- The Structural Study of Myth – Levis-strauss
- Gives insight into Sophocles’ play
- Interaction bw linguistics, anthropology, and literature
- Basic problem of contradiction in myth
- In a myth anything can happen
- No logic no continuity
- Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject
- But there is similarity in the myths collected in different regions throughout the world
- Ancient philosophers and language
- Definite sounds related to definite meaning
- But differ across language
- Saussure – relations among units of sounds and not units of sound produces meaning
- Carl Jung’s attempt to find meaning in basic units of myth (archetypes) similar to ancient philosophers
- Saussure - language
- Unchanging elements - grammar
- Changing elements – sequence of words
- Synchronic and diachronic
- Myth expresses meaning both
- diachronically (
- synchronically (part of larger myth)
- Similar to a sentence
- Jack hates Jill
- Jill hates Jack
- Levis-Strauss – basic elements of myth are not isolated relations but “bundles of such relations”
- To read a myth properly need to pay attention to the story as it proceeds and to relations within, btwn, among stories
- Need to see wh happens before and after the story
- Cadmus – Europa –Zeus – Delphic oracle – city – Thebes – kills Ares the god of war – saws teeth – Spartois spring up – flings a stone – they kill each other – Son Polydorus fathers Oedipus
- Oedipus’ sons - Etocles kills Polynieces – denied burial – sister Antigone give funeral – buried alive
- All relations in one column exhibit a common feature
- I column – overemphasized blood relations More intimate than they should be
- II column – (inverted) Underrating blood relations
- III Column – monsters being slain
- IV Column – difficulties in walking straight and standing upright
- Relations btwn and among columns
- I & II logical contrast
- III 0- killing monsters – dragons associated with the earth – a dragon must be slain before men can be born from earth – sphinx will not permit men to live
- Livi- Strauss – Basic origin of human life addressed by many cultures
- Vegetable springs from earth – decays and back into earth – human bodies
- Judeo-Christian culture – man from clay
- Today people are born from union of two
- III- monsters are overcome by men – denial of the origin of humans from the earth
- Myth therefore includes both aspect of human origin of life
- Myths that show humans springing from earth all over the world also talk of initial difficulty of walking
- IV column affirms individual origin in the earth
- III denies it
- Original problem – born from one or born from two?
- Born from different or born from same
- Earlier and later versions of myth
- Both are not true – coz myth made of all its variants
- Freud’s concept of “Oedipus Complex” - latest variation of the myth itself – child trying to overvalue one parent against the other – born of one or two
- Levi-Struss shows issues around and in the play
- Also shows myth as dramatic - both aspects of human expression are less concerned with delivering the message than dramatizing the intractable questions about the meaning of human life.
- Therefore Lev-Struass – another myth
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