[Commlist] Call for Papers | The Aesthetics of Mythmaking: Narrative, Culture, and Power

    Call for papers | Diffractions Issue 13 | The Aesthetics of
    Mythmaking: Narrative, Culture, and Power 

Deadline for Abstracts: October 31st 2026
Deadline for Papers: January 31st 2027

Editors-in-Chief: Alyse Kaweng Fan, Thales Reis Alecrim 

Call for papers | The Aesthetics of Mythmaking: Narrative, Culture, and 
Power

“We are mythmaking creatures” (Ware 2025); human beings make and 
reinterpret myths. Mythmaking has remained a living action of the human 
cultural process since the earliest stage of human history. Myths are 
not static stories that stay unchanged across time; that is why agency 
and acts of mythmaking are powerful. Through mythmaking, inherited 
stories are continually adapted and reinterpreted to reflect changing 
cultural values and historical circumstances. Consequently, myth also 
assumes the form of a spectacle and ideology that must be critically 
examined; it often serves to naturalise or essentialise instances of 
domination, transforming contingent political agendas into “universal” 
truths. This call for papers values both the aesthetic brilliance of 
mythmaking in the arts and popular culture and the rigor critique of its 
ideological utility as a tool for hegemony. The inherent ambiguity of 
myth as both a meaning-making tool and a mechanism of control invites 
further scholarly exploration. We therefore seek to gather diverse 
perspectives on how these creative processes function across human 
experience, inviting interdisciplinary submissions that weave together 
multifaceted theories of myth and mythmaking.  

Even the same myth can be retold in radically different ways. For 
Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the reinvented myth of 
Ozymandias represents a meditation on antiquity and the transience of 
glory. More than a century later, when Alan Moore rewrote Ozymandias in 
/Watchmen/, Shelley’s ruined king was transformed into a morally 
ambiguous antagonist with the ambition to construct a new 
global saviour myth capable of uniting humanity. Moore’s self-fashioned 
Ozymandias also evokes the myth of Superman, a figure that can be traced 
to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept (1883) of /Übermensch /(beyond-human). 
From Nietzschean philosophical ideal of self-overcoming, the Superman 
later takes forms in different myths: George Bernard Shaw’s play and 
most famously in Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s comics, where Superman 
represents the experiences and aspirations of Jewish immigrant 
communities before being incorporated into American national mythology 
during WWII and the Cold War. Superman mythmaking also transcended 
across the Pacific. In postwar Japan, superhumans like Astro-Boy and 
Ultraman reconstructed the archetype into social recovery and national 
renewal in the aftermath of atomic destruction. These examples show that 
mythmaking reinvents cultural symbols into new stories in response to 
political realities and collective memory.

While myths are traditionally framed as archaic narratives of gods and 
heroes, modern scholars argue that the act of mythmaking can act as a 
mobilizing force in society and serves as a political power beyond its 
presence in art (Citton 2025; Josephson-Storm 2017). A political 
myth operates as a system of explanation, providing a cryptography 
through which the disconcerting chaos of contemporary facts is ordered 
and understood (Girardet 1987; Segal 2020). By offering an imaginary 
reading of a historical moment, myths restore intelligibility to a 
fractured world, manifesting in recurring structures like the nostalgia 
for a Golden Age or the yearning for a providential Saviour. However, 
this phenomenological reality of worldbuilding parallels Walter D. 
Mignolo’s decolonial critique of “enunciation,” where the content of 
myth is disseminated by the enunciator who ultimately possesses power 
(2018, 144–145).  

Mythmaking is still an ongoing cultural process without a singular 
definition. In a way, its study can be viewed as a consequence of the 
emergence of anthropology, which, during the 19th century, inquired 
about the concept of myth. This was the work of, for example, E.B. Tylor 
and J.G. Frazer. Yet, they were not so concerned about the aesthetics of 
mythmaking, as they viewed it as a form of “primitive knowledge” that 
was the exact opposite of Western art and science. Across the 20th 
century, authors as diverse as Bronislaw Malinowski (1922), Ernst 
Cassirer (1946), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1978), Northrop Frye (1967), Carl 
Jung (1964), Joseph Campbell (2004), and Mircea Eliade (1954) have 
suggested a whole range of different and often conflictive definitions 
for this concept. They actively engaged with the knowledge traditions of 
anthropology, philosophy, history, comparative literature, and religion 
studies. 

One compelling form of analyzing mythmaking emerged at the intersection 
of aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and critical theory during the 19th 
century. Reacting against Enlightenment rationalism, German Romantics 
and Idealists such as Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel called for a “new 
mythology” to heal the alienation between humanity and nature while 
birthing the philosophical myth of absence—the belief that modernity is 
uniquely “mythless” (Josephson-Storm 2017, 17–21). This tension is 
central to the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who, echoing 
Max Weber, argued that the Enlightenment’s “disenchantment of the world” 
sought to dispel myths through reason, yet ultimately revealed that 
“enlightenment reverts to mythology” (2016, xviii), as instrumental 
rationality facilitated the domination of human beings over one another. 
In this way, inquiring the aesthetics of mythmaking involves a critique 
of different areas of the socio-cultural construct, reaching the realms 
of narrative, culture, and power.  

