The Town Square
mythologics
Sanity is madness put to good use.

- George Santayana

“Mythologics: Cross-Disciplinary Archaeologies of the ‘Natural’ in Global-Age America”
CCI Workshop: Spring Semester, 2009

Barthes
This workshop tackles the “logic” or “logics” of the cultural mythologies coming to the fore in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century. This is a cross-disciplinary undertaking in which faculty from English and American Studies, History, Communication Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, and Classics, both from UNCG and other institutions, will analyze the emergence of cultural myths that, we argue, have been shaping domestic cultural production and representation at the turn of the new millennium.

Our inspiration for this workshop is Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, a seminal text in critical theory and cultural studies published in France in 1957. Mythologies is clearly a product of mid-twentieth century France and the leftist intellectuals of that moment. But their efforts to unearth the work of mythmaking in their own culture prompted us to update the questions and answers for present day America. The main question we pose is how and why do myths get produced, gain resonance, and in turn reshape their culture? Further, under the press of globalization are American myths identifiable as national longings in a transnational age? Or, to denote the other end of a possible spectrum, might they simply be a product of global capitalism? Obviously, no easy answers will emerge; but an interdisciplinary examination of the working of mythmaking in America will provoke stimulating and creative responses.

Resident Fellows:
Phyllis Hunter, History, Co-convenor and Co-ordinator [pwhunter@uncg.edu]
Christian Moraru, Department of English, Co-convenor
Sarah Daynes, Department of Sociology
Charlie Orzech, Department of Religious Studies
Scott Romine, Department of English
Roy Schwartzman, Department of Communication Studies
Jonathan Zarecki, Department of Classical Studies
Visiting Fellows:
Kent Ono, Professor, Asian American Studies, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.
Professor Ono conducts research on rhetoric and discourse, media and film, and race, ethnic, and cultural studies. His most recent books include Asian Americans and the Media (2008, Polity Press) and Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (2002, Temple University Press).
Jeffery DiLeo, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Associate Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston-Victoria.
Professor DiLeo is editor and publisher of the American Book Review and founder of the journal Symploke. His books include Federman at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction (State University of New York Press, 2008), Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (State University of New York Press, 2007, On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), and Morality Matters: Race, Class, and Gender in Applied Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 2002).

Organization:

The Workshop is organized around four clusters or venues of investigation. We plan to begin with a preliminary reading and discussion of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies-- our inspirational text. Venues of cultural production that will serve as organizing clusters, each of which are rife with mythological interventions include:

  1. Consumption and Avertising
  2. Visual Culture
  3. The Natural and Built Environment
  4. Virtual Reality
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