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Introduction
Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, José Manuel Losada has been a researcher for more than ten years at the universities of La Sorbonne, Harvard, Oxford, Montreal, Durham and St. Kliment Ohridski (Sofia).
He has also taught at the universities of Navarra, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Montpellier, Münster, Munich, Valencia, Guadalajara (Mexico), Tunis and Iceland. He has given seminars and keynote lectures at some fifty European and American universities.
Additional affiliations
October 2017 - December 2017
September 1996 - November 1998
January 1993 - June 2017
Education
September 1986 - October 1990
Publications
Publications (231)
This issue explores the significance of myths within European cultural and intellectual history. It emphasises myths as timeless lenses for interpreting the world, grappling with philosophical inquiries social issues, as well as moral and ethical behaviours. The eleven chapters that compose this special issue highlight the dynamic nature of myths a...
Among the functions of myth, the referential one is particularly relevant. After examining it from three angles (textual, categorical, and chronological), this article shows that it materialises in the hermeneutic function according to which scholars should look for the transcendental, sacred referent of each text in the absence of which there is n...
La bibliografía sobre interpretaciones de los relatos míticos es inmensa: los mitos grecolatinos en la novela y el cine de aventuras, las adaptaciones de mitos celtas, nórdicos o eslavos en el cine, las series de TV y los cómics, las relaciones entre mitos de Oriente y Occidente… La lista es interminable y sobreabundante en comparación con la bibli...
This "Introduction" showcases the work carried out by "ACIS, the Myth Criticism Research Group," "Asteria, the International Association of Myth Criticism," and "Amaltea, Journal of Myth Criticism." Every two years, they organize an "International Conference of Myth Criticism" at the Complutense University, which has already been attended by over 1...
Hasta qué punto una investigación puede asociarse a una vida? Durante esta conferencia, narrada de modo autobiográfico, trazaré los principales vectores que, de modo parcialmente inopinado, han contribuido a la configuración de una definición científica del mito, iniciada hace treinta años, progresivamente afinada y definitivamente elaborada hace a...
De modo general y escueto la tematología de la caída moral puede resumirse en tres grandes apartados: las causas, el acto y las consecuencias. En la tradición judeocristiana (escritura canónica y deuterocanónica, reflexión filosófica y teológica), la tipología de esta caída es múltiple en sus manifestaciones; Jesucristo y san Pablo las enumeran rep...
The mytheme or mythical theme of immortality is inseparable from space and, above all, time; not from a time similar to ours, but to that of the mythical world. This is the context for reflection on two temporal stages of human life: youth and old age, stages that cultural myth criticism addresses through ancient and modern texts.
RESUMEN
El mite...
The volume presents and develops a new theory of myth: Cultural Myth Criticism. The field of study is Western literature, from antiquity to the present; occasionally, Eastern and pre-Columbian texts are addressed.
Na era da digitalização, o mito se encontra em uma situação singularmente sensível, na medida em que são colocados em xeque tanto sua perenidade quanto sua validade. Será capaz de superar este embate? A mitocrítica cultural tem muito o que dizer a respeito: por um lado, mostrar que o mito, graças ao seu dinamismo, possui uma capacidade inusual de a...
Editorial Desde 2008, Amaltea, Revista de Mitocrítica ha venido ofreciendo a sus lectores con «periodicidad fijada» un número anual. Esta periodicidad respondía a la inercia de las revistas editadas en formato de papel: las constricciones de imprenta obligaban a respetar unos plazos muy extensos desde la recepción a la publicación de los artículos....
El catálogo (111 páginas a color) recoge todas las obras de la exposición de tablas al óleo del pintor Luis Priego, exhibidas en el c arte c (Centro de Arte Complutense), Madrid, del 20 de enero al 4 de abril de 2022. Incluye, además, textos de diversas personalidades, así como un Prólogo del comisario de la exposición, José Manuel Losada.
The cat...
El arte nos habla de belleza, y la belleza-por polisémica que parezca la palabra-, de una adecuación entre el mundo y nuestras formas de percibirlo sensitivamente. Con nuestros sentidos captamos la realidad material, no toda la realidad. Solicitar a un artista que represente físicamente la realidad espiritual puede parecer osado; comprobar que a me...
