Object-Oriented Mythography

This essay investigates the compelling affinities between the premodern mythographic tradition and the various schools of thought grouped under the rubrics of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and vitalism. Like mythography proper, much of this work entails the acceptance of alternative, even enchanted realities; like certain strains of modern analytic philosophy and science fiction, it posits possible worlds and builds them out from within by acts of intellection, extended metaphorical conceits, and provisional bids for our faith. More than the result of a loose homology, the mythographic mode is a central idiom within these schools of thought, accounting in part for their allure to literary scholars, whose attachments to otherworldly stories are similarly inherited from the mythographic tradition.