Myth and the Limits of Reason

Book excerpt: This inquiry expands on ideas initially worked out in The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience (University of Massachusetts Press; November 1988). This study demonstrates how authors as diverse as Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood employ "mythemic figurations" in ways that disclose defining limits of discursive analytical reason in the domains, respectively, of religious, national-cultural, psychosocial, and psychobiological experience. This revised edition features extensive substantive and stylistic improvements that render the exposition more fully developed and accurate, and the prose more precise and readable.