| dc.description.abstract | The myth-making (mythopoeia) of El Cid and King Arthur as hegemonic devices flows through a diachronical shapeshifting process with religious and political functionality linked to the Christianization of Spain and Britain. These myths interlock with the hegemonic rhetoric of Christian Reconquest to shape national identities and their procedural correlates, i.e., the monarchical Castilianization of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) and the formation of the English monarchy (Britain). Consequently, there occurs a gradual imposition of a monolingual politico-epistemological model over the plurilingual and multi-ethnic cultural mosaic. Mythical heroes and saint-warriors substitute real figures to create fictional iconosystems and redesign collective memory and cultural identity. In this context, El Cid and King Arthur as mythemes/iconemes develop in functional correspondence with the Christianization of Britain and Spain and the establishment of national monarchies. El Cid and King Arthur are myth-synthesis since in them a variety of worldviews and textual-iconographical traditions crystallizes to create new transmedia narratives with symbolico-allegorical character. This functional relationship takes place through complex intericonic and intertextual processes in the social and cultural imaginary of medieval Spain and Britain. Special heed is paid to the impact of Byzantium’s religious, military, and literary paradigms upon the formation of Arthurian and Cidian iconosystems and narratives. Aiming to understand and describe the functionality of El Cid and King Arthur as hegemonic myths, we apply a comparative methodology intertwined with a cross-cultural perspective according to which myths, as complex devices gathered together from iconic and textual discourses, bear a concrete functionality. This functionality appears
linked to the human calling to ontological self-interpretation, world-understanding, and socio-political legitimation.
Furthermore, there is a continuity of these mythemes linked to contemporary cybercultural multi- and transmedia storytelling. In other words, the mythopoeia of El Cid and King Arthur takes place today via transmedia adaptations within the framework of cyberculture and digital technologies. Special forms in which these mythemes appear today are digital cinema, video games, and online educational resources. This transmedia shape-shifting process shows that traditional myths still hold a significant capacity of impact on individual and collective imaginaries. This continuity also indicates that the mythopoeia of King Arthur and El Cid is still expanding to further stages in new social and technological environments. Additionally, this process occurs in an iconological field largely determined by bio-digital categories of cyberbeing. These two conditions transform the traditional formal, diegetic, and ideothematic fashion of these mythemes according to new transmedia possibilities. | en |
