"The story of the wreck": Hauntologic, parodic and chronotopic perspectives in contemporary women's revisionist mythmaking

The present thesis explores the revisionist mythmaking tradition and its methodology of revisiting, decoding and deconstructing mythical and traditional stories in order to incarnate the original myths, discover their full potential, and pick the bones of any kind of ideological underpinnings out of them. It supports a threefold investigation toward the revisionist mythmaking tradition consisting of hauntologic, parodic and the chronotopic perspectives. In the first chapter, I discuss the theoretical framework of this thesis, which aims to explain revisionist mythmaking through different authors, poets and literary critics. The second chapter bases its discussion upon Christa Wolf's 1998 book Medea, a modern retelling of Euripides's tragedy with the same title and brings together Derrida's concept of hauntology and the haunting qualities of the precursor myths. In the third chapter, analyzing Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad as one of the most-widely known rewritings of the myth of Odysseus, I aim to discover the way parody and parodic forms function in contemporary rewritings through (de)mythologizing the mythical tales. The fourth and the final chapter focuses on a rewriting that supports an authentic textual strategy of revision by Ursula K. Le Guin – Lavinia, recounting Vergil's unfinished Latin epic poem, The Aeneid through the voice of his last wife, Lavinia, with the theoretical framework of Bakhtin's chronotope. Key words: mythology, revisionist mythmaking, deconstruction, contemporary fiction, women authors, parody, hauntology, chronotope, rewriting, intertextuality