ABSTRACT
Reading, like remembering, is dynamic. It builds on prior readings and memories. Although initial readings invite the projection of preexisting cultural conceptions, particularly when the text is transparent, subsequent readings necessarily become dynamic hybrids of projection and reception, become protean syntheses. Although they reinforce the 10 mythotypes, these syntheses couple them with new images and sounds. This, in turn, creates a new mythology in the sense of Barthes (1972) and Lincoln (1989), a metalanguage or “second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes, 1972, p. 115), but dangerously so because “myth is always a language-robbery…Is there no meaning which can resist this capture with which form threatens it?” (p. 131). This is not a global monoculture, but quite its opposite: thousands of Creoles, well documented by Allen (1995) and Liebes and Katz (1993) among others. The result is not a coming to gether in one monoculture but a coming apart. With what does that Babelization leave us-with cultures or with anarchy?
