A generation ago, Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces
introduced thousands of Westerners to the world of myth. O'Flaherty
(Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, 1984) seems to be
addressing a similar audience today, although she assumes her
readers have a basic familiarity with the material. Her attempt is
to provide a way to think more deeply and clearly about the great
stories from other cultures and our own. O'Flaherty contends first
with the difficulty of defining myth, settling on the formulation
that myths are, in the deepest sense. "true stories." Using stories
from Judaic, Christian, Greek, and Hindu sources, as well as from
Woody Allen and Kazantzakis, as a vehicle, O'Flaherty's style is
breezy and informal. But she is addressing big questions in this
series of brief essays - What good are other peoples' stories? What
meaning can they carry outside their own context? Where is the
force of myth without ritual? - and she sometimes gets tangled in
her own thinking. When discussing the study of religion and the
controversy between the merits of detached observation and
firsthand experience, for example, we are led through complicated
comparisons between hunters and sages, and subgroups of
hunter-sages, and sub-subgroups of those. But O'Flaherty returns
again and again to the usefulness of encountering other cultures
through their stories, including their ability to shed light on our
own. O'Flaherty (Historian of Religions/U. of Chgo.) has thought
long and hard about the mythic world and generously shares her
insights and sometimes personal experience here. While astutely
warning of the pitfalls and blind alleys likely to be encountered,
she holds the hope that through the myths of others, Westerners
might bypass the bloodless cynicism of so much contemporary thought
and "skim close to the ground of the human heart." (Kirkus Reviews)
Other People's Myths celebrates the universal art of storytelling,
and the rich diversity of stories that people live by. Drawing on
Biblical parables, Greek myths, Hindu epics, and the modern
mythologies of Woody Allen and soap operas, Wendy Doniger
O'Flaherty encourages us to feel anew the force of myth and
tradition in our lives, and in the lives of other cultures. She
shows how the stories of mythology--whether of Greek gods, Chinese
sages, or Polish rabbis--enable all cultures to define themselves.
She raises critical questions about the way we interpret mythical
stories, especially the way different cultures make use of central
texts and traditions. And she offers a sophisticated way of looking
at the roles myths play in all cultures.
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