“All universal theories of myth are automatically wrong”

G. S. Kirk, 1977

MDS2/3CLM: Lecture 12 Theories of Myth (2)

“There is no theory-free approach to myth”

Ken Dowden

The Uses of Greek Mythology

Early Approaches

•  Allegory: Myth as a story that represents or symbolises in a disguised form the reigning ideas and beliefs of a society

•  Nature allegory: Myth as a story that explains in a

symbolic or personified way the events of nature •  Comparative mythology: Looking for similaries between

the myths of different cultures •  F. Max Müller (1823-1900), and later Georges Dumézil

(1898-1986)

Myth and Ritual Theory •  Ritual is the act while myth are the words

associated with the act, which then become stories •  Sir J. G. Frazer The Golden Bough (1890-1915) •  Classicist Jane Harrison: Greek myth and ritual

both arise from the same cultural concerns

•  Originally applied universally: all myths and rituals are related

•  Later, more carefully and specifically: only some are related, or can be proved to be related (Walter Burkert, Fritz Graf)

Psychoanalysis and myth

•  Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): •  Myths are the ‘dreams’ and repressed

concerns of a specific ethnic imagination •  Classicists: Philip Slater, Richard Caldwell

•  Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961): •  Myths reveal the collective unconscious •  Myths give expression to archetypes, manifested

as heroes, gods etc. •  The archetypes can be expressed in new ways in

different cultures and times (even suggested UFOs were a new myth arising from the space-faring era)

•  Classicists: Karl Kerenyi

Psychoanalysis and myth

Structuralism •  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) •  Different versions of a myth must be broken down into

their component parts (mythemes) and arranged to reveal the underlying binary oppositions (the underlying structure)

•  A mediating figure in the myth helps to symbolically resolve the culture’s contradictions

•  Not interested in the linear story •  Classicists (in adjusted forms): G.S. Kirk, Marcel

Detienne, William Blake Tyrell

Ambivalence of Nature/Culture in The Odyssey

G.S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures, 1970 NATURE

savage hostile

vs idyllic

pastoral

CULTURE

disease drunkenness

vs civilized

law

WINE

civilized humanity

vs uncivilized

drunkenness

CYCLOPES

ODYSSEUS

plundering lawless

vs

intelligent guest

Formalism

•  Vladimir J. Propp (1985-1970) •  Russian folktales broken into common plot

elements (31 functions) that always occur in the same order (although not all need occur in every tale)

•  Emphasis on the structure of the story itself •  Classicist: Walter Burkett

The Heroic Biography

•  The structure of the life-cycle of the hero from birth until death, as recounted in myth and folklore

•  Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Semiotics and Myth •  Sign: something that stands in for something else •  Signifier: how it is communicated, a gesture or

word •  Signified: the literal meaning •  Roland Barthes (1915-1980): Myth is the deeper,

cultural connotations of the sign •  E.g. the word Odysseus (signifier) stands for the

character/hero (signified) but mythically suggests cunning, long-enduring etc.

•  Myth looks natural and universal to the culture that produces it

•  But it is in fact culturally and historically specific

•  Analysis of the myth will reveal its ideology •  Classicists: Charles Segal

Semiotics (continued)

Myth and Ideology •  Ideology: A set of values, ideas, beliefs, feelings,

representations and institutions by which people collectively make sense of the world they live in

•  Karl Marx (1818-1883): "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”

•  After Barthes, Marxist scholars have tended to

merge myth and ideology together •  Bruce Lincoln: Myth as “ideology in narrative

form”

•  Challenges what is taken for granted, what is seen as ‘natural’ and exposes these ideas as human, cultural, historical constructions

•  Seeks to discover the way texts are aligned with class, gender, race or other interests

•  Seeks to show how dominant ideas in a given society at a particular time are transmitted

•  Examines how opposing ideas have been dealt with (e.g. ridiculed, punished, brought back into the fold)

Ideological analysis:

Amazons

•  Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 B.C.E.) •  Priam recalls fighting the Amazons, “men’s

equals” (3.189) •  The Amazons “who fight men in battle” (6.186)

are slaughtered by Bellerophontes.

Black figured amphora signed by Exekias Achilles killing the Amazon Queen Penthesilea c. 540-530 B.C.E. Made in Athens Found at Vulci (now Lazio, Italy)

Image URL: http://www.ancient.eu.com/image/512/

•  Athenians: men, public sphere, warriors •  Daughters of Athenians: women, private sphere,

wives, mothers of sons •  Amazons: women, public sphere, warriors,

mothers of daughters •  A mixing rather than a complete inversion of

gender roles

William Blake Tyrrell:

Gendered Oppositions & The Amazons:

Persian War (490-479 B.C.E.)

•  Pre-war: Theseus rapes Amazon, leading to invasion of Athens

•  Post-war: No mention of the rape, Amazons depicted in Persian outfits

•  New imperialist rationale for Amazon invasion

•  William Blake Tyrrell: Foreigner/Athenian, Man/Woman

Wonder Woman

Image URL: http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/comicmasterpost/50121990/29773/original.jpg

Image URL: http://www.singularitynyc.com/images/Rosie-the-Riveter.jpg

•  Amazon becomes World War II heroine in 1941

•  Post-war controversy when women were supposed to return to traditional roles

Poststructuralism and Myth

•  Meaning (including poetic, mythic) is never fixed: John Peradotto

•  Meaning shifts in the relationship between texts, between texts and their readers, and between different voices within the text

“Greek Mythology is an ‘intertext’, because it is constituted by all the representations of myths ever experienced by its audience and because every new representation gains its sense from how it is positioned in relation to this totality of previous representations”

Ken Dowden 1992: 8

•  Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London: Vintage, 1957, 1993. •  Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. •  Richard Caldwell, The Origins of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth, New York & Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1989. •  Jospeh Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edn, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949, 1968. •  Eric Csapo, Theories of Mythology, Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. •  Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology, New York: Routledge, 1992 •  Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 1954 •  Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

trans. James Strachey, Vol. XVIII, London: Hogarth, 1955. •  Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction, trans. Thomas Marier, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins

University Press, 1993. •  C. G. Jung, Jung: Selected Writings, ed. A. Storr, Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana •  G.S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures, Berkeley: University of California Press,

1970 •  G. S. Kirk, “On Defining Myths,” in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. A. Dundes, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1984 •  G. S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin, 1974 •  Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss, eds. R. and F.

De George, New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1972. •  Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, Scholarship, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,

1999. •  Hugh Lloyd-Jones, “Psychoanalysis and the Study of the Ancient World,” Freud and the Humanities, London:

Duckworth, 1985. •  Lucia Nixon, “The cults of Demeter and Kore,” Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, eds. R. Hawley and B. Levick,

London & New York: Routledge, 1995. •  John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in The Odyssey, Princeton University Press, 1990. •  Charles Segal, “Greek Myth as a Semiotic and Structural System and the Problem of Tragedy,” Interpreting Greek

Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text, Ithaca NY: 1986. •  Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,

1968. •  William Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A study in Athenian mythmaking, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.