Myth and Meaning, Myth and Order

From a modern perspective that earns him a place among such contemporary mythologists as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, Prof. Ausband explores the collective national consciousness and ever-evolving "reinvention" of the American people, their ways of thinking about and explaining their world, and the relationship of those belief systems to belief systems of the past in a manner that is both accessible and entertaining. Far from nihilistic in outlook, he posits that we are not *without* myths, but *between* myths, and therefore between self-definitions, "--reaching sometimes backwards to what we thought we knew, sometimes forwards into what we do not yet know--in an effort to find stories that will define us to ourselves . . . . "In the meantime," he writes, "we create order as we can, watching ourselves and our world sometimes in broken bits and pieces of tales, as we might study our reflections in the pieces of a shattered mirror" (120). Vividly and almost conversationally, this short work provides an excellent analysis of the world-defining, world-ordering function of all dynamic mythologies, and an overview of the critical importance of mythology to human civilization.