A political myth is an ideological narrative that is believed by social groups.
In 1975, Henry Tudor defined it in the book Political Myth. He said that myths are believed to be true even if they may be false, and they are devices with dramatic constructions used "in order to come to grips with reality". Political myths simply deal with political topics and always use a group of people as the hero or protagonist. [1] In 2001, Christopher G. Flood described a working definition of a political myth as "an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group". [2]
In 1946 Ernst Cassirer recounted political theory in his The Myth of the State. [3]
In 1973, T. L. Thorson wrote in the 4th edition of A History of Political Theory : "It is the mark of a modern mind to be able to explicitly create a 'myth' as a way of influencing others (as, for example, Plato does in The Republic ). In its original sense myth is a literal description." [4]
According to Tudor, what recasts myth as political in nature is its subject matter, [5] : 17 that being politics. In order for a political narrative to be recast as myth, the narrative of events must be cast in dramatic form and it must serve a practical argument. [5] : 16
Tudor defines dramatic form, stating "there is indeed a critical event by reference to which men can order their present experience but the events in question are thought of as taken place in the past." [5] : 16 The function of political myth can be better understood when it is broken down into the following components: (1) myth provides the theoretical argument, which is incorporated into an (2) ideology that supports the myth by providing a practical argument. [5] : 127
Every myth has its protagonist/heroic figure that represents a particular community destined to create a morally coherent world which orients the community's activities towards this end. [5] : 138 Mythopoeic narratives in political discourse can range from origin stories (foundation myths) that recount the establishment of a community, to ascribing a political existence to a community based in the future (often a utopic vision), to restoring a political community that has ceased to exist.
Although, both myth and ideology carry certain values and beliefs, ideology provides a practical argument rooted in rendering the community's past experiences as coherent, allowing them to make sense of their present circumstances and often, as a result, providing communities with objectives for future activities. A myth is considered a political myth when the narrative provides an ideologically marked account of the past, present, and future of the political community. [6] By ideologically marked, the narrative carries "assumptions, values, and goals associated with a specific ideology… that conveys an implicit invitation to assent to a particular ideological standpoint." [6]
In short, political myths offer "an account of the past and the future in the light of which the present can be understood." [5] : 139 A political myth's success is dependent on the practical argument being accepted as true. [5] : 138
Examples cited as political myths include Manifest Destiny, [7] The Clash of Civilizations, [8] and national myths. [9]
A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those features. Some nations are equated with ethnic groups and some are equated with affiliation to a social and political constitution. A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. A nation has also been defined as a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity and particular interests.
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use the term as mainly condemnatory.
A national myth is an inspiring narrative or anecdote about a nation's past. Such myths often serve as important national symbols and affirm a set of national values. A national myth may sometimes take the form of a national epic or be incorporated into a civil religion. A group of related myths about a nation may be referred to as the national mythos, from μῦθος, the original Greek word for "myth".
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, but not defined, by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.
The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), during the European interwar period (1918–1939), the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th century liberal capitalist societies. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Narration is a rhetorical mode of discourse, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which a narrator communicates directly to an audience. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.
Pseudoarchaeology—also known as alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, cult archaeology, and spooky archaeology—is the interpretation of the past from outside the archaeological science community, which rejects the accepted data gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to supplement the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacy, and fabrication of evidence.
Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past matter, encompassing the continuum of events about a culture.
Narrative structure is a literary element generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer. The narrative text structures are the plot and the setting.
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
Hayden V. White was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973/2014).
In Shakespearean scholarship, Henriad refers to a group of William Shakespeare's history plays. It is sometimes used to refer to a group of four plays, but some sources and scholars use the term to refer to eight plays. In the 19th century, Algernon Charles Swinburne used the term to refer to three plays, but that use is not current.
The Foucault–Habermas debate is a dispute concerning whether Michel Foucault's ideas of "power analytics" and "genealogy" or Jürgen Habermas' ideas of "communicative rationality" and "discourse ethics" provide a better critique of the nature of power in society. The debate compares and evaluates the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to questions of power, reason, ethics, modernity, democracy, civil society, and social action.
Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Research Professor of Sociology at UC-Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists. His interests are wide ranging. He has been noted as an influential follower of Karl Polanyi.
Traditional stories, or stories about traditions, differ from both fiction and nonfiction in that the importance of transmitting the story's worldview is generally understood to transcend an immediate need to establish its categorization as imaginary or factual. In the academic circles of literature, religion, history, and anthropology, categories of traditional story are important terminology to identify and interpret stories more precisely. Some stories belong in multiple categories and some stories do not fit into any category.
Temporal finitism is the doctrine that time is finite in the past. The philosophy of Aristotle, expressed in such works as his Physics, held that although space was finite, with only void existing beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite. This caused problems for mediaeval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers who, primarily creationist, were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal with the Genesis creation narrative.
Egyptian mythology is the collection of myths from ancient Egypt, which describe the actions of the Egyptian gods as a means of understanding the world around them. The beliefs that these myths express are an important part of ancient Egyptian religion. Myths appear frequently in Egyptian writings and art, particularly in short stories and in religious material such as hymns, ritual texts, funerary texts, and temple decoration. These sources rarely contain a complete account of a myth and often describe only brief fragments.
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrative as a myth can be highly controversial. Many adherents of religions view their own religions' stories as truth and so object to their characterization as myth, the way they see the stories of other religions. As such, some scholars label all religious narratives "myths" for practical reasons, such as to avoid depreciating any one tradition because cultures interpret each other differently relative to one another. Other scholars avoid using the term "myth" altogether and instead use different terms like "sacred history", "holy story", or simply "history" to avoid placing pejorative overtones on any sacred narrative.
The theory of narrative thought (TNT) is designed to bridge the gap between the neurological functioning of the brain and the flow of everyday conscious experience.
Henry Tudor's definition.
