Mytheme
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Mythology |
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In
Overview
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who gave the term wide circulation,[4] wrote, "If one wants to establish a parallel between structural linguistics and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme and phoneme."[5]
The structuralist analyzer of folk tales Vladimir Propp treated the individual tale as the unit of analysis. The unitary mytheme, by contrast, is the equivalent in myth of the phonemes, morphemes, and sememes into which structural linguistics divides language, the smallest possible units of sound, structure, and meaning (respectively) within a language system.
In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss first adapted this technique of language analysis to analytic myth criticism. In his work on the myth systems of primitive tribes, working from the analogy of
Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett have also used the term "mytheme".
Lev Manovich uses the terms seme and mytheme in his book The Language of New Media to describe aspects of culture that computer images enter into dialog with.
See also
Citations
- ^ "mytheme – Definition of mytheme in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries – English. Archived from the original on April 25, 2017.
- unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.
- ^ Lévi-Strauss: "the true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations" (Lévi-Strauss 1963:211).
- OCLC 1782260. reprinted as "The structural study of myth", Structural Anthropology, 1963:206-31; the term mytheme first appears in Lévi-Strauss' 1958 French version of the work.
- ^ Lévi-Strauss, La poetière jalouse, Paris, 1985 (The Jealous Potter, Chicago, 1988) pp. 144-46.
General and cited references
- OCLC 753269.