headed and, curiously, thirsty for milk. The article focuses on those traits of Nāgas which set them apart from animals, and on those traits that characterize them as snakes.

Persefone, missbrukare eller missbrukad?

Persephone, Abuser or Abused
 This article addresses the mystifying reinterpretations of sexual violence that we often encounter in the Nachleben of ancient mythology. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades’ abduction of his niece Persephone is described with language reminiscent of sex slavery in the Iliad. The maiden continued to be represented as a victim of male and divine violence in Ancient and Early Modern retellings of the myth, but in Romantic and Decadent portrayals her innocence faded. The poppy, which is associated with Demeter in Ovid’s Fasti, now came to dominate representations of her. In Algernon Charles Swinburne’s ”The Garden of Proserpine” (1866) and other creative receptions from this period, she is depicted as a queen of opium and a femme fatale. This process transformed the rape of Persephone. The aggression of Hades and Zeus is blurred as Persephone becomes not abused but an abuser, both victim and perpetrator. The change can be related to actual drug use among women of this period. The neutralization of Hades continued and increased during the twentieth century, as the blame was even shifted to Demeter. In psychoanalysis as well as in contemporary poetry, music and novels, Persephone prefers following Hades to the underworld over staying under the protection of her smothering mother. The article connects this retelling of the ancient myth to another modern myth: a daughter must allegedly break the bonds with her mother in order to become an independent individual. Empirical studies on daughter-mother relationships, however, suggest that this view is mistaken. It is more common that young women feel that a good relationship to their mothers improves their chances of achieving independence.

Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays ed. by Verna A. Foster (review)

Reviewed by: Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays ed. by Verna A. Foster Stephe Harrop (bio) Verna A. Foster , ed. Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Pp. viii + 250. $40.00. Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends is an admirably wide-ranging survey of the ways in which contemporary dramatic literature appropriates, contests, and transforms pre-existing mythic and fantastical narratives. Verna A. Foster's introduction makes a strong case for the volume's chosen terminology and self-consciously diverse range of subject matter. Dramatic "revision," Foster [End Page 268] contends, does not (unlike more conventional terms, including "adaptation" and "translation") presuppose the existence of an identifiable, literary source-text (2-3) and thus opens the way for an expansive and inclusive range of narratives— incorporating "various kinds of retellings of myth, fairy tale, and legend" (3)—to be considered alongside one another. The resulting breadth of critical focus aims to develop new insights into the contemporary use of "old stories for new cultural purposes" (12), traversing genre- and subject-boundaries to explore a varied collection of modern playwrights, their different creative practices, and their distinctive "dramatic revisions" of myth, fairy tale, or legend (12). The book's first four chapters offer new perspectives on relatively familiar territory, as they examine the contemporary adaptation and dramatic revision of ancient Greek myth. Miriam Chirico develops a structuralist analysis of the "mythic revisionary drama" (15) of Karen Hartman, Sarah Ruhl, and Caridad Svich, highlighting the diversity of revisionary strategies and styles being deployed in three key works. Karelisa Hartigan discusses the challenges posed to Aristotelian definitions of tragedy by modern dramatic revisions and, in particular, their intense focus on individual experience. Elizabeth W. Scharffenberger explores the ways in which contemporary playwriting and performance can radically "unmake" myth (52), inviting modern audiences "to reflect on their own participation in, and vulnerability to, the phenomenon of mythopoesis" (53), in the process rendering the received mythologies of Helen and Jocasta "metamythopoetic" (63). Finally, Jeffrey B. Loomis identifies a complex network of connections between the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter" and "the affirmation of a vital, dynamic, life-heralding spirituality" (76) in the seriocomic dramas of Tina Howe. There is plenty to stimulate and provoke in these essays, but what is particularly valuable about this volume is the juxtaposition and interaction of these analyses with later chapters drawing on a more diverse range of source materials, which invite a broader exploration of the role of dramatic revision in contemporary theatrical writing and performance. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.'s exploration of the transformation and reception of West African myth on American stages highlights the role of revisionary drama in creating and representing "complex and fluid" diaspora identities (93). Similar themes also emerge in Christy Stanlake's study of the multiple mythologies uneasily co-inhabiting Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and the ways in which this complex drama might ultimately function as "a bravely wrought ceremonial action" designed to aid a fractured Native American community's attempts at self-healing (110). Amelia Howe Kritzer argues that Caryl Churchill's use of mythic figures and themes in The Skriker deliberately pushes the play beyond the personal and the everyday in order to make visible "the psychological, social, and economic burden carried by young people" and address the wider issues of "social breakdown" and "natural [End Page 269] catastrophe" (122). Sharon Friedman contributes a fascinating survey of multiple revisions of the "dybbuk" in modern theater and the ways in which this Jewish folkloric figure has been used to engage contentious issues of gender, identity, and sexual desire, additionally stressing "the performative aspect of storytelling" (140) as a key factor in myth-inspired drama's ability to restore the unpredictable, flexible qualities of traditional narratives. Anthony Ellis comparably addresses the relationship between staged fairy-tale narratives and their contemporary audiences, examining Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman and the play's unsettling depiction of "the struggle for the control of representation" (156) between the creative artist and the state. And the fairy tale's potential to dramatize and contest contemporary social...

