A alegoria em J.R.R. Tolkien: entre as Ciências da Religião e a filosofia perene

O ensaio On Fairy-Stories de J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) é resultado da conferência de 1939 para a Universidade de St. Andrews e revisado para publicação em 1947. Neste texto, Tolkien dialoga com duas figuras importantes para as Ciências da Religião, Max Müller (1823-1900) e Andrew Lang (1844-1912). O primeiro é um dos fundadores da ciência da religião, a partir de suas pesquisas em filologia, enfatizando as relações entre linguagem, mito e religião. O segundo foi antropólogo e folclorista, igualmente discutindo as relações entre mito e religião. Neste diálogo, Tolkien estabelece críticas a ambos, fundamentalmente relativas à concepção de alegoria, e indica uma proposta teórica que resgata elementos da filosofia perene, enfatizando elementos de Platão, Aristóteles, Agostinho e Tomás de Aquino.

Ghost Stories from the Uncanny Valley

This chapter proposes that we will soon find ourselves haunted by the ghosts of androids. Although ghost stories have been centrally studied throughout the history of the discipline of Folklore (perhaps most notably during the time of Andrew Lang in the British Folklore society), it appears we are quickly approaching a new era in ghosts: the ghosts of artificial intelligence. This chapter takes as its starting point the proposition of android ghosts, exploring the implications and possibilities emanating from this discussion. What sorts of ghosts will androids make?

National Supernaturalism

This chapter examines how the late-Victorian folklorist and critic Andrew Lang reinvented the idea of many-sidedness as a populist polemic—one that showed W. B. Yeats how to recuperate the old moves of literary nationalism for a global modernism. Although Lang had been Arnold’s student at Oxford, his seminal anthropological treatises insisted that many-sidedness could best be cultivated not by sampling “the best which has been thought and said in the world” but rather by omnivorously embracing ancient folk tales alongside pop fiction. Yet Lang’s populism was also predicated upon a crypto-Romantic view of folklore as talismans of an endangered authenticity out of place in the modern world. This buried essentialism ultimately alienated Lang from mainstream anthropology, but it would also teach the young Yeats that presenting the national as the primitive and the primitive as the occult allowed one to frame Irish folk literature as simultaneously local and cosmopolitan.

At the Crossroads between Literature, Culture, Linguistics, and Cognition: ‘Life is a Journey’ and ‘The Divided-Self’ Metaphors in Fairy Tales

This paper resumes the series related to metaphors in fairy tales started by HERRERO in 2005 (cf. HERRERO, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). In this case, the study is based on how the conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and THE DIVIDED-SELF may explain the structure and the basic meaning of more than twenty popular tales, which in turn accounts for some of the uncanny of tales.The tales, which are representative of various cultures, were compiled by the British author Andrew Lang (1844-1912), and have been downloaded from the Project Gutenberg online library. Our research also casts some light on the fact that tales are akin in varying socio-cultural contexts: their solid experiential grounding may not only have contributed to a uniform plot, but also to an easier transmission of the stories in diverse, remote settings.Resumen: Este artículo continúa la serie relacionada con las metáforas en los cuentos tradicionales comenzada por HERRERO en 2005 (véase HERRERO, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). En este caso el estudio se centra en cómo a través de las metáforas conceptuales LIFE IS A JOURNEY y THE DIVIDED-SELF se puede explicar la estructura y el significado de más de veinte cuentos populares, lo que a su vez da cuenta de parte de “lo maravilloso” que se da en ellos.Los cuentos, representativos de varias culturas, fueron recopilados por el autor británico Andrew Lang (1844-1912) y han sido extraídos del Proyecto Gutenberg. Nuestra investigación apoya además la idea de que los cuentos son similares en contextos socioculturales diferentes: el hecho de que estén firmemente basados en la experiencia puede haber contribuido tanto a que sus argumentos sean parecidos como a que se hayan transmitido fácilmente en entornos lejanos y diversos.