Working Papers in the Humanities
Call for papers: ‘MYTH’. Deadline: 1 August 2010
Contributions are now invited for the 2010 issue of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, an international, refereed online journal aimed at postgraduate and early career researchers.
‘Writing begins, this is its condition, with the effacement or the disappearance of mythical names’ (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe). We should like to propose this statement as a starting point for a collective reflection on myth. For Lacoue-Labarthe, then, myth is excluded or overcome at the point in human history when art and culture emerge. However, one wonders how far it might be possible to stretch such a myth-busting model: for instance, could it be applied to the notion of mythlessness on which it relies? This question recalls a second understanding of art’s relation to myth, which sees art not as an effacement of myth, but rather as myth in its turn. Such has been the position both of those who have denounced art as ‘a thing of the past’ (Hegel), and of those who have sought to revitalize it, thereby creating new possibilities and new practices. We seek to publish articles engaging with these questions; with what they assume or distort; or with topics of the author’s choosing. Some suggestions are:
- The absence or interruption of myth
- Literature between muthos and logos
- The alterity of myth
- Myth for structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis
- Art as (new) myth
- Mythologization and the political
- Mythological woman; gender challenges to myth
- The timeless, the eternally recurring, the pre- or post-historic
- Mythological figures
- (Self-)mythologizing authors
- Myth and collective or anonymous authorship
Papers may come from any field in the ‘modern humanities’, which include the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora). History, library studies, education and pedagogy, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded.
In order to submit a paper, you are kindly requested to register as an author at http://mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph/user/register. Any informal queries can be directed to the editors at postgrads@mhra.org.uk.
ISSN: 1994-8662
Last updated: 09/11/2009