literature and mythology

[britt001]

hi everyone,
i am doing a research about the main points of connection between literature and mythology
if anyone could help me with even a little senetnce or paragraphe , i will be sooo thankful
thank you in advance
sarah.J

[Lokasenna]

Depends on the mythology, I suppose.

My own area is Old Norse literature, and in that resepct, the literature is the mythology. Apart from the odd carved runestone, everything we have is bound up in the Fornaldarsogur and the Eddaic materials.

[britt001]

oh thank you very much lokasenna for your kind reply :):)
well , i'm talking in general !! nothing specific or complicated

thank you once again.

[britt001]

Nobody ???

[weltanschauung]

sarah, this is something you should think about.
literature is that which transmits information through the advent of symbols. they are spread out through the texts in order to give depth and meaning to a piece of paper. mythology comes in very handy because its a way to draw a paralel with an already known set of symbols, so for example, alice in wonderland, lewis carrol writes the story as if it were a chess match, so alice meets throughout the story, the characters that are obviously set out in some kind of order, because each character she meets is a piece on the board after a move.
you have to read about symbols and their origins, to understand how they surface in creative writings.

[JBI]

Read Northrop Frye's The Great Code, or even Fearful Symmetry if you are into Blake, or Anatomy of Criticism for a good introduction. Fables of Identity isn't bad either. Frye, Jung, Frazer (The Golden Bough), and others are good places to start. Frye probably the best.

[britt001]

:):) thank you soooo much !! i appreciate it

[ouroboros dream]

Before starting a thread on "literature and mythology" I checked to see if there was one. This one's old and not being used, but it does mention one of the critics who interest me, Northrop Frye, so--

When I take a look back at the early 20th century, I see a lot of literary writers and critics interested in the intersection of myth and literature: Yeats, Mann, Faulkner. Yet by the 1950s, even though Frye wrote his definitive work, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, the interest started to fade in critical circles, from what I can tell. What seems to have replaced it was various forms of politicized criticism, focusing on Marxism, Freudianism, and feminism.

The subject of myth still comes up in critical works, but there's not as much passion for delving into it, or its connections with literature.

Do moderns, even sixty years after the ANATOMY, have the sense that everything has been said on the subject, or else that it's too complicated to be rewarding?

[Ecurb]

Claude Levi-Strauss, the great French Structuralist anthropologist, wrote extensively on the subject. His four-part master-work is "Mythologiques". He also wrote a shorter work called "Myth and Meaning". Of course, since he was a French Structuralist, most of his stuff is practically incomprehensible, unless you read it very, very carefully. His theory was that you can analyze myth structurally, just as structural linguists diagram sentences or analyze the structure of phonemes. His theory is complicated, but it basically suggests a dialectic -- myths compare sets of opposite concepts,and by comparing understandable opposed concepts to paradoxical ones (like death = rebirth), they make the paradoxes more acceptable.

Joseph Campbell has written extensively on myth, as has Mircea Eliade. I'm not up on the lat 30 years or so (since I left the University). Of course Freud's famous "Totem and Taboo" is well worth reading (wacky as it is).

Joyce's "Ulysses" is loosely based on the Odyssey, of course. Famous poems based on myths are too many to mention, but I like Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Yeats "Leda and the Swan", and Tennyson's "Ulysses" (except I disagree with Tennyson's take on the Odyssey, but it's still a great poem.

[ouroboros dream]

I've never tackled MTHOLOGIQUES, but have read a fair amount of secondary stuff on Levi-Strauss. I like the basic idea of structuralism-- or at least, I like it better than Roland Barthes' attempt to one-up structuralism, the so-called "deconstruction" idea. I read MEANING AND MYTH and I think it provides a pretty good short overview of his thought. He's been criticized for being a little too schematic in its analyses, though one writer-- I forget who-- showed how it might be possible to expand on his ideas in a less schematic way.

We still see mythological concepts crop up in modern writing. I wasn't blown away by Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS, but a lot of people swear by it. I preferred his SANDMAN comics myself. But I get the sense there's not nearly as much of it as there used to be.

[YesNo]

I wonder what is mythology? How do I distinguish it from something that is not mythology? It is possible to justify a statement such as: "All literature (including science and mathematics) is mythology"?

[Big Horn]

hi everyone,
i am doing a research about the main points of connection between literature and mythology
if anyone could help me with even a little senetnce or paragraphe , i will be sooo thankful
thank you in advance
sarah.JThe ancient Greeks viewed Homer as the source of ethical conduct. Had Homer's works not been considered great literature, the most worthy of preservation, this would have been impossible. Homer's world was framed by the gods. His portrayal of the gods, particularly the goddess Athena, sets the stage for the future relations of deities and humans.

[YesNo]

Why is Athena singled out?