The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular ImaginationUniversity of Chicago Press, 1 mai 2021 - 384 pages With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age. |
Table des matières
| 1 | |
Robinson Crusoe 1719 | 26 |
Frankenstein 1818 | 69 |
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1886 | 130 |
Dracula 1897 | 165 |
The War of the Worlds 1897 | 223 |
The Sherlock Holmes stories 1887 1927 | 275 |
Batman 1939 | 311 |
Chapter 9 Myths in the Making Myths to Come | 351 |
Chapter 10 The Mythic Mode | 370 |
Acknowledgments | 383 |
Notes | 385 |
| 407 | |
| 415 | |
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