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Monday, July 28, 2008

Claude Levi-Strauss on a structuralist approach to Oedipus the King

  • 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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