School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Start date: 2011 × End date: 2014 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: poetry × Subject: advertising ×

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    Automotive apotheosis: an exploration of promotional culture as contemporary mythology
    Kurdyuk, Kateryna ( 2011)
    This thesis proposes that contemporary promotional culture is the mythology of today. This hypothesis was first put forth by Marshall McLuhan in his 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, where he astutely observed that myth and poetry have been effectively colonized by promotional culture. Although it has been mainly overlooked by the academic community, this book is a cornerstone of the field of popular culture and mass media. In it, McLuhan was one of the first scholars to detect that folklore of industrial society is determined, not by education or religion, but by the mass media (McLuhan 1951). Over the decades, many scholars from various academic fields have observed the same trends, concluding that the myth-making faculty is thriving in contemporary society, and situating the strongest mythopoeic forces in worlds of entertainment and promotional culture. Nevertheless, these notions have not been sufficiently explored. Hence, in order to uncover the prevalent myth and poetry operating in contemporary society we must turn to promotional culture, and particularly to advertising, which McLuhan believes is as equivalent to collective society as dreams are to the individual (McLuhan 1951, p. 97). Myth is defined in this work as a universal narrative that reflects humanity’s collective unconscious projections and contains primordial forms, or archetypes. This thesis argues that advertising is mythopoeic and utilizes primordial archetypes. The focus of this thesis is automotive adverting, which draws on the mythology of the car as a godlike entity in contemporary popular culture. McLuhan’s observations detailing the colonization of myth and poetry in contemporary society inform a critical methodology which this thesis builds upon and modernizes. The resulting version of mythical criticism is a valid method of enquiry. It reveals underlying meaning in contemporary promotional texts that could not otherwise be observed by using methods such as semiotics alone.