Mythemic figuration and the limits of reason in philosophy and literature

This study explores how modernists in philosophy and literature have used the "depictive rationality" of mythemic figuration to delineate, in self-reflexive ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in religious, national-cultural, psychosocial, and psychobiological domains of experience. It illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical species of mythical depiction in works by Soren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood. Prior to this hermeneutic stage of inquiry, the study first discloses how rationalist theorists of myth---exemplified by Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ernst Cassirer, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans Blumenberg---fail to account for the very possibility of a critical mythical thinking, and it traces the origins of this failure to precedents in the classical dichotomization of munuthetaozeta and lambdaogammaozeta...