Structure Of Myth Research Articles

Analyzing the Structure of the North Korean Leader Myth and Creating the Kim Jong Un Myth

Unlike the political mythologies of other nations, which mainly use symbolic means, the myths of North Korean leaders were completed through stories. Taking note of the fact, the research for this paper focused on the North Korean leaders’ myths in story-telling formats. The myth of the leader in North Korea first came into existence in 1967 as a history book. Analyzing the myth according to the structural myth theory, one can discern five steps to the North Korean myth. Comparing the structure of the North Korean leader myth to those of other Korean myths and of Joseph Campbell’s conception of myths, one sees that they have commonalities as myth and differences as a political mythology. The mythical structures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il myths are matched except that the Kim Jong Il myth lacks dramatic effects as the figures who helped the leader to overcome hardships are unclear in phase four. The Kim Jong Il myth particularly omits the winning part in the final stage. For this reason, the citizens shifted the blame of the Arduous March only to Kim Jong Il, though it was the joint responsibility of both Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. As the founding myth, the Kim Il Sung myth has supported the rule of Kim Jong Un by performing such instrumental functions as to make North Koreans accept the hereditary succession through justification of the hereditary power transfer system, explain the North’s economic difficulties, and provide directions to overcome them, but it also has negative effects. Therefore, in order for Kim Jong Un to succeed in maintaining his regime, he must be able to bring about a myth of his own. There are several difficulties to matching a potential Kim Jong Un myth to the mythical structure of Kim Il Sung’s. In particular, if the Kim Jong Un myth should be completed, the new leader would have to actualize economic growth through reform and opening up. But achieving the goal is not going to be easy.

Sustainability, Globalization, and the Mythic Power of Home

We humans are creatures of both reason and myth, for logic alone cannot tell us why we should find anything meaningful. We craft mythic narratives that frame how we address our challenges. Right now, we need a heroic myth for sustainability. Neither a “journey of discovery” nor a “triumph over evil” suffice. We must, instead, discover the heroism of living at home. Unfortunately, home is more compelling as a goal than as a story. Odysseus reclaimed his home, but the Odyssey ended abruptly when it was time to start living there. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, though, proves that it is possible to tell a compelling story about life at home. While Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings may balance and subvert “the hero story with the gardener story,” as Loren Wilkinson suggested, Our Town omits the warrior’s quest altogether (Wilkinson 73). As such, this play deserves our careful attention. Wilder’s play is not an environmentalist tract, but presents a mythic structure of home that fits sustainability better than the mythic structures of journey or combat. This hearth myth can provide the foundation for a sustainable worldview as we try to fit ourselves to the limits of our planetary home. The myth of home, though, carries its own risks. It can degenerate into chauvinism or passivity. We must go beyond the rural localism of Our Town in order to match the home myth to our world of globalization and migration. Alberto Fuguet’s The Movies of My Life offers insight into how we can do this. Fuguet, the controversial leader of the McCondo literary movement that embraces American pop culture, tells the story of a diasporic young man piecing together his identity and rediscovering a sense of home. This essay will first examine the myth of home and Our Town. Next, it will explore the perspectives of some globalization theorists who will help us understand dimensions absent from Wilder’s play. Finally, we will see how a destabilized myth of home can still take narrative form by looking at Fuguet’s novel The Movies of My Life. By combining the lessons of Wilder and Fuguet, we can craft a sustainable myth of home for our globalized world.

Uwagi o dramaturgii filmu dokumentalnego

Comments on the Dramaturgy of Documentaries The paper aims at analyzing the relationship between dramaturgy in documentary film and fiction film as a form of storytelling governed by similar rules. The author tries to answer questions about the methods used to shape the material in documentary films. She presents an analysis of two Polish documentaries: Siberian Lesson and Argentinean Lesson by Wojciech Staron. The structures of both works are based on the theme of the journey. These films represent a type of drama resulting from real-life events, close Kracauer’s theory of “the found story” and Kieślowski’s “dramaturgy of reality”. They also implement the basic assumptions of the paradigm (of the mythic structures) described by Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler typical of fiction films.

