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New myths: introduction to the special section.

Article Excerpt
This issue has its origins in "New Myths?," a conference held at the then Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College in High Wycombe, UK, 3 May 2003. As one in a series of annual conferences, the theme I chose related to and differed from earlier conferences held there on the body, Dreaming, Othering England and History/Fantasy. I particularly wanted it to be a conference that allowed opportunities to talk about science fiction, fantasy and horror, whether filmic, televisual, literary or whatever. A call for papers is sometimes a provocation, and I intended mine to be this--suggesting that fantasy, horror and science fiction offer us a set of new myths: about how we came to be here, about what we fear today and what we believe our futures to be. In all three cases those myths are perceived from here and now.

According to Raymond Williams, "myth" entered usage in the early nineteenth century, on the coattails of mythos, fable, which was contrasted with logos, what really happened (210-11). Myths are to be contrasted with history, as fabulous but deceptive--even deliberately deceptive--accounts of the past. On the other hand, myth also came to be a term used for stories told to provide a social group with a definite origin--an origin myth. These are "held to be a truer (deeper) version of reality than (secular) history or realistic description or scientific explanation" (212). The same narrative might be either one of these two senses of myth, according to your relationship to the power structures that narrate, represent, reproduce or distribute the myth. A member of an oppressed minority will generally see the myth that justifies that oppression (myths of anti-Semitism, etc.) as falling...