Critical Paths of Indigenous Mythopoetics in Mo Yan’s Pow!

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-462-4_95How to use a DOI?

Keywords

mythopoetics; deconstruction; alienation; spiritual dilemma

Abstract

Mo Yan’s Pow! anchors the coordinates of Chinese myths, modernises and logically restructures them, and demonstrates the bizarre and phantasmagorical nature of modern society from a child’s point of view through a narrative of temporal and spatial dislocation. The alienation of traditional sacrificial rituals and the deconstruction of multiple mythological archetypes show the functional paralysis of traditional mythological symbols under the manipulation of capital. Through forty-one rounds of verbal artillery barbarically tearing apart the hidden food safety cloth behind the watered-down meat, the magic realism technique exposes the spiritual dilemma faced by modern people after failing to pursue spiritual totems, and provides a diagnostic path at the level of mythological poetics for the orderly development of the vernacular society of modern China, while expressing humanistic concern.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jia Li
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/09/12
TI  - Critical Paths of Indigenous Mythopoetics in Mo Yan’s Pow!
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 9th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 841
EP  - 846
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-462-4_95
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-462-4_95
ID  - Li2025
ER  -