Myth

1
Myth

• What is it?

2
What is myth today?

• Take 2 minutes. Write it down. Discuss it with
  your neighbor. Stick it in a jar and sail it
  down the Hudson. This doesnt have to be a
  dictionary definition. (Be prepared to share
  what you wrote -) )

3
Myth Today

• (psstthis is the part where you tell me what the
  word myth means to you)

4
Myth Today My 20 second Answer -)

• Usually old folktales or stories, maybe with a
  grain of historical truth to them, but
  essentially fantastical fictional.
• Howd I do?

5
Academic Definitions of Myth

• This course analyzes Greek myths via a few
  different methods
• Allegorical
• Comparative
• Psychological
• Functional
• Structural
• Structural and Psychological methods will be
  especially important to us. Allegorical,
  comparative, and functional methods, however, are
  often subsumed by both structural and
  Psychological approaches.

6
Joseph Campbell

• Comparative mythology
• Its difficult to avoid some of the similarities
  in theme or action that occur in the myths of
  disparate cultures. For example
• Christian Old Testament/Hebrew Torah (Genesis)
• Mesopotamian epic (Gilgamesh)
• Indian epic (Mahabharata)
• Greek epic (Iliad)
• Roman epic (Aeneid)
• Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian epic (Beowulf)
• Modern epic (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings)

7
Structuralism

• Roland Barthes
• 20th Century, French philosopher
• myth is a system of communicationa message
• since myth is a type of speech, everything can
  be a myth provided it is conveyed by a
  discourse.

8
Roland Barthes

• Myth is a semiological system (a system of signs)
• A sign is a signifier signified. You might
  think of it as a representational system the
  alphabet is a system of signs where the letter A
  is a signifier for the sound of a short A in
  pat or a long A (a) in plate.
• But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is
  constructed from a semiological chain which
  existed before it it is a second-order
  semiological system. Again, language is a
  second-order system. It starts with the
  alphabet, which represents sounds, and uses those
  sound-signs of the alphabet to create words that
  are signifiers of other things. Thus, the word
  tree is the signifier of the idea of a tree (the
  mental image of a tree or an actual, physical
  tree). The point is, one sign system is built by
  using another.

9
Roland Barthes

• Myth naturalizes events We reach here the very
  principle of myth it transforms history into
  nature.
• myth is a semiological system which has the
  pretension of transcending itself into a factual
  system.
• What the world supplies to myth is an historical
  reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a
  while, by the way in which men have produced or
  used it and what myth gives in return is a
  natural image of this reality.
• In passing from hisotry to nature, myth acts
  economically it abolishes the complexity of
  human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
  essencesit organizes a world which is without
  contradictions because it is without depth

10
Roland Barthes

• Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring
  solicitation, this insidious and inflexible
  demand that all men recognize themselves in this
  image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was
  built of them one day as if for all time.

11
Myth the history of the Word

• Myth is a direct transcription of the Greek word
  muthos.
• Its most basic meaning in ancient Greece was
  story, tale, or narrative. But there is no one,
  clear-cut definition of muthos in any ancient
  Greek lexicon.

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Defining Muthos

• From approximately 700s BCE to the 400s BCE, the
  word muthos primarily meant narrative or story in
  the widest sense.
• 5th Century BCE (400s) saw creation of new
  disciplines that directly influenced mythology
  as Greeks knew it
• Philosophy
• History
• These new disciplines challenged the truth value
  of poetry (poetry was the medium of Greek myths
  Homer, Hesiod, et al.).

13
Truth and Fiction

• Truth Alêtheia in Greek
• A lêthê not forget
• Truth not forgetting
• How do people not forget (i.e., remember)
  something?
• They talk about it. They tell stories. In
  short, they spread myths.

14
J. P. Vernant

• Between the eight and fourth centuries B.C. a
  whole series of interrelated conditions couased a
  multiplicity of differentiations, breaks, and
  internal tensions within the mental universe of
  the Greeks that were responsible for
  distinguishing the domain of myth from other
  domains The concept of myth peculiar to
  classical antiquity thus became clearly defined
  through the setting up of an opposition between
  muthos and logos, henceforth seen as separate and
  contrasting terms.

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Vernant

• Myth has nothing to offer anyone who seeks to
  understand, in the strict sense of the word,
  because understanding refers to a form of
  intelligibility that muthos does not encompass
  and that only explanatory discourse possesses.
• Logos cannot codify muthos. Logos cannot fit the
  semiological system of myth within its own system
  of signs.
• From now on to choose one of the two types of
  language is in effect to dismiss the other.
• Logos vs. Muthos
• Non-fiction vs. Fiction
• Truth vs. Lie

16
Vernant

• Three basic characteristics of Greek myths
• Different version can coexist in the same
  collected mythology
• Despite the divergences of myths (about the same
  basic event), they are all connected with the
  same tradition.
• The myths deal with fundamental truths of human
  life
• the mythical accounts have to be serious they
  adopt a fictional, fantastical manner to speak of
  things that are essential, touching upon most
  fundamental truths of existence.
• A kind of knowledge is attained
• they present agents who, in the course of the
  story, perform such actions as to alter the
  initial situation so that by the end it is quit
  different from what it was at the beginning.

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Enough about structure. What about content?

• There are two kinds of Greek myths
• Klea Andron
• Fames of men
• Klea Theon
• Fames of gods