ABSTRACT
"Myth and symbol" or "image-myth-symbol," designate a certain approach or method employed by a particular group of scholars in the field of American cultural studies, a group which, whatever else it may or may not have in common, shares at least a pre-dominantly literary orientation in their historical work. Myths operating as symbols, or symbols embedded in images, function, then, as the indispensable forms whereby and in which a society constitutes its agreed-upon collective reality: not only a view of the world, but also a view of individual behavior, and of relations between the self and collectivity. To acknowledge a parentage, support within the culture itself for the practise of a "presentist" scholarship, one which seeks to create not so much a "coherent" but a "usable" past, is to see oneself as part of a tradition which views cultural criticism as a form of cultural reconstruction.
