MLA Proseminar: The Uses of Myth: Literature, Culture, and the Human Imagination

Why do human beings tell myths, and what do myths allow them to do? This course explores myth as one of the most enduring forms through which cultures have imagined the origins of the world, the nature of gods and human beings, love and violence, death and rebirth, social order, sacred places, and the meaning of the past. South Asia provides our principal archive--from the Vedas and Upaniṣads to the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, Purāṇas, Buddhist narratives, fables, and devotional traditions--but we will place these works in conversation with myths from Greece, Mesopotamia, the biblical world, Scandinavia, Africa, China, Japan, and the Americas. Alongside the myths themselves, we will read influential attempts to explain what myth is and what it does, asking with Paul Veyne whether people "believe" their myths and considering theories of myth associated with figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mircea Eliade, Roland Barthes, Wendy Doniger, and Bruce Lincoln. We will ask whether modern societies have really left myth behind and consider the continuing work of myth in literature and film, nationalism and collective memory, celebrity and popular culture,