Word: mythologist
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...time he began collecting 20 years ago they cost relatively little. Hofstra-educated Pivar has steeped himself in his field since then, reading exhaustively and traveling to important auctions around the world. Says he: "To be a knowledgeable collector of 19th century painting you have to be a mythologist as well as a historian. Being a collector turns you into an aesthete, a financier, a voyager, a voyeur and a scholar...
...evidence of neuropathology included the poet's small body and outsized head, his tics and excessively nervous temperament. But his talent was not impaired. Neither was his critical acumen, at least when applied to the works of the Marquis de Sade, who was, wrote Swinburne, "like a Hindoo mythologist: he takes bulk and number for greatness... as if a number of pleasures piled one on another made up the value of a single great and perfect sensation of pleasure...
THIS IS BRILLIANT intellectual acrobatics, but Barthes is simply incorrect in saying that "the speech of the oppressed" avoids myth. In fact, how could the oppressed ever bear their burdens without myth--and especially without the myth of the Revolution. Myth invades even the writing of the mythologist. The critic must have someplace to stand--for Barthes the someplace is a Marxism which casts the functioning of bourgeois myth into high relief--but that standpoint is itself necessarily a myth, which history and self-criticism will wash away...
Because he has to speak out of myth, the mythologist can never interpret his object fully. Barthes himself speaks of a similar danger--that the mythologist may lose sight of the real object under all the interpretation. He may forget that the Citroen "is a technologically defined object: it is capable of a certain speed, it meets the wind in a certain way, etc." The total object, the sum of all its meanings, remains finally unreachable...
Framed citations on the walls honored not politicians but fellow men of letters. There was one for Thomas Stearns Eliot '10, and another for John Updike '54 ("Eulogist of the farm, mythologist of the locker room, erotologist of suburbia, alchemist of the word," read the award...