The Oleander Bush at Delphi, The Minotaur in the Bullring

Abstract

This study treats literature as a reflection of cultural memory and explores how literature mediates between mythical and cultural relations to the natural world. The paper aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural memory, ecocriticism, and literary studies and draws on foundational texts from these disciplines and previous research that seeks to link them as a theoretical basis. By analysing the works of Gábor Devecseri, chosen as representative examples, the paper demonstrates how literature reveals the return to the deep layers of cultural memory represented in myths and the defects of the relationship between humans and nature, and how it thus contributes to the understanding of a complex (and interdisciplinary) process.

Keywords

• cultural memory
• mythology
• nature
• ecocriticism
• gábor devecseri