The Iron Age of Myth Criticism : Does It Have a Future?

The Iron Age of Myth Criticism : Does It Have a Future?

The question this paper seeks to examine is the relevance of myth criticism in the age of postmodernism, where quaint notions of structure and universal archetypes embedded in the collective unconscious apparently appear naive and outdated. The tremendous impact of poststructuralism in the late seventies to mid-eighties has provided the theoretical underpinning for this postmodern paradigm shift. Eric Gould has attempted to move myth criticism in a poststructuralist direction by radically redefining myth as a part of the symbolic order of language, caught within its endless play of signifiers and signified, which he calls the ontological gap between event and meaning. Jung's, Frye's, Girard's theories fail because they do not take into account the process of interpretation, which entails the recognition that myth is a part of language. But myth studies has not moved in a poststructuralist / postmodernist direction. It still remains concerned with myth's structural function and its capacity to endow a literary work with emotional resonance. Moreover, it has gone beyond its traditional concerns by addressing issues of gender and race. Myth criticism, then, continues to be relevant, and may even experience a renaissance given the renewed interest in science fiction, which in Ursula Le Guin's phrase is simply "warmed over myth." A brief discussion of Aliens 3 is offered to show the usefulness of myth criticism in the analysis of science fiction.