The media or the message? An examination of myths as resources to understand the tourism phenomenon

The present paper discusses the histories of tourism knowledge. The authors argue that tourist travel should be considered in the perspective of broader institutions enrooted into the mythical structures of cultures. The inadequacies of some of the previous attempts to understand tourism from various methodological perspectives are noted. Then, myths are introduced as offering alternate explanations of the tourism phenomenon. Myths have two pronged advantages in understanding tourism: they contain our collective historical understanding about tourism; also, they are a methodological solution to tap into the wealth of tourism knowledge hidden in expressive artefacts. These claims are verified by presenting and analysing a sample of well-known myths.

La conquista del paraíso o la utopía de Cristóbal Colón

La conquista del paraíso o la utopía de Cristóbal Colón

Photography, Punctum and Shock: Re-viewing Juan Rulfo's Short Stories

Prominent and proliferating readings locate mythical structures at the heart of Juan Rulfo's literary world. Notably, Raymond Bartra and Maria Luisa Ortega suggest that his works are structured around universal, timeless myths that embed individual experiences in a collective narrative. In this article, I argue that Rulfo's narrative technique is also connected with an extra-literary, eminently modern tecnica: photographic technology. Rulfo's short story collection El llano en llamas (1953) is viewed through three intersecting critical frames: Walter Benjamin's writings on the modern ‘shock’ experience; the idea of the ‘knock-out’ in Julio Cortazar's theory of the short story; and Roland Barthes' notion of the photographic ‘punctum’. My contention is that an aesthetics of photographic shock underlies Rulfo's short stories, producing tears in the narrative fabric and invoking the reader's participation through particular, personal, contingent effects.

The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women's Epic Poetry

The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women's Epic Poetry

El pecado de Frankenstein

In this article we want to prove that Frankenstein by Mary Shelley belongs to a group of stories (Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Faust, Dr. Jekyll, etc.) that are characterized by a mythical structure in which: 1) a character infringes a natural or divine law related to the human essence and its limits, often expressed as a search for knowledge, and 2) there is usually a tragic ending due to the main character’s boldness. All these texts also respond to a scheme of collapse that comes as a sign of punishment and represents the human anguish in transient nature of time.

The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and history in the making of Bengali refugee identity

AbstractWithin the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy, and nostalgia. The refugees or, more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This paper explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, which was designed to integrate refugees into the socio-economic fabric of India, or eulogizes them as heroic protagonists who successfully battled overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee as both victim and victor obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this paper will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This paper interrogates refugee reminiscences to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to both popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees.

Medijski diskurs o splitskim čitaonicama i knjižnicama u dalmatinskoj periodici (1862. - 1918.)

