In this text I retell the story of a close friend of mine that went missing a few years ago. I also dive into world geographies and how they interconnect unexpectedly, for example through water.  In the Hindu scripture Shatapatha Brahmana, written between the 6th and 8th centuries BCE, one encounter scientific knowledge of geometry, observational astronomy, and many tales, where time is told in a cyclical, nonlinear way. The book recounts how the sweat dripping down the god Shiva’s head is the water of Ganges River, where the ashes of generations of deceased people travel along the currents like a miniature collection of the past. I depart from a lens-based practice to explore remains of traces of stories, contrasts between inherited cultures and gay love.  Through the migratory movement from India to Norway made by my father in the 80’s, the same period as the fathers of my Norwegian cousin’s migrated from, Algeria, Morocco, and Argentina. I came to know about the importance of the permanence as some of them stayed and influenced our cultural microcosmos of diaspora perspective. While some of them departed back again to their birth countries leaving mythical-like aura behind. From the get-go our shared upbringing in the Scandinavian landscape made us witness the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of our human existence and filling a gap between having two cultures. And a question to the difference between being of or having a minority background.  The artistic expression can be intricately intertwined with the nuanced language of gestures, transcending linguistic and cultural motifs. Through a local Indian newspaper shipped to my hometown in Norway ever since I was a child, arised a playful game of trying to understand and learn these symbols and cultural motifs.

This thesis looks at the media event of Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki (Our Story of the Mahabharat), a serialized, televised version of the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata which ran on prime-time Indian television from July to November 2008. The show was created and produced by Balaji Telefilms and Ekta Kapoor, well known throughout Asia for extremely successful prime-time soap-operas which have come to be representative of the genre in India. Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki was canceled quite early in its run (it was intended to air for upwards of three years) due to low ratings and intense viewer criticism of the program. The bulk of the criticism compared it unfavorably to an earlier version aired by B.R. Chopra and his team in 1988-90, which is to this day remembered as one of the most watched events in Indian television history, and is still widely seen as a largely “successful” visual translation of the story to television. This thesis analyses the dimensions of Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki’s promises to offer something both “old and new” to the Indian public, its internal structure, the influences upon its creation, its failure, the nature of the criticism against it, and how it sparked a large public debate about how “authenticity” and “tradition” are currently being conceptualized by modern popular media in India. The thesis takes data and evidence from a variety of scholarly, print, online, and ethnographic sources to demonstrate that Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki’s failure was much more complex than the case of its being simply a “bad” show; rather it reveals that to many, Chopra’s earlier version has become in some ways monolithic, containing an essential “rightness” that speaks to broader concerns about the current state of India’s cultural and religious heritage as refracted through the lens of modern media. This thesis examines Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki as one unique occurrence within a much broader field of mythological/devotional programming currently available in India, and points to the need for a larger scholarly study of this phenomenon. / text

This study explores evocations of the concept of the "Amazon Woman" and her female tribe, from cross-continental prehistoric sources to contemporary ritual practice within native amerindian belief systems of the rain forests of South America. The designation "Amazon" for the world's largest river has often been considered a grand "mistake" made by sixteenth century explorers; imaginative portrayals of Amazons had invigorated the reports of numerous early travelers, including Marco Polo, Columbus, and Hernan Cortes. This analysis establishes the importance of a reconsideration of the Amazon "mistake," or the idea that Europeans were projecting the fantastical worlds and dramatic personae of classical Greek legends and later romances of chivalry onto the realms of New World daily experience. The deep roots of prehistoric and historic civilizations carry the fragmentary genesis of matristic views of the world--the Mother, deified as Warrior, is a constant sign and symbol interplaying within the semiotics of the Amazon. The amazons of the New World were both ancient sister kin and actual tribal homosocial units who played vital roles in sacred religious beliefs and clan organization. I read the corpus of chronicles on, and studies of, the question of Amazons through a multi-faceted and multidisciplinary lense: archeology, history, anthropology, ethnography, mythology, literary criticism, and the sciences all intertwine to provide a more wholistic view of the subject. The text of the Amazons is clarified here by the consideration of prehistoric fragment upon fragment, reuniting five tribal narratives from the rain forests of South America, which reconstitutes the overall corpus of the Amazon mythos in Latin America. An autobiographical opening juxtaposes the continuum between the personal and cultural microstructures of my own approach to this subject with the macrostructures of the socio-symbolic order generally, and keeps a double focus constantly at play throughout the entire analytical text. Finally, Amazons are defined as evocations of natural phenomena and the diversity of animal and human behaviors as represented in mythical, cultural, and social spheres. This thesis comprises a literary analytical process I define as "ecotextuality": the reading of biotic diversity through its multiple languages, not excluding the "I" of the reader/writer.

Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west to tell of the mysterious passage the unconscious can make through the ccntempoorary desert to win the bride of life. It serves as an illuminator and normative guide for evaluating how other novels avoid or confront the initiatory hell. By the Scanlon standard, some contemporary mythology is escapist. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle express the youthful desire to arrive almost automatically at a new age, either with help from a new Christ or through practicing a simplistic morality. Other novels tell of the agony of modern Grail questers who sense that a viable myth is possible, but cannot completely envision it nor accomplish the passage through the void to gain it. The hindrances in each case are powerful forces which exert control over society. These forces are scientific objectivity and racism in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and an unbeatable Combine which forces people to be rabbits and like it in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Thomas Pynchon's The Cring of Lot 49 makes clear thet the confining forces are sustained because the secret of life has been lost, and man needs protection from the void which he cannot face without the secret. Saul Bellow deals directly with mythologies in Mr. Sammler's Planet. On the one hand is the popular view which ignores what every man knows is right and asserts instead that whatever one wants, he should have. This view replaces the archetypal sustaining images with a myth of continuous progress which, now that progress has faltered, makes living seem overwhelmingly hopeless. However, Sammler believes that meaning is established in life even as it collapses. The good man is part of an elite which is unusually intelligent and discerning, able to develop the will to carry out the contract with life and to enjoy the mystic potency in living. The novels in this study indicate a trend toward a reformulation of the basic mythological structures of Western man. Possibly the belief is weakening that something from somewhere will save him from his given situation, and a mythology is emerging which tells of significant life in the common, discovered through an awareness of the archetypal consciousness.

by Cindy, Ah Shan Kuan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Howard Jones. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-272). Also available via World Wide Web.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Lebenslauf. "Bibliographie: " p. vi-viii.

D. Tech. Language Practice / The graphic novel has become the means through which a generation of contemporary writers has chosen to communicate the myths of our time to the world, yet unlike their counterparts in classic mythology, they have not yet enjoyed the same depths of investigation. As a medium with the ability to conjure up powerful, emotive reactions, the graphic novel is now in need of a means of substantiating the responses and reactions to the medium. This study has set out to prove that through the utilisation of a three-pronged analytic model that incorporates analytical approaches from the schools of Myth- and Archetypal Criticism, visual analysis, and particularly Linguistic Criticism an authoritative literary critique can be produced on a graphic novel that would reveal and comment on the three primary constituents of the medium, namely: language; story; and graphic illustration. In addition, this study has aimed to provide contextualisation for the nature and development of the graphic novel against the backdrop of postmodernism for the purposes of explaining the sociological, cultural and temporal influences that prompted and promoted the development of the comic book into what we now know as the graphic novel. A secondary aim of this study has been to provide further legitimacy to the concept of contemporary mythology through the exploration of this controversial concept and, by virtue thereof, set the scene for the incorporation of Myth-criticism into a multi-pronged analytic model.

In the first chapter we intend to present, although in a restricted sense, some of the positions of the most recent critics, which will allow us to determine the meaning of our Author. / The next chapter is mainly dedicated to giving information which establishes the relationships between the most important mythological traditions and classical works. Such information will serve to find and establish the components of the Pavesian culture. / Cesare Pavese was born in Piemonte, Italy, in 1908, he lived in the historical period during which fascism and nazism triumphed and through all the horrors of the immediate after-war. Pavese's incapacity to be concretely active in the political field brings him to relive, in his writings, the ancient Italian cult of the Evocativo. This technique of his is a hermetic method of going through with his ethical social mission. To evoke a god in a moment of national crisis is a traditionally Italian ritual; while the invocation to a God or a Muse is also part of the literary tradition. The classicism of Pavese is now recognized by different critics. Their basis for this decision is his work Dialoghi con Leuco. However, our attention is more focused on the romance Il diavolo sulle colline which occupies the central part of the trilogy La Bella Estate. / This text Il diavolo sulle colline contains many meanings which requires different approaches--such as the cultural precedents of other authors, and even those of Pavese himself--to decipher. The many messages in this work can all be traced back to the concept of death and rebirth. Pavese uses themes which are beloved to Dante and the humanists, who were themselves inspired by the great Greek and Latin authors. / And thus, we are left wondering whether Il diavolo sulle colline was conceived according to the norms of the classical tragedy, which was based on the celebrations in honor of the god Dionisus (the Hellenic demon venerated by the Latins under the name of Bacchus, and affiliated with an old Italian divinity whose symbolic name was Liber Pater). Poli, a dominating figure in Il diavolo sulle colline could be the double of this god. Our discussion will therefore be founded on the testimony of mythographers. / From a methodological point of view, our analysis will not take into account the chronological sequences, but rather the themes which imply the operation of segmenting the text.

Thesis (M. S.)--Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Committee Chair: Michael Nitsche, Ph.D.; Committee Member: Celia Pearce, Ph.D.; Committee Member: Eugene Thacker, Ph.D.; Committee Member: T. Hugh Crawford, Ph.D.