Suchergebnisse

Sammlungs und analysemethode für eine neue elsässische mythology.
Das Studium der Mythology und der volkstümlichen Literatur des Elsasses bringt spezifische Probleme mit sich, welche mit der Verstädterung und der frühen Alphabetisierung des Elsasses zusammenhängen. Neben einer volkstümlichen Literatur, welche die Errungenschaften der stadtischen Freiheiten preist den frühen Aufstieg der Stadte und der bürgerlichen Lebensweise überhaupt, bestehen sehr zahlreiche Erzahlungen, die meist entfernten Tälern entstammen. Das Sammeln und Analysieren dieser Texte ist heitel, denn trotz grosser Entfernung von den Stadten ist deren literarischer Einfluss dentlich darin Spürbar.

Sex has become a sort of myth or secular religion, ie, a mass-belief in a new world entirely redeemed from its evils by revolution. A myth is this sense is an ensemble of internally understood evocative images which can mobilize political action. Hope in revolution presupposes the ideas of man's original innocence & of society's responsibility for evil (as theorized by J. J. Rousseau & F. Nietzsche, C. Saint-Simon & K. Marx). As no political or economic revolution can entirely liberate man from his aggressiveness (as S. Freud pointed out), the sexual revolution is proposed (by W. Reich & his followers) as the basic step toward the new world. A totally free sexuality, breaking the dialectic between Eros & Thanatos, gives way to the death instinct (S. Freud) & therefore leads to a world of struggle for domination, not of liberty. Modified HA.

The object of this study is European cave art {extending roughly front the 30th to the 9th millenary B.C.). Avoiding a hasty assimilation with phenomena observed in contemporary nonliterate societies, the A. proposes an interpretation centred on the classification of the figures as masculine/feminine in connection with the themes of the hunt and death. In consequence, a revision of the classic hypotheses concerning Paleolithic art (totemism, magic of the hunt and fertility, mythology, metaphysics) becomes necessary.
In conclusion, Paleolithic art gives evidence of the existence of a complex metaphysical System. Even if we are unable to define its contents, the study of this primitive art shows that the thought of Upper Paleolithic man was just as rich and flexible as that observed in present-day societies.

John Keep, Emancipation by the axe? Peasant revolts in Russian thought and literature.
Contrary to widespread opinion, a continuous thread runs from the 17th- and 18th-century Russian peasant revolts to the agrarian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, manifested in the survival of social Utopian myths. The Razin legendary cycle, distorting Christian teaching, presents the "liberator" as an avenging apostle. Russian writers from Pushkin onward, and later social theorists, took up the theme of agrarian violence but were shocked by the brutal events of 1917-1918. Early Soviet writers (e.g. L. Leonov) offered a critical portrait of the peasant revolutionaries, but subsequently this theme has been neglected. A comparison of two novels on the Razin revolt (A. P. Chapygin, 1927; S. Zlobin, 1951) illustrates changes in the official ideology and Soviet literary taste; popular mythology is today manipulated for mundane political ends.