Amidst these diverse intellectual traditions and definitions of 
mythmaking, this call invites contributions that explore mythmaking as 
an ongoing process of cultural translation, forms of exercising power, 
political representation, and artistic (re)creation. We are interested 
in examining how mythmaking is still continually making, remaking, 
and mobilising new meanings and identities across historical periods, 
cultural contexts, and media forms.

Proposals for thematic articles in response to this call are welcome, 
including but not limited to the following topics:

  *    Mythmaking and memory retelling 
  *    Superstition, hagiographies, and religion stories  
  *    Mythmaking in different culturalforms: films, comics, and music 
  *    Mythmaking and Nationmaking  
  *    Mythmaking as Tools of (De)colonial Discourse  
  *    Mythmaking and Identity: theInvention of Tradition and Self-making 
  *    Mythmaking and Imaginary  
  *    Lived experience and Phenomenology of Mythmaking
  *    The Power of Mythmaking in Social and Political Contexts 
  *    Mysticism and Poetry 
  *    Myth and Mythmaking in Literature from Romanticism to Modernism 
  *    Mythopoesia 
  *    Women Writers/Poets and Feminist Revisionist Mythmaking 
  *    The Role of Mythmaking in Visual Arts 
  *    The Study of Mythography in Modern Culture 
  *    Mythic ecology 
  *    Mythmaking, Philosophy, and Science: from myth to reason 
  *    Mythmaking and Psychology (Jungian Psychology, Psychoanalysis, etc) 

*Submissions and review process*

Abstracts will be received and reviewed by the /Diffractions /editorial 
board who will decide on the pertinence of proposals for the upcoming 
issue. After submission, we will get in touch with the authors of 
accepted abstracts in order to invite them to submit a full article. 
However, this does not imply that these papers will be automatically 
published. Rather, they will go through a peer-review process that 
will determine whether papers are publishable with minor or major 
changes, or they do not fulfil the criteria for publication. 

Please send abstracts of *150 to 250 words*, and *5–8 keywords* by 
*October 31, 2026*, to (info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com)> with the subject “Diffractions 13”, 
followed by your last name. 

The full papers should be submitted by *January 31, 2026*, through the 
journal’s platform, using our Style 
Sheet: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions 
<https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions>. 

Every issue of /Diffractions /has a thematic focus but 
also contains special sections for non-thematic articles. If you are 
interested in submitting an article that is not related to the topic of 
this issue, please consult the general guidelines available on the 
/Diffractions /website 
at https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions 
<https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions>. The 
submission and review process for non-thematic articles is the same as 
for the general thematic issue. All research areas of the humanities are 
welcome, and we accept contributions in English or Portuguese. 

There are no Article Processing Charges associated with the submission 
process. We do not request any payment from the authors.

*References*:

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2016. /Dialectic of 
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments/. Verso. 

Bell, Michael. 2015. “Myth and Texts.” In /A History of Modernist 
Poetry, edited by Alex Davis and Lee. M. Jenkins/. 46-67. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University  

Bell, Michael. 2016. “An Analytic Note on Myth in Modernism: The Case of 
T.S. Eliot.” In /Religion and Myth in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry/, edited by 
Scott Freer and Micahel Bell. 65-76. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing. 

Campbell, Joseph. [1949] 2004. /The Hero with a Thousand Faces/. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. /Language and Myth/. Harper & brothers. 

Citton, Yves. 2025. /Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds/. Verso 
Books. 

Eliade, Mircea. 1954/. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal 
Return/, translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Brothers.  

Frye, Northrop. 1967, “Literature and Myth.” /Relations of Literary 
Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, /edited by James Thorpe. 
27-54. New York: Modern Language Association. 

Girardet, Raoul. 1987. /Mitos e mitologias politicas/. Companhia das 
Letras. 

Josephson-Storm, Jason A. 2017. /The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, 
Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences/. University of Chicago 
Press. 

Jung, C. G. 1956. “Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude 
to a Case of Schizophrenia.” In /The Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 
5/, edited and translated by Gerhard Adler & R.F.C. Hull. New York: 
Bollingen Foundation Inc. 

Keats, John. [1819] 1990. /John Keats: The Major Works/, edited by 
Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Lévi-Strauss. 1978. /Myth and Meaning/. Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press. 

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. /Argonauts of the Western Pacific/. 
Routledge and Kegan Paul.  <http://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.15655>

Mignolo, Walter D. 2018. /On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, 
Praxis/. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 

Segal, Robert A. 2020. /Myth Analyzed/. Routledge.

Ware, Owen. 2025. “We Are Mythmaking Creatures.” OUPblog. Feburary 9, 
2025. Accessed on 17 June 
2026. https://blog.oup.com/2025/02/we-are-mythmaking-creatures/ 
<https://blog.oup.com/2025/02/we-are-mythmaking-creatures/>.

Yeats, William Butler. 2001. “A Coat” and “The Song of Wandering 
Aengus.” In /The Major Works of W.B. Yeats/, edited by Edward Larrissy. 
Oxford: Oxford University Press.  



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