El estudio de los diversos tipos de imaginario y, por extrapolación, de géneros literarios (mito, fantasía, ciencia ficción, esoterismo, etc.), es paso obligado para comprender mejor el mito. Aquí abordaré la ciencia ficción desde el punto de vista de su «trascendencia», con objeto de comprender sus puntos de confluencia y divergencia respecto al m...
Water cannot be a myth (it lacks personal character), but its symbolic polysemy qualifies it to intervene in countless mythical stories. As a primary symbol of life and death, the liquid element takes us into the inexhaustible cultural imaginary of worlds inhabited by supernatural beings.
The relationship between myth and science fiction is a complex one. Frequently, the boundary between these two correlates of our imaginary seem to blur; all the more since the beginning of the industrial revolution when the usual extraordinary scenarios of the mythical stories were also represented by science fiction. It seems as if the relentless...
Las relaciones entre el mito y la ciencia ficción son complicadas. A menudo la frontera entre estos dos correlatos de nuestro imaginario parece difuminarse; más aún desde los comienzos de la revolución industrial, cuando los escenarios extraordinarios habituales del relato mítico han sido también representados por la ciencia ficción. Parece como si...
Where does myth start and where does it end? How far does science fiction go? What significance does the crossing between both narratives have? As always, what is crucial and indisputable is to analyse the kind of transcendence in each case, the utmost criterion to identify and distinguish myth and science fiction. This book offers different answer...
Une série de circonstances politiques, sociales et artistiques ont diversifié le lyrisme à part entière en Espagne et en Amérique Latine au cours du XIXe siècle. Grâce à l’influence des « Lyriques du Nord », à l’aube du XXe siècle, une nouvelle expression trouve son nouveau cheminement : c’est le temps de la Modernité. L’étude de la nouveauté de l’...
This article pays particular attention to Cultural Myth Criticism, and how this new perspective deals with the main challenges that myth encounters today: social globalization, culture of immanence, and logic of consumerism.
Keywords: Myth, Mythology, Cultural Myth Criticism, Globalization, Immanence, Transcendence, Consumerism.
(Abstract in English below). En la civilización maya, el imaginario sobre el origen de los seres humanos sigue sus propios patrones. La mitología quiché cuenta el azaroso proceso que, tras diversos intentos fallidos, concluyó en la creación de los primeros hombres a partir del maíz. Hombres de maíz, de Miguel Ángel Asturias (1949), aborda este mito...
In Mayan civilization, collective imagination about the origin of human beings follows its own patterns. Quichean mythology tells of the hazardous process that, after various failed attempts, ended in the creation of first human beings from corn. Men of Maize ( Hombre de maíz ), by Miguel Ángel Asturias (1949), allows us to delve into this myth of...
Además de libro sagrado que inspira fe, la Biblia es también un escrito que recoge la apasionante historia de las vicisitudes del hombre que busca respuestas al misterio de la existencia más allá de sí mismo. Es el compendio histórico de unos testimonios humanos tocados por lo sobrenatural, un reflejo de la identidad de un hombre que no se resigna...
La mitocrítica se ha constituido sobre una base interdisciplinar gracias a su relación con otras ciencias humanas y sociales. Grandes investigadores franceses han contribuido en esta tarea. A partir de la reflexión sobre el pensamiento simbólico, el inconsciente y el imaginario colectivos, así como de la interacción de las literaturas clásica, mode...
Uno de los rasgos más conocidos del salmón es su instinto a regresar a su lugar de nacimiento para reproducirse y morir; sube vigorosamente el río a contracorriente, a diferencia de animales y humanos. Pero el salmón, además de no ser el único pez anádromo, coincide en su carrera suicida con los demás ejemplares de su misma especie: todos son, a su...
Our aim is to understand if myth has been directly affected by the digital revolution and to what extent it has retained its original essence or whether it has mutated to new forms. These articles tackle films and television series that devote a considerable part to the impact of transcendence in our lives. They show that myth continues to be a par...
