Mythopoetics of Culture as a Cognitive-Semiotic Resource of Ethnic Mentality: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

The paper provides an interdisciplinary conceptual synthesis of the mythopoetics of culture allowing for the transcendence of its narrow philological reduction and establishing its status as a fundamental epistemological and ontological category. The evolution of ideas concerning myth within the humanities knowledge is investi-gated: from E. Cassirer’s gnoseological statics to E.M. Meletinsky’s dynamic literary synthesis and contempo-rary anthropological approaches. The two-vector mechanism of constructing the wholeness of human percep-tion under the conditions of existential uncertainty is explicated in detail. The semiotic vector is based on the conception of nominational semiosis, which defaces the gap between the word and the denotatum, while the epistemological contour ensures the cognitive closure of the world’s excessive complexity through a system of codes. Integrating M.M. Betilmerzaeva, O.A. Gabrielyan, and A.A. Panchenko’s approaches, mythopoetics is defined as a dynamic operating system and a protective cognitive shell of the ethnic mentality. It is summarised that mythopoetics transforms macro-social chaos into a value-ordered Cosmos constructing the experience of ‘authenticity’ and guaranteeing the trans-historical reproduction of the unique narrative of ethnic identity.