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Summary Mirror of Myth: Stories

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This summary contains all the important information for the course Stories of the university minor Mirror of Myth. It's a summary of all the lectures and includes some extra overviews, explanations, seminar notes and answers to prepatory questions. With this, a good grade is guaranteed!

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  • 10 februari 2024
  • 60
  • 2023/2024
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MOM: Stories
Week 1 defining myth
HC 1
- You can miss one of the sessions per module
- No reading seminar on 22 December
- Week 7: no class for functions
- Excursion: Thursday 23, Friday 24 February
 Acquire your own tickets
- Deadlines
 Exam stories: 16 January 2024
 Theories essay: 2 February 2024
 Functions video essay/podcast 3 February

- Defining ‘myth’
 Notions of: antiquity, sense of timelessness, pleasure, deeper meaning
 Prose narratives = myths
 Notions of: past, truthful
 Notions of: traditional, supernatural, explanation or a justification for something
 Plato: the myth (mythos) is taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also
 Quotes:
 ‘Myth conveys an aura of great antiquity and at the same time projects a
sense of timelessness. The content of a story gives pleasure, yet there is also a
feeling that it means something more’ Zajko/O’Gorman
 ‘Prose narratives which, in the society in which they’re told, are considered to
be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past’ Csapo
 ‘a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which
embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification of something
such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or natural
phenomenon’ Oxford English Dictionary
 There are 2 kinds of stories (logoi), one false and one true, ‘and the myth
(mythos) is, taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also’ Plato
- Do you think ‘myths’ are true, untrue, or truth doesn’t come into it
- Do you think myths are narratives?
 Not a sufficient condition, but there are no myths without narratives
 So, do you think they’re prose narratives?
 For instance, viewing conspiracy theories as myths, this is then not about the past
- Do you think myths involve supernatural beings or forces?
- Do myths serve to provide/embody an explanation?
 Like how Rome was made
 This can happen, but not necessary
- Do myths project timelessness?
 No: I can’t think of many myths that are still believed today

,  Possibly, the context is not relevant for us anymore

- Defining myths
 Definitions tend to be complex, many different criteria put together
 It’s not easy to agree on the individual criteria
- Some neighboring terms:
 Legend
 Difference myth-legend: legend has less to do with the supernatural;
 Folktale
 Fairy-tale
- The etymological origin of ‘myth’
 Originally (e.g. Homer), meant ‘speech’ and ‘story’, often with the connotation of
authority
 Then gradually acquired a sense closer to our own, ‘myth’, including a sense of
falsehood, as in the Plato quote from earlier
 This is a reminder that terminology is not constant
 Question: what is the relevance of an original Greek meaning to us? Yes, our word
‘myth’ comes from the Greek, but does the original meaning matter?
- There are reasons not to be aporetic (twijfelachtig)
 ‘Family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein): a useful concept for many complex
definitions. Thus the standard definition of myth are not wrong because there are
countless counter-examples
 Consider why/when we speak of ‘myth’: not only something that one can define
perse, but also a term that we use to achieve something
 E.g. “that’s only a myth”
 E.g. a ‘collection of Greek myths’
 Context and purpose matter
- What can one do with myth
 3 aims:
1. Further specify what myth is
2. Demonstrating the variety of what myth does
3. Introduce some of the issues that will come in in detail in subsequent classes

- What to do with myths:
1. Tell stories
2. Unearth meaning
3. Express identity
4. Explain causes
5. Gain access to cross-cultural truths
6. Label a current story/belief as false
7. Catalogues, mythography

,- What to do with myth I: tell stories
 Here: particularly actually telling, speaking
 In theater/on stage, in books, in paintings
 Communal story-telling probably goes back as far as huma civilization, and so
probably do myths
 That itself has many function: the pleasure of stories, bonding, propagation of
values, etc.
 Informal story-telling, e.g. by parents to children
 Attested for Greece, practiced in modern western cultures too
 Formal tellings
 In Greece, e.g. Homeric rhapsodes and tragic plays
 In the modern world, e.g. novels, films, comics, opera
 Brief allusions rather than complete tellings: e.g. names, images, videogames (?)
 Is it right to distinguish between a myth and its (re-)tellings?
- What to do with myth II: unearth meaning
 Taking myths and trying to find the deeper meanings
 Allegorical interpretation
 E.g. ancient re-reading of deities as natural forces, Christian reinterpretations,
more recent mystical interpretations
 Symbolic, stands for something different
 Freud
 Oedipus complex, narcissus
 Used myths to identify broader truths about humans
 Finding universal truths
 Structuralism
 Myth as reflecting structural patterns of thoughts in a society (divine-human-
animal, city-country, etc.
 Seeing underlining patterns in the myth
 About how all big myths structure society, looking for a truth about a culture
 Gender studies
 Myths as reflecting underlying ideologies of gender in a society
 2 general observations on the above
 Some of these assume universal truth of myth; others the myth to its society
 For many of these it matters less that myths are stories and more that they
don’t have a single author
- What to do with myth III: use them to express/define who you (and others) are
 Many ancient cities had foundations myths
 Spartoi in Sparta
 Autochthony in Athens
 Romulus/Remus, Aeneas in Rome
 Modern uses:
 Zeus on Greek Euro-coins
 Suffragettes referred to as ‘Amazons’
 Sports teams called ‘Titans’

, - What to do with myth IV: explain causes
 Aetiological myths frequent in antiquity
 Aetiological: a myth that tells the origin of something (it explains a cause)
 Prometheus deceiving gods explains practice of eating sacrificial meet
(Hesiod)
 Origi of rituals explained through myths (e.g. end of Euripides plays)
 ‘Cambridge ritualist’: explaining myth (and Greek tragedy) as originating in
ritual
 The mythical story explains something that is the practice now
 ‘survivals’ theory
 Very 19th century
 You study a myth, encoding what this culture practice
 Difference with structuralist: try to find common structures looking at several
myths, survival theorists look at one myth (at a time)
 E.B. Tylor, James Frazer: Proposes that earlier elements of a culture survive
later in fossilized form; e.g. in the Roman myth of the golden bough survives
an older belief in the magic of the mistle toe.
 Myth (and other things) thus give access to lost earlier cultural practices and
beliefs
- What to do with myth V: gain access to cross-cultural truths
 Looking at different cultures of myths
 Already antiquity was occasionally interested in similarities between (e.g.) Greek
and foreign gods (Herodotus)
 Comparative method becomes important in 19th cent., with the rise of
anthropology and comparative philology
 Max Müller: comparative mythology; sun myths
 James Frazer: generalizing explanations for recurring mythical features
 Both within Indo-European (i.e. a linked system) and beyond Indo-European,
incl. e.g. semitic cultures (human universals)
st
 21 cent.: evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion
 Tries to understand religion as a sort of byproduct of the human brain
 ‘Minimally counterintuitive concepts’
 ‘Intentionalist fallacy’
- What to do with myth VI: label a current story/believe as false
 ‘Populist myths’
 N.B. the significance of myth in 2022
 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
 Analyses modern myths, e.g. red wine in France, bleu guides, steak frites,
einstein’s brain
 Already in antiquity
 E.g. the historian Thucydides (5th cent. BC) implies that his predecessors didn’t
distinguish myth and history
 More positive: Plato uses myths to convey philosophy in a different mode
- What to do with myths VII: catalogues, mythography

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