Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-century Literature

Voorkant
Michael Bell, Peter Poellner
Rodopi, 1998 - 260 pagina's
The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.

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Inhoudsopgave

Myth and Aspects of the Mind
25
Myth Art and Illusion in Nietzsche
61
Myth Science Technology
81
Reactionary Modernism and SelfConscious Myth
99
Rudolf
115
Myth as a Form of Life
125
Myth as Fiction
139
The Lesson of Anthropology in T S Eliot
153
Grounding or Overcoming the Subject?
167
Modernist Poetry and
181
Memory Culture and the Subject
197
Myth Modernity and the Vocalic Uncanny
213
Notes on Contributors
237
Index
257
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Pagina 50 - What is she, cut from love and faith, But some wild Pallas from the brain Of Demons ? fiery-hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power. Let her know her place ; She is the second, not the first.
Pagina 40 - For the discerning intellect of man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation...
Pagina 41 - Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.
Pagina 52 - One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.
Pagina 40 - Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams, can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man, My haunt, and the main region of my song.
Pagina 187 - In a Station of the Metro": The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals, on a wet, black bough.
Pagina 197 - One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.
Pagina 128 - tis genuine English Idiom in English words. I have given up Hyperion — there were too many Miltonic inversions in it — Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion, and put a mark x to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one || to the true voice of feeling.

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