CONTEMPORARY MYTHOLOGY SECOND EDITION

Enter the fascinating world of contemporary mythology, where everyday phenomena take on a deep, symbolic meaning. This book is a journey through the meanders of culture, in which you will discover how myths shape our perception of reality. Prepare for an intellectual adventure that will change the way you look at the world.

• Analysis of contemporary socio-cultural phenomena
• Using classical myth theories to understand the present
• Discovering hidden logic in everyday situations
• Understanding how contemporary mythology responds to the need to make sense of the world
• Identifying places, characters and objects as elements of mythological narrative
• Taming reality by explaining the unknown with the known
• Revealing the social functions of myth, such as masking inequalities

Contemporary Mythology is devoted to the analysis of contemporary socio-cultural phenomena using classical theories of myth. Such a juxtaposition reveals in the well-known, everyday cultural reality layers of logic quite different from the „common sense” that we attribute to Western culture on a daily basis and allows us to show in a new light phenomena that seem to have already been worked out by science and devoid of mystery.

The book puts forward the thesis that contemporary mythology responds to the same need as its venerable older sisters – the desire to understand the world and give it meaning; it also uses similar methods – thinking with things, presenting individual phenomena instead of general principles, anecdotal narration. The material for the imagination are places, characters and objects encountered in the course of everyday hustle and bustle. At the deepest level, myth serves to tame reality: it explains the unknown using the known. This means that contemporary mythology also performs important social functions: by masking economic inequalities or our own ignorance in a world of specialisation and expert systems, it provides us with a sense of security and „familiarity with the world”.

The book consists of 10 chapters devoted to very diverse phenomena. It begins with an introductory chapter, presenting the assumptions of contemporary mythology on the example of the charitable circulation of bottle caps (which ultimately turns out to be economically and ecologically unprofitable) and the parallel cycle of stories about the circulation of human organs (the so-called „kidney thieves”). The next two chapters present scandal as a contemporary myth, focusing on the historical variability of its forms and putting forward the thesis that scandal is a „practice of revealing” embedded in a specific media circuit, and therefore „looking at evil from the side of good”.