U radu se medijski diskurs o čitaonicama i knjižnicama analizira kao povijesni fenomen koji opisuje mjesto i ulogu čitaonica i knjižnica u Dalmaciji između 60-ih godina 19. st. i Prvoga svjetskog rata. Članci u dalmatinskim novinama iz toga razdoblja, kao materijalizirani oblici diskursa, nude odgovore na bitna pitanja povijesti hrvatskog knjižničarstva: pod kojim su se uvjetima osnivale čitaonice i knjižnice te kakav je temeljni koncept određivao njihovo mjesto i ulogu u konkretnom povijesnom razdoblju.Opisuje se povijesni kontekst, uvjeti pojavljivanja diskursa, funkcije i tip diskursa, konceptualna struktura i transformacijski procesi prema novim diskursnim praksama. Analizom je diskursa utvrđeno da su čitaonice i knjižnice kulturne činjenice na koje snažno utječe socijalni kontekst. Uočene su dvije faze u razvoju diskursa: u prvoj fazi diskurs snažno sudjeluje u metaforičkim igrama i konstrukciji mitskih struktura - etničkog identiteta, narodnog jedinstva i jezične zajednice. Na konceptualnoj razini uloga čitaonica i knjižnica prepoznaje se u dekonstrukciji tradicionalnih odnosa - one su teritorijalno zaokruženo ekskluzivno mjesto simboličke produkcije, tvorbe novih društvenih struktura i kulturnih vrijednosti. U tom kontekstu, aktivnosti knjižnica znatno su manje medijski prezentirane nego druge aktivnosti čitaonica. Drugu fazu, koja počinje sredinom 90-ih godina 19. st., obilježava umnožavanje diskursa, diferencijacija organizacijskih oblika i funkcija knjižnica od ostalih funkcija kulture te snažan upliv novog diskursa. Medijski diskurs prezentira promjenu konceptualnih struktura, pa se mjesto i uloga knjižnica tumače u okviru sve snažnije uloge znanja i obrazovanja u ostvarivanju ciljeva društva u zaoštrenoj socijalnoj diferencijaciji i potrebi daljnje izgradnje modernoga društva i kolektivnog subjektiviteta. Osnovno je obilježje ove razvojne faze, ako tražimo razliku u odnosu na prethodnu, snažan upliv diskursa o znanju, institucionalno podržanog ulogom knjižnica u njegovoj distribuciji.

Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress: A Feminine Journey with Dream-Like Qualities

Satoshi Kon is a Japanese animation film director whose works, story, and imagery suggest altered mental states, such as insanity or dreaming. Millennium Actress (2001), which this author regards as Kon’s magnum opus, uses a dream-like style of animation and filmmaking to create the narrative of a biography of a fictional actress. In this feature-length animated film, Kon reifies theories and findings from the functions of dreaming and the mechanics of dream that have developed over a hundred years since the early 20th century. The oneiric quality of the animation film is explored using both psychoanalytical/psychological theories and neuroscientific frameworks to reveal its story of a feminine journey in relation to the collective unconscious and mythic story structure, and the cinematic editing techniques that help the storytelling lead to the dream state.

La Lutte des paradigmes: la litterature entre histoire, biologie et medecine (Flaubert, Zola, Fontane)

‘Quelle est l'image de l'homme à la fin du xixe siècle?’ (p. 525). To answer this broad question Niklas Bender considers the ways in which historical, biological, and medical models of humankind interact in the novels of three writers: Flaubert, Zola, and Fontane. The nineteenth-century novel is examined as a site of tension between opposing world views (scientific, historical, and mythic), and as a site in which ideas of positivism and social progress coexist uneasily with notions of scepticism, biological determinism, and degeneration. How might a biological world view relate to an historical one? Where do these disciplines converge and where do they part company? Bender's analysis is thorough and convincing, and his arguments are clearly signposted. Using a range of nineteenth-century historical and philosophical texts (Michelet, Burckhardt, Nietzsche), and medical and physiological sources (François Magendie, Claude Bernard), this study draws out various paradoxes in these writings, which are perhaps indicative not so much of the authors' failings as of the myriad of contradictory theories of humankind and overlapping discourses vying for attention in an increasingly secular age. Bender challenges the traditional, simplistic interpretations that have tended to contrast Zola's naturalism and Fontane's realism. For Bender, each writer's work betrays, rather, a mélange of contradictory paradigms, known or unbeknown to the writer. In Zola's work, the scientific paradigm is dominant, yet his concern with historical specificity and social progress, as well as the undeniably mythic structures that underlie the Rougon-Macquart series, are identified by Bender as inconsistent with the biological model. Salammbô exemplifies Flaubert's negotiation of the biological and historical, featuring characters whose physiology and pathologies are both rooted in antiquity and open to modern interpretation: for example, many of Salammbô's crises echo nineteenth-century medical reports on hysteria. Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale and Fontane's Effi Briest and Irrungen, Wirrungen emphasize the historical paradigm. Fontane in particular positively rejects the scientific, yet Bender detects an unacknowledged reliance on essentially scientific structures and paradigms in his work, for example in the impersonal narrative technique, and the prominence of sexuality throughout his œuvre. In some respects the relationship between literature and science in the nineteenth century may seem an unoriginal topic, yet Bender does provide new insights, admittedly alongside much material that could have been condensed in favour of a more concise and gripping narrative. Too much time is spent recounting plot and character, which seems unnecessary given that the texts under consideration are so well known (although the synopses of Fontane's work will prove useful for students of French literature unfamiliar with this author). The corpus is conventional and it would have been refreshing to see Bender expand his ‘panorama’ (p. 363) of the Rougon-Macquart series and concentrate less on Nana and Germinal, as more original work could perhaps be done here. A particularly welcome element of the study, however, is the comparative approach: the comparisons between the French and German historicist schools and realist movements are illuminating and greatly increase the depth, reach, and potential implications of Bender's analysis.

