부산대학교 도서관

In this article, I offer a detailed examination of R. D. Laing's oft-disparaged book, The Voice of Experience. Drawing on archival materials I highlight the debt this book from 1982 owes to Jane Ellen Harrison's studies of Greek mythology and ritual. Although Laing missed the full import of Harrison's work, I argue that the combination of Harrison and media ecology helps unlock the unrealized potential lurking within Laing's book. By developing and correcting Harrison's writings on language, I suggest that we can see a vital resonance between her studies of archaic Greek life and media ecology's emphasis on the transformations in experience wrought by both symbolicity itself and alphabetic literacy. Bringing these lines of argument together, and connecting them to Laing's notion of 'mythologems' allows us to generate unexpected insight – not into individual birth experience, but into our wrenching emergence into symbolicity, and, even more traumatically (in the West), into literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]