Myth and the Limits of Reason - Couverture souple

Stambovsky, Phillip

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 9042000783 ISBN 13 : 9789042000780

Editeur : Editions Rodopi B.V., 1996

Synopsis

Traditionally understood as pre-critical, even pre-rational, mythical thought has in fact played a critical role in post-Enlightenment intellectual history. Modernists in philosophy and literature have used the depictive rationality of myth to disclose, in self-reflective ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in various domains of human experience. In so doing, they have effectively furthered, without resort to analytical abstractions, the epistemological critique of reason begun during the Enlightenment. Stambovsky illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical form of mythical thinking in works by Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood. The selected texts focus respectively on religious, national-cultural, psychosocial, and psychobiological realms of experience. These illustrations follow an inquiry into why the very possibility of critical, mythically inventive (mythopoetic) reflection is unsatisfactorily explained by leading rationalist accounts of myth. It is with this problem in mind that Stambovsky begins his monograph with observations on the origins of rationalist and counter-rationalist conceptualizations of myth in the fragments of Xenophanes (the father of rationalist mythology) and in Plato's Phaedrus. Of pivotal import is the early rationalist discrimination of mythos from logos and its epistemological implications (the rationalist legacy) in the history of the idea of myth. Following his look at paradigmatic classical precedents, Stambovsky traces the influence of the rationalist legacy in the myth theory of Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Cassirer, Ricoeur, and Blumenberg. The aim is to reveal how this influence in different ways limits these theories as instruments for detecting and explaining the seminal critical and historical significance of modern mythopoeia. This study will be of particular interest to teachers and students of myth theory in departments of philosophy, religion, literature, and cultural anthropology.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

This inquiry expands on ideas initially worked out in The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience (University of Massachusetts Press; November 1988). This study demonstrates how authors as diverse as Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood employ "mythemic figurations" in ways that disclose defining limits of discursive analytical reason in the domains, respectively, of religious, national-cultural, psychosocial, and psychobiological experience. This revised edition features extensive substantive and stylistic improvements that render the exposition more fully developed and accurate, and the prose more precise and readable.

Biographie de l'auteur

Phillip Stambovsky, an independent scholar, earned a doctorate in English at the University of Massachusetts. Formerly a tenured English professor, Dr. Stambovsky moved on to pursue advanced studies in philosophy at Yale, Boston University, and Boston College.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Editions Rodopi B.V.
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 9042000783
• ISBN 13: 9789042000780
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 148
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible