culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU
impatient to move further up on the ladder of human evolution. Such a change
was successful because of one major characteristic of the postmodern times, that
is the blurring of boundaries. The common distinctions between capital and
labour, capitalist class and working class, middle class and working class, male
and female, culture and nature, mind and body, disappeared, allowing for a new
type individual to appear and for new rituals to be performed. That is why we
can speak of new types of colonisations: the Coke-colonisation, the Mccolonisation,
the cable network colonisation, the electronic word colonisation.
Malls become the new temples for worshipping and people engage in genuine
pilgrimages not towards shrines but towards centres of fashion. On the new
market the knight is replaced by the opportunist, duels are substituted by
transactions.
It is in such a society that the individual yearns for the feeling of freedom
only to discover that it is an illusion, that he is caught in too entangled of a net
that does not let him consume but it compels him to choose from whatever it
offers. This idea gives us the opportunity to explain the title of our paper – it is
for the reason mentioned above, because we struggle in illusions of freedom and
reality that we have chosen to discuss not the myths but the pseudo-myths of the
20 th (up to the 21 st ) century. The modern man takes a peek at the world not from
behind steel bars but from behind the glass pane of a TV set or of a clerk desk,
or from behind the invisible “bars” of electromagnetic rays.
Old or new, national or international, myths have always captivated
people of all ages and cultures. The process of interpretation in which they
engaged people constituted a challenge for all classes. Either reduced to their
legendary dimension or poeticised by artists from all areas, they have always had
a rich range of significations and the wide gamut of symbols that they comprised
allowed an imaginative exploitation. This is the reason why they have become
the subject of interest and investigation of artists, theorists and common people
alike. Filtered through the codes of each age, they acquired new types of
representation, the archetypal pattern remaining however, the same. This is
exactly that has always made this topic so interesting – the use of old myths in
new, recontextualised situations, the change of “heroes” and special deeds and
their power of adaptation both to reality and to the world of fiction.
References:
Barthes, R. 1997. Mitologii, transl. M. Carpov, Iaşi: Editura Institutul European
Baudrillard, J. 2005. Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri, transl. A. Matei,
Bucureşti: Editura Comunicare.ro
Bradbury, M. 1968. Stepping Westward, London: Penguin Books in association
with Secker & Warburg
Bradbury, M. 1971. James Walker şi America, transl. L. Dobrescu, Bucureşti:
Editura Univers
Bradbury, M. 1983. Rates of Exchange, London: Secker & Warburg
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