ITTOL - Lecture 8 - Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth
Levi-Strauss, in "The Structural Study of Myth"
The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition, David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 860-8) says that "...myth is language..." (861) whose "mythical value" (the story told in the myth) cannot be destroyed by even the "worst translation".
He makes three claims (862):
He describes the complex order of the constituent units as that can be "read as a whole" (863) rather than in a strictly linear fashion. As an example of how this may be done, he breaks the Oedipus myth down into a series of units laid out in tabular form such that they can be read horizontally (story sequence) or vertically (relational sequence).
For Levi-Strauss, there is no one "true" version of a myth; for him, a myth "...consists of all its versions." (866) and "structural analysis" requires that all versions be "taken into account".
Each version of the Oedipus myth represents another dimension of the myth; each can be arranged in a table and then stacked.
The constituent units in each version can be compared and grouped (across dimensions) according to their relationships with one another. They can also be read horizontally (normal linear reading mode), vertically (by relationship) and backwards or forwards(horizontally or vertically within the dimension stack).
The purpose of a myth, according to Levi-Strauss, "...is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction." (867) and he claims that
The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition, David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 860-8) says that "...myth is language..." (861) whose "mythical value" (the story told in the myth) cannot be destroyed by even the "worst translation".
He makes three claims (862):
- that meaning in myth comes from the way its constituent elements are combined
- that "language in myth exhibits specific properties"
- that "These properties are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level..."
- myths are made up of "constituent units"
- These constituent units can be "found on the sentence level" and are of a more complex order than the constituent units of ordinary language
He describes the complex order of the constituent units as that can be "read as a whole" (863) rather than in a strictly linear fashion. As an example of how this may be done, he breaks the Oedipus myth down into a series of units laid out in tabular form such that they can be read horizontally (story sequence) or vertically (relational sequence).
For Levi-Strauss, there is no one "true" version of a myth; for him, a myth "...consists of all its versions." (866) and "structural analysis" requires that all versions be "taken into account".Each version of the Oedipus myth represents another dimension of the myth; each can be arranged in a table and then stacked.
The constituent units in each version can be compared and grouped (across dimensions) according to their relationships with one another. They can also be read horizontally (normal linear reading mode), vertically (by relationship) and backwards or forwards(horizontally or vertically within the dimension stack).
The purpose of a myth, according to Levi-Strauss, "...is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction." (867) and he claims that
...The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science,...the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. (868)