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Myth

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The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Abstract

This chapter provides a discussion of myth as poetic literary style, based on the distinction between mythos and logos introduced through an analysis of understandings of the terms in archaic Greece. The archaic associations of mythos with truth, and of logos with beguilement and deception, are discussed in relation to Romantic and modernist poetics and philosophies in the context of civic liberalism, utopias, patriarchal values, myth as means of human cognition, and myth as constitutive pragmatically necessary fiction, among others. This leads to the argument, centrally based on Bracha Ettinger’s work on matrixial borderspace, that myth is a literary style engendering faith and belief experienced somatically, because what is experienced is a memory of co-emergence with another (the [M]other) which cannot be expressed symbolically.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am italicizing logos when the term includes its archaic meaning (e.g. speech as means of seduction); “logos” is not italicized when it refers to modern understandings of the term, but sometimes I use the term with the understanding that the speech of logos is still underpinned by its archaic meaning.

  2. 2.

    This work was supported by a mobility grant from the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-MC-2018-3109, within PNCDI III”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Suceava, Suceava, Romania

    Tudor Balinisteanu

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  1. Tudor Balinisteanu
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Correspondence to Tudor Balinisteanu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Barry Stocker

  2. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Michael Mack

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Balinisteanu, T. (2018). Myth. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_8

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