The Contemporary Post-Myth Ioannis Mazarakis Abstract The semiological roots of many of the best known video games, films and simulation systems can be detected on previous mythical narratives which are still affecting the signifiance of those contemporary texts. But how do those new art forms produce meaning? In this paper, I will attempt to present the contemporary post-myth, which is formed upon the basis of the previous semiological chain of myth and invokes the participation of the spectator in the signification process. Key words: myth, postmodern, post-postmodern, semiotics, new media, film, video game Is postmodernism démodé? Do we live in a post-postmodern era, where a new sense of self is figured out, irony is renounced and the author is “reborn” as an implied factor in textual analysis? Over the last few years, the theoretical reaction against postmo- dernism has taken a new direction, which goes beyond the Marxist criticism expressed by Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton in the ‘90s. Suggestions of new, coherent, cultural paradigms, such as digimodernis 1 and metamodernism 2 have emerged while, at the same time, former advocates of postmodernism acknowledge its institutionalization during the twentieth-century, calling it “a thing of the past” 3 . But is it really over? In her work The Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon de- scribes postmodernism as a critical re-evaluation of the past; nei- ther as a denial nor as a utopian envisioning of the future. Parody becomes the basic expressive form of the postmodern criticism 1 A. Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond”, in Philosophy Now, November/December 2006, <http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/ The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond> (10 August 2014). 2 A. Furlani, “Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After”, in Contemporary Lit- erature, 2002, Vol. 43, No. 4. 3 L. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, London, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 165.