The Refiguration of Body and Soul: Time and Narrative in C.S. Lewis's Retelling of the Cupid and Psyche Myth

This paper presents a reading of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold in light of Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of time’s role in transformation. I will focus on the narrative dynamics Lewis achieves by incorporating the temporal into the fabric of his narrative. This approach to temporality contrasts markedly with his source material, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass, which ultimately appears to transcend time and therefore transformation by novel’s end. I finish my analysis by arguing that as Lewis moves from his protagonist, Orual's, initial retelling to embracing a more limited version of the myth, instead of the disruptive force it is for Apuleius, the temporal becomes a generative force, transforming and renewing Lewis’s narrative along the lines of Ricoeur’s paradigm of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.

Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"

Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"

C. S. Lewis, Fairy Tales, and Walter de la Mare

C. S. LEWIS loved fairy tales. Nor was this predilection confined to childhood. If anything, his interest in fairy tales—in the fantastic, and myth more generally—stayed with him throughout his life, and arguably increased. It is not a taste that some of his admirers would share or even, perhaps, approve, but it was, nevertheless, important. He referred to his own stories as ‘fairy stories’, and his last work of fiction, Till We Have Faces, is a ‘myth retold’. In fact, Till We Have Faces is more than a ‘myth retold’—it is, properly speaking, a fairy tale retold, since it is a re-telling of the story of Cupid and Psyche: the inset tale that appears in the late Latin writer Apuleius's Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass. This inset tale is essentially a version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, a story that is recognizably what is now called a fairy tale. But that in turn derives from folk tales—from anonymous sources too ancient or too uncertain to date. Folk tales are typically rooted in preliterate culture, evolve over time, and migrate widely over geographical space.

On Myth, Considered as a Method for Legal Thought

The textual form of law relates to language and not to narration but to myth. Law's text does not develop in the temporal sequence of past-present-future, but spreads by analogy of concentric circles. If ‘normal’ myth is a folklore of people then the law is a myth retold by lawyers. For the sake of separation of legal myth from mythology as a whole, law creates its own rituals. In post-modern societies the mythologization of law becomes even more important as the boundaries between legal and lay communities are challenged. Classical legal theories cannot deal with this change and Kafka's The Trial is as good a jurisprudence as any other legal theory.

Learning through symbol, myth, model, and ritual

An interdisciplinary course entitled "Religious and Spiritual Issues in Health Care" was offered for nursing students, medical students, and seminary students. The course was designed to explore religious responses to human suffering and to examine the role of different health care professionals with regard to spiritual concerns of patients.The identification of symbol, the retelling of myth, the presentation of model, and the enactment of ritual enhanced the learning process. In the context of the universality of human suffering, professional differences were recognized and respected.Teamwork in health care is a process which can be learned cognitively and affectively by affirming and sharing professional values with other health care professions.