Logos versus mythos: the strange adventures of Netochka Nezvanova in the lands without
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Interactive storytelling and memory building
Presentation Title:
- Logos versus mythos: the strange adventures of Netochka Nezvanova in the lands without
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Abstract:
Abstract
The problem I think goes back to our basic conception of the world.
Western democracy has been built upon the dichotomy real-apparent. From Euclid to Einstein progress has been based upon the devaluation and desacralization of human experience.
The modern person lives among the fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass of myriad neutral places in which he drifts, governed and driven by the obligations imposed by an advanced, technocratic society. Yet, among Romanian peasants the ritual narration of stories defends the house against evil spirits. Still more, the narration leads to the presence of God, the intermediary world between this intelligible world of beings of pure light and the sensible world.
This paper discusses Netochka Nezvanova (Nameless Nobody), one of the myriad, enigmatic programs enacted throughout Eastern Europe following the disintegration of communism, to contravene the advance of western rationalism and relativism in the East, and prevent a complete and permanent schism in the real-apparent Continuum.
