Mythistory
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Mythistory
Author: Joseph Mali
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2003-05
Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography. In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory." Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans
Author: Tatjana Aleksić
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Release Date: 2007
The idea of this collection is to bring to the forefront various ways in which the literary poetics of Balkan nations interrelates with their national poetics, and present recent and innovative explorations of literature and film which actively engage with national poetics, a kind of mythopoiesis of the modern Balkans. In proposing an approach to the national question that lies distinctly in the liminal space best designated as mythistory, the collection brings together two dominant approaches to national discourse. The first tends to interpret the nation as a myth, an artificial creation, an invention, even a â oedream.â The other is a mapping of the nation that considers its historically progressive role. It is their multifaceted dynamics that brings to the foreground a unique national mythopoetics. Mythistory is explored through its multifold engagement with the text: as a major element in the universal nationalist discourse, as a narrative strategy extensively utilized in Balkan literary and film narratives, and as a particular technique in approaching the text. Through the insights gained from literary and critical theory, historical analysis, and cultural anthropology, this collection seeks to reveal the application of mythistorical discourse upon narratives responding to nation-forming historical events. The texts in this collection articulate very distinct agendas of gender, identity, culture, philosophy, and aesthetics, all interwoven with national problematic, but steer away from the definition by which mythistory is relegated to the transparently propagandist.
Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan
Author: Gary L. Ebersole
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 2020-09-01
This examination of death rituals in early Japan finds in the practice of double burial a key to understanding the Taika Era (645-710 A.D.). Drawing on narratives and poems from the earliest Japanese texts--the Kojiki, the Nihonshoki, and the Man'yoshu, an anthology of poetry--it argues that double burial was the center of a manipulation of myth and ritual for specific ideological and factional purposes. "This volume has significantly raised the standard of scholarship on early Japanese and Man'yoshu studies."--Joseph Kitagawa "So convincing is the historical and religious thought displayed here, it is impossible to imagine how anyone can ever again read these documents in the old way."--Alan L. Miller, The Journal of Religion "A central resource for historians of early Japan."--David L. Barnhill, History of Religions