The Augustan Myth of Stability and Its Reception in the Twentieth Century: from the Places of Rest to the Territories of the Oppositional
The Augustan Myth of Stability and Its Reception in the Twentieth Century: from the Places of Rest to the Territories of the Oppositional

Summary/Abstract: Following Y. M. Lotman, Jüri Talvet has defined the semiosphere as the imagined dialoguing ‘border’ between the biosphere and the noo-sphere (the one determined overwhelmingly by the activity and the impact of noos, the human intellect). The semiosphere […] is the most fertile ground for the semiosis. It is here that cultural-artistic ‘explosions’, discoveries, and ‘leaps’ to new original meanings are most likely to take place. (Talvet 2003: 154) It is within this fertile space that “the homo sapiens dwells deeply in the homo somnians (man of dreams). Dreams (fiction, myths) overlap with the real, but still transcend the real we know to open new horizons” (ib. 141). The basis for the configuration of many myths is the desire for this liberating transcendence. Nonetheless, there are some ‘anti- semiospheric’ myths which contribute to paralysing the exploration of new horizons. This is one of the main characteristics of a myth created through literature in eighteenth-century Britain: the Augustan myth of stability

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