Margaret Cavendish's Mythopoetics: By Way of Introduction

Line Cottegnies's “The ‘Native Tongue’ of the ‘Authoress’: The Mythical Structure of Margaret Cavendish's Autobiographical Narrative” is one of the few recent, scholarly discussions to have examine...

It all began with a kiss, or when packaging sells a country

PurposeThis paper aims to: better understand the country of origin (COO) construct by adopting a lens of marketplace mythology; and develop a conceptual framework delineating the process of mythologizing a country through the use of packaging.Design/methodology/approachAnalysis of narratives on food product packages that claim a connection to Italy lets this qualitative study join two streams of research – on COO effect and marketplace mythology.FindingsThe work proposes four mythological properties of the country of origin construct, discusses their major dimensions, establishes their relationship, and develops a conceptual framework delineating the mythological nature of the country of origin construct.Research limitations/implicationsSeveral directions for future research may enhance this study. For example, the interpretation of the narratives by the consumers of food products claiming an Italian connection will allow exploring how the mythic structures employed by marketers are read by the intended readers.Practical implicationsThe importance of COO effects on consumer decision making is expected to become even stronger with current globalization trends that increasingly move products across countries and force marketers to engage in a battle to differentiate their brands – in many cases by capitalizing on the origin of products.Originality/valueBy exploring food package stories, the paper focuses on the carrier of mythic meaning that is under‐researched in both COO and marketplace mythology studies. The present study adds to the understanding of how geography ceases being a mere informational “Made in” statement and is transformed into a powerful cultural marker, full of symbolically framed meaning.

The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery

Abstract: “The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery” examines how classical authorities continued to influence scientific knowledge in the early modern period in spite of the emergence of more experiential and empirical methods of cosmography. Demonstrating that experiential evidence from travel literature and material evidence from the burgeoning culture of collection often endorsed rather than displaced myth, the paper argues that the preservation of myth is not a facile protection of power relations but is representative of how material reality is inherently connected to and supported by mythical structures. The paper performs a temporal short circuit, suggesting not that an impoverished early modern science failed to understand the significance of empirical evidence but that the emerging discourse of science sought a mutually sympathetic relationship among art, myth, and empirical evidence.

The Quest for Victory: Collective Memory and National Identification among the Arab-Palestinian Citizens of Israel

The interdependence of collective memory and national identification has become a widespread scholarly axiom. While the related literature recognizes the role of memories of victimization and heroic victories, this article illustrates the importance of a ‘semiotic balance’ between these two for the maintenance of national identification. The study is based on an individual-centered quantitative method, which has never been used to investigate the national identity—memory nexus before. Using a survey with a representative sample ( N = 530) of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the association between individuals’ memories and national identification is examined. It was found that remembering a combination of victory and victimization is a better predictor of national identification than either theme separately. These findings indicate the crucial importance of a balanced mythical structure that includes both themes of victimization and triumph.