Desde finales del siglo pasado, la revolución digital ha modificado nuestra forma de entender los contenidos y las formas de los relatos míticos en películas y videojuegos. En estas páginas analizo el impacto de esta revolución digital en los mitos tradicionales (clásicos, nórdicos, bíblicos). También reflexiono sobre la relación entre mito, cienci...
Since the end of the last century, the digital revolution has modified our way of understanding the contents and forms of mythical narratives in film and videogames. In these pages I will deal with the impact of this digital revolution on traditional myths (classic, Norse, biblical). I will also reflect on the relationship between myth, science fic...
Por motivos que diversas disciplinas explican desde hace varias décadas, la mujer ha sido históricamente considerada como paradigma de virtud o de perversión. En lite-ratura, arte alérgico a la transparencia, estos estereotipos femeninos han sido a me-nudo vehiculados a través de los relatos míticos. A continuación, veremos brevemen-te la idoneidad...
Drawing on four famous verses of Horace's Epistle to Pisones (v. 333-334 and 343-344), criticism and literary practice transformed the poet into a benefactor of humanity who improves men by instructing and entertaining them. Our goal is to reveal-as in filigree and marking the transition from one era to another, from classicism to modernity-the dev...
José Manuel Losada comparte sus reflexiones en torno a las macroestructuras de piedra que componen el conjunto escultórico del Descubrimiento de América, creado por Vaquero Turcios en la plaza de Colón (1977). Su análisis del bloque dedicado a las "profecías" de Séneca, san Isidoro y el Chilam Balam invita a profundizar en el carácter escatológico...
Resumen: A partir de fórmulas célebres de M. Eliade ("El fin del mundo ya ha tenido lugar"), la Mitocrítica Cultural puede aportar algunas pautas esclarecedoras sobre el Eterno Retorno. A través de la rueda del tiempo en la mitología hindú y el retorno de las estaciones en la griega, este artículo aborda algunas manifestaciones de este mito en las...
The religious institutions no longer presenting any character of interference in contemporary Western society, it is the "healthy secularism", that is to say, the one that integrates the plurality of the religious, which is to promote the teaching of the latter in an organic way by helping to reorient the entire national education, since the discip...
Journal: Bérénice, Rivista semestrale di studi comparati e ricerche sulle avanguardie (Paris).
Narrated for Children, and History of Great Men of Greece, by Fernán Caballero (1865), is a work of a markedly pedagogical and moral character: it avoids scabrous references and highlights the profitable content. His reading is very pleasant and enjoyabl...
This three-page article in three languages (English, Spanish and French, each one page) is a scientific Editorial of Amaltea, Journal of Mythcriticism’s #9 Issue (Oct. 2017), devoted to “Myth and Cinema in the 21st Century. // Este artículo de 3 páginas en 3 lenguas (inglés, español y francés) es la justificación científica del Editorial del número...
Can we use the adjective "bizarre" and the noun "bizarrerie" to apply them to baroque notional fields? Without a doubt. It would not even be by semantic drift, as was the case when the baroque word was introduced to designate an art, a style, breaking with classicism, from a term of Portuguese origin of strongly distant meaning. Moreover, more of t...
Many researchers and, in their wake, students, journalists and politicians interchangeably use the concepts of myth, symbol, type, prototype, archetype, figure, theme, story, legend… This confused use is often applied to the concept of character: symbolic and archetypal figures, movie stars and celebrities, sports personalities, stars of the song b...
The emotive nature of myth lays the foundation of the research proposed for this trilingual volume. The book aims to provide a study, as wide and thorough as possible, that brings guidelines and models capable of interpreting the mythical-emotional phenomena. Its implementation will be of great help to understand an important part of the writing an...
The emotive nature of myth lays the foundation of the research proposed for this trilingual volume. The book aims to provide a study, as wide and thorough as possible, that brings guidelines and models capable of interpreting the mythical-emotional phenomena. Its implementation will be of great help to understand an important part of the writing an...
The emotive nature of myth lays the foundation of the research proposed for this trilingual volume. The book aims to provide a study, as wide and thorough as possible, that brings guidelines and models capable of interpreting the mythical-emotional phenomena. Its implementation will be of great help to understand an important part of the writing an...
