Editorial [PDF]
James Farrugia: University of Malta
Quest for the Origin of Primitive Myths: Revisiting Max Müller’s Comparative Mythology [PDF]
Yan Yang: Peking University
Victorian intellectuals explored the origins of primitive myths to understand the early human mind and its evolution to its present state. Among various interpretations, Max Müller’s Comparative Mythology, based on Comparative Philology, is influential, controversial, but ultimately eclipsed. This essay revisits the rise and fall of Müller’s Comparative Mythology, paying particular attention to three particular time spots in Müller’s career. By examining Müller’s works on mythology, this essay argues that, with all its errors and limits, Müller’s theory of mythology is multi-faceted, playing different roles in Victorian Mythography. Indeed, in the 1850s and 1860s, Müller’s Comparative Mythology is epoch-making, and scholars tend to forget his pioneering contributions to the Science of Mythology, neglecting his cautious warnings against anthropological conjectures.
‘Some (Not So) New Kind’: No Country for Old Men and Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction in Post-9/11 American Culture [PDF]
Richmond B. Adams: Northwestern Oklahoma State University
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men has generated significant discussion that moves beyond earlier works in his oeuvre. As McCarthy’s first novel after September 11, 2001, its concerns relating to American exceptionalism drew attention from critics such as Vincent Allan King and Francisco Collado-Rodriguez. These discussions, however, look beyond how McCarthy’s portrayed Sheriff Ed Tom Bell through the context of his roots as an ancestral Georgian and a culturally evangelical Protestant, with roots dating back to the early 1800s. Those roots, I argue, form the basis of Bell’s pursuit and later abandonment of Anton Chiguhr. Rather than, in King’s view, relinquishing his moral authority as Sheriff and as a representative of post-war American stability, McCarthy portrays Sheriff Bell as understanding that even if he were to capture Chiguhr, he would become what he sought and, by doing so, put his “soul” in a position of irredeemable moral hazard. Rather than losing moral authority, however, Bell embodies the evangelical Christian notion that to lose is, in fact, to win. Through that paradox, Bell represents the notion that morality, particularly in the post-9/11 era, remains attainable even as it is elusive.
On the Importance of Netnographic Research in Understanding Young People’s Virtual/Real Lives [PDF]
Dallel Sarnou: Université Abdelhamid Ibn Badis Mostaganem
This era of ubiquitous and unprecedented technological advancement has captured the attention of scholars in the humanities, encouraging them to investigate the nature of computing and the prolific use of technology in almost all aspects of human activity. Aiming to redefine humanity in the digital age, many scholars have brought about new theorisations that seek to answer new questions. By placing emphasis on this, the present essay reflects on new directions in the humanities that seek to decipher these technology-related changes. More particularly, my focus is to consider how Robert Kozinets’ “netnography”, as an emerging research method in digital anthropology, can help educators, parents, and students to understand the transformations that are taking place in non-digital situations. I inquire, in this article, about the role netnographers could play in assisting teachers and parents to bridge the gap between digital natives and digital immigrants by examining virtualised behaviour.
Re-thinking Beginning: Okri’s The Famished Road and the Crisis of the Postcolonial Nation [PDF]
Rogers Asempasah: University of Cape Coast
This essay explores the centrality of beginning in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Beginning is explored not as a narratological category but a dominant trope in anticolonial nationalists’ discourses of nation formation and the transition to liberation. I argue that Okri’s exploration of beginning can be read in critical dialogue with Fanon, and can be framed by David Scott’s idea of tragic consciousness. This essay demonstrates how Okri redefines time as a complex process of disorder and order; within this scheme of things, beginning is presented in The Famished Road not a singular event but as a recurrent potential for national reinvention and generational responsibility constituted by radical betrayal. In other words, beginning is a moment plucked out of the paradoxical flux of time. This essay concludes that Okri’s reconceptualisation of beginning has implications for Scott’s notion of crisis of temporality and tragic consciousness.
