Sembe K. Mythological Discourse in the Novels by Mario Vargas Llosa

The present dissertation is the first monographical paper in Ukraine to offer a systematic mythocritical study of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels. The research brings together myth theory, postcolonial approach, cultural anthropology, elements of poststructuralist methoology, and reader-response approach in order to explore the many routes of 20th-century remythologization in Latin America and the journey of the continent’s new heroe reflected in Vargas Llosa’s multifaceted and politically committed fiction. Although conducted in the area of Latin American Studies, the research also makes an attempt to track the process of myth-making and self-mythologizing in various ideologically committed authors native to distinct cultural paradigms of the 20th century (from M. Vargas Llosa and J.M. Arguedas to J. Joyce and F. Werfel), since introducing elements of comparative analysis into the study of Llosa’s mythopoesis proved both an indispensable and inevitable stage of anthropological analysis in literature. The study on the chosen topic required redefining myth as an epistemological category in the contemporary cultural discourse. Following the ideas of N. Frye, C. Lévi-Strauss, A. Losev, M. Eliade, and some other Founding Fathers of the myth theory, myth is to be understood first and foremost functionally, as a specific narrative that explains the state of things, i.e. creation of the world and humanity, emergence of natural and social laws, certain kinds of relationships etc. Myth is a mode of organizing reality, that is based on what we call ‘presumption’ of literacy, and requires respective mythological perception. Through contemporary desacralisation of myth, symbolic and semantic canonicity has been questioned and subverted. Reception of authors’ myths requires syncretic and flexible tools capable to cope with both theoretical and practical challenges of today. The urge of mentioned physiognomic contemplation has manifested the return of the Prodigal Son in the person of humanity to the myth, which has reclaimed its sense-forming function in most humanitarian discourses and is indeed a powerful episteme of today.