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A narrative account of the dreammakers of international culture as they construct the attitudes and lifestyles of the early 90s ; includes sketches of Giorgio Armani in Milan, Vanna White, Ted Koppel, Costa-Gavras, Stephen King, Peter Greenaway, Yergeny Yertushenfo, Donald Trump, and Merv Griffin.
American Mythologies examines eleven myths that form part of the storehouse of present-day American mythologies, elucidating the nature of contemporary myths by investigating their ideological sub-terrain. Grounded in a semiological approach, which explores the displacement of information and the transformation of signs that characterise mythic communication, this book sheds light on the socio-economic, gendered, national and racial interests that lie behind myth-making. Presenting rich case studies from popular culture and public discourse, it demonstrates the manner in which these myths, and American mythology in general, promote the core values of everyday life under capitalism: rugged individualism, the unfettered right to accumulate wealth, the superior moral character of free-enterprise democracy, and its abundant opportunities for every citizen. By the same token, that same mythology negates the corruption endemic to the capitalist social order, an order that also promotes inescapable class, racial, and gender inequalities which confine the majority of Americans to a life of constant economic struggle. A fresh critique of the foundations of American culture, American Mythologies will appeal to those with interests in sociology, social and cultural theory, and cultural and media studies.
American Mythologies by William Blazek,Michael K. Glenday Pdf
In its more than three decades of existence, the discipline of American studies has been reliably unreliable, its boundaries and assumptions forever shifting as it continuously repositions itself to better address the changing character of American life, literature, and culture. American Mythologies is a challenging new look at the current reinvention of American studies, a reinvention that has questioned the whole notion of what "American"—let alone "American studies"—means. Essays in the collection range widely in considering these questions, from the effect of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer's writings about boxing to the interactions of myth and memory in the fictions of Jayne Anne Phillips to the conflicted portrayal of the American West in Cormac McCarthy's novels. Four essays in the collection focus on Native American authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, while another considers Louise Erdrich's novels in the context of Ojibwa myth. By bringing together perspectives on American studies from both Europe and America, American Mythologies provides a clear picture of the current state of the discipline while pointing out fruitful directions for its future.
American, African, and Old European Mythologies by Yves Bonnefoy Pdf
Here are 80 articles on mythologies from around the world, including Native Americans, African, Celtic, Norse, and Slavic, and about such topics as fire, the cosmos, and creation. Also includes an overview of the Indo-Europeans and an essay on the religions and myths of Armenia. Illustrations.
Native American Mythology by Hartley Burr Alexander Pdf
This fascinating and informative compendium of Native American lore recounts the continent's myths chronologically and region-by-region, offering a wide range of nomadic sagas, animist myths, cosmogonies and creation myths, end-time prophecies, and other traditional tales. Legends include stories of sun worship, trickster pranks, the ghost world, and secret societies.
This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.
Handbook of Native American Mythology by Dawn Bastian Williams,Judy K. Mitchell Pdf
Popular Hopi kachina dolls and awesome totem poles are but two of the aspects of the sophisticated, seldom-examined network of mythologies explored in this fascinating volume. This revealing work introduces readers to the mythologies of Native Americans from the United States to the Arctic Circle—a rich, complex, and diverse body of lore, which remains less widely known than mythologies of other peoples and places. In thematic chapters and encyclopedia-style entries, Handbook of Native American Mythology examines the characters and deities, rituals, sacred locations and objects, concepts, and stories that define and distinguish mythological cultures of various indigenous peoples. By tracing the traditions as far back as possible and following their evolution from generation to generation, Handbook of Native American Mythology offers a unique perspective on Native American history, culture, and values. It also shows how central these traditions are to contemporary Native American life, including the continuing struggle for land rights, economic parity, and repatriation of cultural property.
Who is Kokyanwuuti? What is a shaman? Why are myths so important in our lives? Myths are a rich source of history. People use them to make sense of our world. Even before myths were written down, people told and retold the stories of the gods and goddesses of their homeland. Readers of American Indian Mythology will learn the history of myths, as well as their deeper meaning. From the Southeast tribes stories of how people got fire to the plains tribes stories of the Buffalo Woman, this book helps kids understand the myths that shape and direct people's lives. Abdo & Daughters is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
American Mythologies by William Blazek,Michael K. Glenday Pdf
This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is ‘American’ and what is ‘American Studies’ into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America. Michael K Glenday’s analysis of Jayne Anne Phillips’ work and explores in it the contexts where myth and dream interact with each other. Betty Louise Bell is one of four essayists in this collection who focus their criticism on authors of Native American heritage. In the first part of ‘Indians with Voices’, Bell carefully argues that Roy Harvey Pearce’s seminal Native American studies text Savagism and Civilization fails to acknowledge its white elitist assumptions about what constitutes The American Mind and views Native Americans along a primitive-savage binary that helped to create a twentieth-century ‘national mythos of innocence and destiny’. Other essays include Christopher Brookeman’s study of the impact of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer’s non-fiction writing about heavyweight boxing.
Native American Mythology by Hartley Burr Alexander Pdf
This fascinating and informative compendium, assembled by a celebrated anthropologist, offers a remarkably wide range of nomadic sagas, animist myths, cosmogonies and creation myths, end-time prophecies, and other traditional tales.
The Origins of the World's Mythologies by E.J. Michael Witzel Pdf
This remarkable book is the most ambitious work on mythology since that of the renowned Mircea Eliade, who all but single-handedly invented the modern study of myth and religion. Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years. Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths--recounted by the communities of the "African Eve"--are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions. Witzel's book is an intellectual hand grenade that will doubtless generate considerable excitement--and consternation--in the scholarly community. Indeed, everyone interested in mythology will want to grapple with Witzel's extraordinary hypothesis about the spirituality of our common ancestors, and to understand what it tells us about our modern cultures and the way they are linked at the deepest level.
Grounded in a semiological approach, which explores the displacement of information and the transformation of signs that characterise mythic communication, this book sheds light on the socio-economic, gendered, national and racial interests that lie behind myth-making. Presenting rich case studies from popular culture and public discourse, it demonstrates the manner in which these myths, and American mythology in general, promote the core values of everyday life under capitalism: rugged individualism, the unfettered right to accumulate wealth, the superior moral character of free-enterprise democracy, and its abundant opportunities for every citizen.
The Mythology of North America by John Bierhorst Pdf
Describes the background of the myths of the Indian cultures of the North American continent, some of which have the same themes as myths of other world cultures.