All societies are stratified and myths are not free from this stratification. Myth criticism has to take into account the social classification. Through an analysis of the Don Juan myth, we can see the social difference that exists both between the speaker and the receptor of the myth, and the mythical character represented in the story and the res...
Toda la estructuración del "Quijote" revela una intención netamente desmitificadora. Así, la 1ª parte es de naturaleza eminentemente paródica; consiste, por lo general, en trocar el ambiente poético-caballeresco en ambiente de baja cotidianeidad. La 2ª parte, más innovadora, utiliza con gran sutilidad el recurso de lo apócrifo, suscita en el lector...
No son pocos los investigadores y, en su estela, alumnos, periodistas y políticos que utilizan de manera indistinta los conceptos mito, símbolo, tipo, prototipo, arquetipo, figura, tema, cuento, leyenda… El camino inverso es, por desgracia, habitual: los investigadores nutren su léxico a partir de los conceptos de políticos, periodistas, alumnos, e...
Elemento fundamental del mito es su referencialidad a una trascendencia, dimensión particularmente problemática en la literatura contemporánea. Más que en otros tiempos, hoy es sumamente arduo comprender la trascendencia. Cualquier persona está dispuesta a conceder valor a determinados actos y objetos, pero solo la persona trascendente les otorga u...
This article presents a potential framework for various synchronic or diachronic studies. It opens an inquiry in the fields of linguistics, rhetoric, didactics, stylistics, literature in general (forms, genres, themes, schools, movements...), based on the notion of “latinitas”. The semantic drifts from both a civilizational and an ideological persp...
Editorial of issue # 8 in English, French, and Spanish
Sartre’s “Les Mouches” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “Le Deuxième Sexe” are antimythological works. Where there is no transcendence, there cannot be neither mythical drama nor mythical essay. However, Yourcenar’s “Phèdre” and S. Bertière’s “Apologie pour Clytemnestre” are authentic mythical works: their heroines’ disagreement with the will of gods prove...
This volume contains the selected proceedings of the Conference held in the Complutense University of Madrid (20-23/10/2015).
It would be wrong to attribute a mythical dimension to the characters, despite the aura that gives them their name. We are in full immanence subsumed by a transcendence of a purely cosmic nature (the presence of an arbiter would have transformed it into a sacred transcendence). Gradually, eclyptically, the fatality that weighs on the two protagonis...
In the midst of the uncertainty that prevails on the concepts of fantasy and myth, this article aims to clarify their points of convergence and divergence. It does so from well-known fairy tales (Tom Thumb, The Sleeping Beauty) in both traditional (Perrault) and contemporary (Tournier) versions. The angle of focus, transcendence, allows to offer a...
This article exposes two reflections. 1st. The transfer of literary and artistic genres. 2nd. The apparent contradiction of the mythical image. The analysis text is “Ariadne auf Naxos”, by Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Este artículo expone dos reflexiones. 1ª La transferencia de géneros literarios y artísticos. 2ª La aparente contradicción de la imagen...
This article explores the literary manifestations of the dialectics that oppose essentialism vs. existentialism in the currents that have dominated European philosophy for centuries: the logic of the immanence and the logic of the transcendence. The essentialist or idealist immanence is evident —though no less paradoxical— in Schelling and Cassirer...
In his "Odes", Víctor Hugo includes poems of monarchical inspiration along with others in a markedly postclassical way. Some of these pieces take as a pretext a Spanish epigraph extracted from Spanish comedies or warrior chronicles. This procedure is strange due to the origin of the texts and the generic transposition to which they are submitted. T...
Mito: relato explicativo, simbólico y dinámico, de uno o varios acontecimientos extraordinarios personales con referente trascendente, que carece en principio de testimonio histórico, se compone de una serie de elementos invariantes reducibles a temas y sometidos a crisis, que presenta un carácter conflictivo, emotivo, funcional, ritual y remite si...
Starting with a personal definition of "myth", this paper seeks to substantiate the claim that every myth is essentially etiological, in the sense that myths somehow express a cosmogony or an eschatology, whether particular or universal. In order to do that, this study reassesses Classical and Judeo-Christian mythologies to revisit and contrast the...
