Taking Responsibility for the Concept of “Myth”
How to Do Things with Myths - A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There - Ivan Strenski
Ivan Strenski [+]
University of California Riverside (retired)
Author of 15 books and more than 100 academic articles on religion and political issues
like gift, sacrifice, freedom of religion/religious freedom, religious nationalism, French
Catholic integralism, post-revolutionary French Jewry, divine right of kings, Ivan Strenski
is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. His most recent books are Muslims, Islams, and Occidental Anxieties:
Conversations about Islamophobia (2022), a history of the study of religion from the
Renaissance to the present-day, Understanding Theories of Religion (2014) and Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics (2009), Arabic translation (2016).
Description
Arriving at a definition of myth is a creative, constructive effort, not a passive act of discovery. Following Richard Rorty’s “pragmatist” approach to conceptualization, the success of such a definition depends on how well it fits the use to which we seek to out the concept. Beginning with a grasp of the ordinary, everyday meaning of myth as ‘story,’ what kind of story merits being called a “myth”?