Myth and Its Revision. Myths gain a literary autonomy as they evolve through time into sovereign narratives used as socio-cultural foundational texts. Mythic sources may originate or accrue from religious, historical, political, or cultural references, but each of these sources holds:
“ a double power. It [the myth] exists or appears to exist objectively, in the public sphere, and consequently confers on the writer the sort of authority unavailable to someone who writes "merely" of the private self.” Myth belongs to "high" culture and is handed "down" through the ages by religious, literary, and educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation-everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable.” (Ostriker 72).
In revisionist mythmaking, stories are repeatedly rehashed as new generations of artists, authors, and poets appropriate, agglomerate, and regenerate them to interrogate or endorse their cultural paradigm.
In the feminist literary tradition, revisionist mythmaking asks "new questions of old texts" as it develops previously unheard voices, interprets new imagery from older symbologies, seeks original …show more content…
Prufrock may yearn to be Hamlet, but what woman would want to be Ophelia? While the myth of a Golden Age has exerted incalculable pressure in the shaping of Western literature and its attitude toward history, the revisionist woman poet does not care if the hills of Arcady are dead. Or rather, she does not believe they are dead. Far from representing history as decline, or bemoaning disjunctions of past and present, her poems insist that past and present are, for better or worse, essentially the same. (Ostriker
“ a double power. It [the myth] exists or appears to exist objectively, in the public sphere, and consequently confers on the writer the sort of authority unavailable to someone who writes "merely" of the private self.” Myth belongs to "high" culture and is handed "down" through the ages by religious, literary, and educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation-everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable.” (Ostriker 72).
In revisionist mythmaking, stories are repeatedly rehashed as new generations of artists, authors, and poets appropriate, agglomerate, and regenerate them to interrogate or endorse their cultural paradigm.
In the feminist literary tradition, revisionist mythmaking asks "new questions of old texts" as it develops previously unheard voices, interprets new imagery from older symbologies, seeks original …show more content…
Prufrock may yearn to be Hamlet, but what woman would want to be Ophelia? While the myth of a Golden Age has exerted incalculable pressure in the shaping of Western literature and its attitude toward history, the revisionist woman poet does not care if the hills of Arcady are dead. Or rather, she does not believe they are dead. Far from representing history as decline, or bemoaning disjunctions of past and present, her poems insist that past and present are, for better or worse, essentially the same. (Ostriker