Myth: explicative, symbolic and dynamic tale that recounts one or more extraordinary events—which are personal and transcendental; it lacks historical testimony and is made up of invariable thematic elements, which are often presented in a situation of crisis; presents a conflictive, emotive, functional and ritual character, and always points out t...
This article is based on a definition of the myth (explanatory account of one or more extraordinary and transcendent events that always refers to an absolute, either particular or universal, cosmogony or eschatology) and relates it to various elements that shape our contemporary society (social globalization, the culture of immanence and the logic...
This article addresses the consequences of social globalization in literary myths. The corpus used is a series of contemporary French novels: Les Choses (G. Perec, 1965), Belle du Seigneur (Albert Cohen, 1968), L’Œuvre au noir (M. Yourcenar, 1968), Le Roi des aulnes (Michel Tournier, 1970), La Vie, mode d’emploi (G. Perec, 1978), L’Exposition colon...
There are three types of myths in modern and contemporary times. 1) the traditional myth, open to transcendence; 2) the myth as deformation and exaltation at the collective level; 3) the myth identified with the fallacy, the social trickery. This article studies the main characteristics of this typology. / / Existen tres tipos de mitos en los tiemp...
This trilingual volume examines the extent to which myths are affected by the crisis of the 20th and 21st centuries. Four theoretical studies analize both the crisis of structure ―that imply the distortion or disappearance of myth― and the crisis of concept and terminology, that currently threaten the study of mythology. The largest section of the...
Every myth is made up of a limited series of constitutive elements, also known as invariants or mythemes. These elements do not necessarily coincide with the plotline of the original myth, but rather give shape to its mythic essence. These unvarying elements have a mythic core, that is, they follow the logic of myth: they hold, in some way, a trans...
Every myth is made up of a limited series of constitutive elements, also known as invariants or mythemes. These elements do not necessarily coincide with the plotline of the original myth, but rather give shape to its mythic essence. These unvarying elements have a mythic core, that is, they follow the logic of myth: they hold, in some way, a trans...
This trilingual volume examines the extent to which myths are affected by the crisis of the 20th and 21st centuries. Four theoretical studies analize both the crisis of structure ―that imply the distortion or disappearance of myth― and the crisis of concept and terminology, that currently threaten the study of mythology. The largest section of the...
This chapter introduces the volume that brings together the studies and the images of the usual "Mythological Walk" through the streets of Madrid for the Science Week. Este capítulo introduce el volumen que reúne los estudios y las imágenes del habitual "Paseo mitológico" por las calles de Madrid con motivo de la Semana de la Ciencia.
Ciencias La Universidad Complutense recibe el galardón del II Certamen Internacional ONCE de Investigación sobre Juego Responsable 2 Salud Dos ojos para toda la vida 4 Medio Ambiente La respuesta animal al cambio climático 6 Humanidades 1914: El año que cambió la historia 8 Amaltea: una nueva manera de estudiar la mitología 13 Cultura Museo de Antr...
Article-Review of Cervantes' "Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda" translation into French by F. de Rosset.
Lope de Vega : Un événement de cour en France et un événement domestique en Espagne au XVIIe siècle, article publié dans Poésie de cour et de circonstance, théâtre historique. La mise en vers de l'événement dans les mondes hispanique et européen. XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Paris : L'Harmattan, 2014, pp. 267-276 (ISBN : 978-2-343-02790-6). Il sera question...
This article analyses the problem about the adaptation of the myth to various artistic media.
There is no myth without extraordinary event that gives it the supernatural qualities it requires in order to become part of the literary and mythological History. A definition should be given about what "extraordinary" means: an event involving facts done by personal beings (either gods or human) belonging to the supernatural world is an extraordi...
Ces quelques réflexions portent sur l’évolution constatable de l’instance poétique dans l’œuvre de Hugo jusqu’à ce que le poète endosse le statut de mage. Les recueils témoins ou étapes sont "Odes et Ballades", "Les Orientales", "Les Châtiments" et "Les Contemplations".
Analytic description of the 17th-century book.