The Universal Literary Solvent: Northrop Frye and the Problem of Satire, 1942 to 1957

There has hardly been a book or article on satire written last six decades without two observations: an acknowledgement of debt or opposition to Northrop Frye's study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (1) and a caveat that satire is a notoriously slippery subject (Hamilton 149). The study of satire and Anatomy is almost certainly most influential study of satire twentieth century. It is a convention, when making broad claims of this sort, to cite a few major examples of such influence, quote one or two later critics affirming breadth of that influence, and leave rest implicit; Hamilton provides as much (149, 265-66 n23). case of satire, such is breadth and depth of Frye's contribution it would be more efficient and appropriate to appeal to readers to come up with a single example of a later critic on whom Frye has not exerted any influence, or anything less than a major indirect influence. Put plainly and historically, Frye completely reshaped our understanding of what satire is and how it works. His study of prosimetric fiction that Varro Reatinus and Lucian of Samosata nominated as Menippean satire, and which Frye anglicizes as anatomy after Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, changed discourse permanently, and much for better. (2) Frye's general definition of satire as militant irony (ac 223) is shortest, most applicable, and most extensible criticism. Yet Frye begins his academic career with a far more conventional and profoundly negative view of satire and comes to his understanding of satire as part of mythic structure of much later. Little attention has been paid to Frye's two-decade struggle to come to grips with satire. The great critic curses himself openly on subject--God wish could stop scribbling this crap (NBAC 312)--and often trails off with a hopeless I dunno when satirically stumped. The origin and progress of most powerful theory of satire we have remains, as yet, undisclosed. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism, A. C. Hamilton discovers moment which Frye begins to come to terms with satire his early career. Although his commentary on subject is admittedly a footnote to his survey, Hamilton's insight is so astonishing that it bears almost complete quotation. He first observes: In 1944 article ['The Nature of Satire'], (3) Frye notes two things as essential to satire: 'one is wit or humour, other an object of attack' (1944.76); reproducing this statement Anatomy, he adds that wit or humour is 'founded on fantasy or a sense of grotesque or absurd' (224) (Hamilton 150). Hamilton adds following note, worthy of careful review: The change, which registers Frye's recognition of satire as a mythos, seems to have been triggered by an image. The 1944 article allows satirist to possess poetic imagination only in reverse gear: poetry may deepen and intensify imaginative impact of things; satire belittles and minimizes it (1944.79). But then his recognition that perhaps satire was Blake's real medium (FS 193) led him to recognize that the great satirist is an apocalyptic visionary like every other great artist (FS 200). This passage Fearful Symmetry (4) is followed by an extract from 1942 article [The Anatomy Prose Fiction], p.42, on shift of perspective satires of Swift, Apuleius, and Petronius, to which he now adds: In Rabelais, where huge creatures rear up and tear themselves out of Paris and Touraine, bellowing for drink and women ... we come perhaps closest of all to what Blake meant by resurrection of body. Rabelais' characters are what Blake called his 'Giant forms' (FS 200-01). Anatomy, he revises, though only slightly, a passage from this same article [...] Imaginative fantasy alone becomes one essential element that elevates satire to a major literary form [in Frye's thought]. (Hamilton 266 n24) will go further than Hamilton and argue that Frye's earliest conception of satire was also governed by an image--the very conventional one of satire as an acid, a literary corrosive, or caustic--and that change Frye's thought was occasioned by an even more specific image from his study of Blake: one of poet-illustrator's actual media, his etching acid. …

