Loading...
Location
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Document Type
Paper
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-54.htm
Start Date
24-7-2026 2:30 PM
End Date
24-7-2026 3:20 PM
Description
Indrapramit Das's The Devourers (2015) follows a Kolkata historian who encounters a werewolf with a complicated past. As Alok learns more about the vibrancy of that past, he discovers truths about himself and about the mythic traditions still alive in the remote Sundarban forest.
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) portrays a historian from a culture of mermaid-like creatures descended from the pregnant women thrown overboard in the Middle Passage: She must leave her people so she can grapple with the weight of her profession. In R.F. Kuang's Katabasis (2025), two post-graduate students studying magick travel to the underworld to rescue their advisor. In doing so, they realize that academia may not be the only option.
I argue that each of these texts portrays a paradox: as the scholars' adventures lead them away from academia, they nonetheless rely on academic practices to understand their journeys. Kuang's protagonists debate which representations of hell are most accurate. (Virgil's Aeneid is just "Roman propaganda.") Yetu, from The Deep, must reconsider the burdens of being a culture's only historian—and does so in light of that culture's history. In The Devourers, Alok transcribes and annotates a werewolf's journal, but his footnotes reveal his discomfort with the material, and are soon replaced with his own journal. Drawing on the works of Brian Attebery, Rosemary Jackson, Farah Mendlesohn, and Veronica Schanoes, this paper begins by exploring the styles of scholarship present in the novels: citational (The Devourers), cultural/oral storytelling (The Deep), and conversational (Katabasis) to establish each work's initial portrayal of scholarly interactions. I conclude with an exploration of how academic discourse leads scholars away from academia, allowing them a jumping-off point to explore other ways of knowing, and other ways of being.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
The Scholar's Journey: The Limits of Academic Discourse
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Indrapramit Das's The Devourers (2015) follows a Kolkata historian who encounters a werewolf with a complicated past. As Alok learns more about the vibrancy of that past, he discovers truths about himself and about the mythic traditions still alive in the remote Sundarban forest.
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) portrays a historian from a culture of mermaid-like creatures descended from the pregnant women thrown overboard in the Middle Passage: She must leave her people so she can grapple with the weight of her profession. In R.F. Kuang's Katabasis (2025), two post-graduate students studying magick travel to the underworld to rescue their advisor. In doing so, they realize that academia may not be the only option.
I argue that each of these texts portrays a paradox: as the scholars' adventures lead them away from academia, they nonetheless rely on academic practices to understand their journeys. Kuang's protagonists debate which representations of hell are most accurate. (Virgil's Aeneid is just "Roman propaganda.") Yetu, from The Deep, must reconsider the burdens of being a culture's only historian—and does so in light of that culture's history. In The Devourers, Alok transcribes and annotates a werewolf's journal, but his footnotes reveal his discomfort with the material, and are soon replaced with his own journal. Drawing on the works of Brian Attebery, Rosemary Jackson, Farah Mendlesohn, and Veronica Schanoes, this paper begins by exploring the styles of scholarship present in the novels: citational (The Devourers), cultural/oral storytelling (The Deep), and conversational (Katabasis) to establish each work's initial portrayal of scholarly interactions. I conclude with an exploration of how academic discourse leads scholars away from academia, allowing them a jumping-off point to explore other ways of knowing, and other ways of being.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc54/schedule/4
