Publication details
Vyprávění bez vypravěčů a posluchačů : bezstarostná imaginativníperformance pro neuspokojené měšťanstvo
| Title in English | Storytelling without Narrators and Listeners: A Light-Hearted Imaginative Performance for the Unsatisfied Bourgeoisie |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Religio: Revue pro religionistiku |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | Full text, published |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/Rel2024-38103 |
| Keywords | myth; monomyth; polymythical thinking; ontological politics; world-making; Anthropocene |
| Attached files | |
| Description | This review essay on Jan Kozák‘s book Monomýtus confronts the Campbellian tradition of the interpretation of myth, which is employed in a structuralist manner by Kozák, with Marquardian conception of the opposition between hegemonising monomythical and liberating polymythical modes of engaging the storytelling in life. Furthermore, it directs this confrontation towards ontological politics as a proper political disposition for the Anthropocene. The text shows that Kozák‘s engagement with mythology, which reminds of Mircea Eliade‘s project of new humanism and ultimately takes mythology to be a symbolic system able – due to its multilayered polyvalence – to refer beyond itself towards the numinous, is possible only by systematically leaving people engaging myths in their actual lives out of the analysis. Thus, it fails to touch on the world-making significance of storytelling. Due to that, such kind of analysis may satisfy the very partial “spiritual” needs of the contemporary materially well-off bourgeoisie in the West (or in the developed North) yet it cannot say much relevant to religious studies after the ontological turn and in the context of the task of re-composing a common world (or a pluriverse, into which many worlds fit) in a situation of fatal global environmental and geopolitical threats. |
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