What are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.
I plan to turn my informal annotated bibliography into a report which addresses the shifting research aims throughout my project. This report will attempt to define destruction myths as well as detail their structure, symbolism, and purpose as a literary form using a comparative framework across my four chosen myths. The goal of this project is to use this framework to develop an understanding of human values and fears that prevail across time as understood through comparison. As I have developed my research question and claims, I also hope to expand this project and touch on the historical interpretations of these texts and the shift of cultural beliefs about ‘the end of the world’, a topic I’m currently unable to address due to the time constraint.
Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.
Explaining the importance of ancient literature in a time when people don’t particularly seem to care so much for history or literature to begin with is a bit difficult, and is a question I have struggled with for the past couple weeks as well. I was drawn to the genre of apocalypse and myth separately. A science-fiction project led me down a rabbit hole on solipsism, transhumanism, and immortality, while the motifs of creation in Genesis and other works I read in Literature Humanities led me to comparative mythology. I chose to focus on destruction myths because I thought it was interesting how much emphasis was placed on creation myths over their antithesis, which should have just as much importance, if not more. I am of the opinion that literature is important because it has historical and cultural impacts, not just within the academic sphere. Myth is doubly important because it puts words to the intangible, and gives us a way to comprehend concepts that can’t always be explained. This plays out in narrative archetypes such as good vs evil, the chosen one, and return to a Golden Age —which are used to frame media, politics, religion, and self-understanding.