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Myth And The Creative Imagination, J. Neil Garcia

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This essay inquires into the broadly creative affordances offered by mythological material to artists in general, and to writers in particular. It uses as examples the first few volumes of the Panay Bukidnon’s epic series, whose insights into non-dualistic thinking and transcendence echo the paradoxical procedures of poetic creativity on one hand, and urge translations into present-day national narrativities on the other, in light of the country’s increasingly cloven and agonized realities. Finally, as a way of fortifying its central argument, it discusses recent mythopoeic works by Filipino writers, that demonstrate in a variety of ways the generativity—and the usefulness—of …