An Arthurian Omaggio to Michael Murrin and James Nohrnberg

Michael Murrin and James Nohrnberg are two of the most prominent Arthurian scholars of the past half century. Although neither works directly on Malory as a specialist, they share an interest in literary history, the influence of Arthurian literature, and the mythic structure that romances inherited from biblical and classical materials. This special issue of Arthuriana, based on work presented at two meetings of the Purdue University Comparative Prose Conference, highlights the influence on both scholars of both the Arthurian legend and the work of C.S. Lewis on myth. A meeting of the Comparative Prose Conference devoted to C.S. Lewis was held at Wittenberg University, November 1 and 2, 2007. Another meeting, an omaggio to Professors Murrin and Nohrnberg from their former students, was held in the Anniversary Drawing Room at Purdue University, November 5 and 6, 2009. Arthurian literature, as Professor Murrin explains in a passage in The Veil of Allegor y (1969), relies on the connection between myth criticism and allegory that Lewis' work often exemplified: Critics could identify myth and allegory because they recognized a basic kinship between them. A myth, like a metaphor or an extended allegory, is by definition open-ended: it invites interpretation. As Lewis demonstrates, a summary of the Orpheus myth-his descent into Hades in particular-evokes deep responses from anyone who hears it. This is true of allegorical tales as well. To take an example from Spenser: Saint George set out from the court of the Faerie Queene to kill a dragon in the Garden of Eden. The whole idea of reversing the Genesis narrative of the Fall is immediately arresting and demands interpretation. Or take an old romance like that of Huon, who on a journey from Paris to Babylon met the Fairy King Oberon in his magical wood and there received great gifts of power. The basic plot of an allegory must always be mythic. Where it is not, the poet has failed-has not succeeded in converting his tale into metaphor. (The Veil of Allegory, p. 99) Murrin's reference to C.S. Lewis and to a journey from Paris to the Middle East takes us to two areas of Arthurian studies that further connect this selection of papers. Lewis wrote a celebrated review of the Oxford edition that Eugene Vinaver edited after the discovery of the Winchester manuscript of Malory's masterpiece, and he never ceased promoting Malory as essential reading, but he also promoted those Italian redactions of chivalric and Arthurian romance by Boiardo and Ariosto, whose hero Orlando leaves Paris for the Middle East and its magical landscape, like Huon of Bordeaux before him. These romances, in turn, were the models for Spenser's Faerie Queene. In 'The Arthurian Torso,' the third section of the first part of The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (1976), Professor Nohrnberg turns to Prince Arthur, the figure who connects each book of Spenser's romance, and at once suggests his mythic elements: The multiple unity of The Faerie Queene has Arthur for its emblem. . . . His resemblance to the other knights turns up often. . . . It has more than once been suggested that Arthur was something of an afterthought on Spenser's part; he has been described as a device adopted late in the poem's composition to connect an otherwise disjointed Ariostan serial. . . . [But the] allegory presumes the possibility of a mind embellished with all the virtues that the poem celebrates. . . . Thus the once and future king in Spenser is the duodecimal or 'magnanimous' Arthur, in whose greater mind the virtues of all the other knights reside. . . . Spenser's knights might be said to rotate the service of virtue from legend to legend, while the stationless and free-lance Arthur functions once in each of their legends in their stead-like an itinerant Levite. . . . An obvious Arthurian symbol of completeness is the round table. In Malory, we read that Merlin devised it as a symbol of the wholeness of the world, or the unity of the Arthurian order. …

The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery

Abstract: “The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery” examines how classical authorities continued to influence scientific knowledge in the early modern period in spite of the emergence of more experiential and empirical methods of cosmography. Demonstrating that experiential evidence from travel literature and material evidence from the burgeoning culture of collection often endorsed rather than displaced myth, the paper argues that the preservation of myth is not a facile protection of power relations but is representative of how material reality is inherently connected to and supported by mythical structures. The paper performs a temporal short circuit, suggesting not that an impoverished early modern science failed to understand the significance of empirical evidence but that the emerging discourse of science sought a mutually sympathetic relationship among art, myth, and empirical evidence.

An interview with Christopher Vogler

As part of an ongoing research project that involves interviewing people who work in script-related roles within the film and television industry, I travelled in May this year to Los Angeles. There, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to spend some time with Christopher Vogler, a long-standing Hollywood story consultant and author of the hugely successful book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. I wanted to share some of this interview with readers of the Journal of Screenwriting, not just because the material is interesting - I hope you agree! - but because it might be of value to those who are currently researching the film and television industry. In the interview, Vogler tells me about how he became interested in storytelling, his early days of working the story departments at various film studios, his work with Disney on several successful animation films, and how the success of his book has led to much work as a freelance story consultant, working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.