{"id":14408,"date":"2016-10-10T06:46:53","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T12:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=14408"},"modified":"2016-10-10T06:46:53","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T12:46:53","slug":"montana-ethic-project-what-our-myths-say-about-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/10\/montana-ethic-project-what-our-myths-say-about-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Ethic Project: What our myths say about us"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Myth\"<\/a>

Joey and Libby Early<\/p>

Michael Sexson, an emeritus professor of English at MSU Bozeman, talks about “Mythic Montana” in this, the final chapter of the Montana Ethic Project.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is the final chapter of the 32-part video series \u201cThe Montana Ethic Project.\u201d This chapter features Michael Sexson, an emeritus professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman, talking about “Mythic\u00a0Montana: The Last and the Best.” \u00a0You\u00a0can watch the whole video below. Here is an edited transcript of how it begins:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“My name is Michael Sexson. I\u2019m a professor of English at Montana State University where I\u2019ve been\u00a0teaching literature since 1966.\u00a0My special interest in literature is mythology, traditional stories that all cultures have to explain, to\u00a0console, to orient us meaningfully within the great scheme of things through the use of imaginative\u00a0techniques typically associated with hyperbole or exaggeration, and other tropes having to do with\u00a0amplification and expansion of what is historically obvious.<\/p>\n

“Because of its commitment to these imaginative strategies, myth is often dismissed as, at best,\u00a0misinformation. Or at worst, deliberate lies. Understood this way we might say that the notion that the\u00a0sky is bigger in Montana is a ‘myth,’ because when measured it is exactly the same size as the sky in\u00a0Nebraska.”<\/p>\n

Here is another, edited excerpt from Sexson’s\u00a0presentation<\/em>:<\/p>\n

“Some years ago an anthology of literature came out featuring Montana writers titled ‘The Last Best\u00a0Place.’ That title since has taken on a life of its own, going beyond a slogan to that of a credo, if not a\u00a0manifesto. We\u2019re not only the best place, we\u2019re the last of the best places.<\/p>\n

“Now it seems to me that if that title had been the best place, it would have disappeared from our\u00a0communal conscious. But to add the word ‘last’ brings together an imaginative collision of mythic\u00a0forces: the alpha, the omega, the beginning, the end. Montana is the best because it appropriates that\u00a0aspect of American mythology which in turn has appropriated to that aspect of world mythology that\u00a0sees the place where we live as completely new, as Adam must have seen the world on the first morning\u00a0creation: pristine, undefiled, unpolluted, virginal, innocent. And to use two fancy words, largely\u00a0because they also happen to be lovely words, prelapsarian and antediluvian. That is, before the fall,\u00a0before the flood.<\/p>\n

“And this I would argue is the great myth of Montana, the myth of the prelapsarian and the antediluvian.”<\/p>\n