Mytheme

Abstract: On the basis of my engagement with myth over the decades, the present paper seeks to present some ‘prolegomena’ to the study of myth today. It does so, in the first place, by a short overview of philosophical contributions and implications of the study of myth. After formulating and discussing a possible definition of myth, the argument focuses on two complementary perspectives in the scholarly approach to myth: the objectifying perspective of rupture versus the participatory and identifying perspective of fusion. After indicating the pros and cons of both, and giving an example (notably, the ‘hero fights monster’ mytheme) of extensive continuity in myth through space and time, the paper concludes with a summary of the main results of the author's current long-range comparative research into leopard and leopard-skin symbolism, which is informed by loosely interlocking mythical complexes extending all across the Old World and part of the New World, over a time span from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present.

Abstract: Debra A. Moddelmog offers the first book to explore fully the process of reading and interpreting myth in fiction.Some literary scholars view myth criticism as passe, an approach to literature that enjoyed a heyday in the l950s and 1960s before being replaced by approaches that are considered to be more theoretically sophisticated and satisfying, such as feminism, new historicism, and deconstruction. Moddelmog argues that there are many good reasons not to cast out myth criticism from the community of critical approaches. Most obvious among them is that myth has attracted many writers of this centuryfrom James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf to Flannery O Connor, Thomas Mann to Alain Robbe-Grillet, William Faulkner to Alberto Moraviaand that to ignore myth is to dismiss an essential part of their work. Moddelmog suggests that by reconstruing the relationship between myth and literature, we will find that mythic approaches are frequently not only necessary but also highly stimulating, engaging readers in many varieties of questions, quests, and conclusions.Thus in this study she provides a poetics for myth in twentieth-century fiction, arguing that the nature of myth is to inspire interpretation, that every myth carries with it an intertextual body of theories regarding its meaning and yet remains capable of evoking new meaning. When used in fiction, myth therefore functions like a language, with the reader attempting to negotiate meaning for the myth or its key actions, its "mythemes, "while at the same time responding to the interpretive cues of the text itself. Because of the complicated demands placed on readers by both the myth and the text, readers who pursue myth in fiction are not simple translators or reactors but rather are participants in a dialogue involving numerous texts, a dialogue that is finally interminable.In support of the poetics she proposes, Moddelmog presents several chapters devoted to the study of twentieth-century fiction in which the Oedipus myth appears. Each chapter focuses on a specific interpretative issue that is related to the experience of reading myth in fiction but one that also examines a genre of fiction in which the Oedipus myth recurs. Chapter 3 (on the science fiction of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Philip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick, and Roger Zelazny) reveals not only how a single mytheme can evoke a complex reading process but also how each reading of a work containing a myth influences the next reading of a similar work. Chapter 4 (on antidetective works written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon) addresses genre questions that the mytheme as structural unit calls forth. Chapter 5 (on psychological fiction written by Flannery O Connor, Alberto Moravia, and Max Frisch) looks at the appropriation of the Oedipus myth by psychoanalysis and the consequences of that appropriation by those who are reading and writing after Freud."

Abstract: The article focuses on research into the evolution of myths among differing cultures. It states a comparison of 47 culturally distinct myths concerning the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper constellations, known as the Cosmic Hunt myths, shows how mytheme analysis can determine the relatedness of stories and divergent points for each myth. It talks about similarities of the Greek myth on Polyphemus in Homer's "Odyssey" resembled tales of the trickster Crow among Algonquin myths.

Abstract: Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas By Gananath Obeyesekere (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 Pp xx + 320, preface, photographs, illustrations, notes, index $2195 paper) Gananath Obeyesekere is best known for discussing perspectives of "the Other" in the social sciences today, and his work invites controversy In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1997 [1992]), he challenged the common academic belief that Captain Cook was killed in Hawaii because the natives considered him a god The god-assertion appeared to Obeyesekere a myth-making function of Westerners, here the British, as a means of validating their feelings of superiority over people they would soon be colonizing Some other anthropologists, most spectacularly Marshall Sahlins, expressed strong opposition to Obeyesekere's thesis (Knauft 1993, Sahlins 1995) Now Cannibal Talk picks up where Apotheosis left off, drawing from some of the same resources used in the earlier volume In both, Obeyesekere employs formidable scholarship, exhaustive research, and persuasive arguments to establish his position His weakness is simply one that comes with the territory: he must rely almost exclusively on written documentation from early explorers, missionaries, settlers, and other Westerners, all of whom have built-in prejudices and limitations Where he is able to use supposedly native documentation, it is necessarily material written down by Westerners and is typically what Westerners would record because it represents "the Other" as savage Accordingly, Obeyesekere relies on narrative and cultural analyses of these primary documents to derive his insights, and he does so expertly The author's position is that Westerners, upon first encountering Others in such places as South America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, already assumed that these people performed savage acts Gazing upon those Others' ungenteel bodies-tattooed, pierced, largely naked-the Westerners wedded their presuppositions of savagery with their perception that the appearance of the natives was savage Since an element of the Western assemblage of savage cultural traits was cannibalism, the Westerners presumed cannibalism, asserted cannibalism, wrote home about it, and then published it once they returned home, thus institutionalizing their representation Obeyesekere organizes the book around case studies that focus primarily on cannibal tales originating in Polynesia, treating Cook and the seamen associated with him as a single group that spread the mytheme (a term the author borrows, modified, from Levi-Strauss) of savage cannibalism; he deals as well with other expeditionary voyages, seamen, missionaries, and settlers He draws his primary data from written forms-published and unpublished reports, logs, letters, studies He then constructs his analyses with conceptual frameworks from Western literary sources such as the Bible (transubstantiation and the Eucharist), fairy tales, and legends (especially of vampirism); and Western customs such as drawing and quartering, showing that the mytheme of cannibalism was vital and present in European culture at the time of the European discovery of presumed cannibals in the South Seas-that in fact the cannibalism mytheme lay deeply embedded in the foundations of European culture To assess narratives depicting or documenting cannibalism, Obeyesekere utilizes the "deconstructive-restorative" analytical method, "deconstructing" original narratives to "restore" supposed original events and attitudes Correlating outsider narratives with Western parallels containing similar motifs, Obeyesekere deftly shows a cultural predisposition of the wandering Westerners toward categorizing as cannibals the exotic people they encountered …