Para uma "mitogênese" moderna: mito e utopia em "Alice no país das maravilhas" e 1984, de George Orwell

Abstract

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the hypothesis that new myths may arise in contemporary society, based on two case studies: Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949). To understand this possible mythification, we resort to the work of Hans Blumenberg, who presents myth as the result of a process of work on mythical narratives and their selection through reception. We also make use of the hypothesis that this work and selection are related to utopian consciousness, as understood by Ernst Bloch. The study of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland identifies a process of mythification of Alice's figure by the psychedelic movement in the USA in the 1970s, in which the character is portrayed as a guide in the process of lysergic experimentation. This mythification relates to the utopia of a free society, around which various countercultural movements were organised. In the 1984 study, mythification occurs through the appropriation of the work as a cautionary myth, in a similar way to the uses of Greek tragedy by Athenian democracy. The work is appropriated as an absolute horror, which is borrowed by using elements of the book, such as the vocabulary of newspeak, to translate the anxieties of our time. The mythification is related to angst over the loss of the basic principles of the Enlightenment: the individual's autonomy and equality among them. This angst organises a dystopia that rises up as resistance against the corrosion of the already “achieved” utopia of the Enlightenment. Given the satisfactory results of this exploration, we seek a theoretical-methodological systematization, which allows extrapolating this analysis to other cases, in the hope that it may contribute to the understanding of contemporary phenomena.