Myths have been considered universal and timeless narratives describing human existence, or geographically determined stories reflecting essential features of a specific culture; vehicles of absolute truths or ideologically unsound delusions. Probably in the West today the word is principally used to describe a story, character or object which is entirely fictional and which should be revealed as such.
And yet mythology, a body of myths that is formed collectively, is at the core of narrative processes and any new text recasts one or more fundamental myths for the society that develops it, renewing its validity for the society itself. It seems to be impossible to organize experiences into narratives without reworking preexisting ones.
The presence of narrative paradigms is often particularly visible in
media products aimed at children, and refashioning myths for the new
generations is also an ideological enterprise: shaping the minds of the
young has always been one of the principal ways of creating a cohesive
society. Using the myth theories of Hans Blumenberg and Roland Barthes, among others, the course will study animation as a particularly interesting place to investigate the way myths, defined by Eric Csapo as "socially important narrative [that] is told in
such a way as to allow the entire social collective to share a sense of
this importance," are selected, validated, rejected, recast.