From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base
Mytheme
Fundamental generic unit of narrative structure
Fundamental generic unit of narrative structure
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") or linked in more complicated relationships. For example, the myths of Greek Adonis and Egyptian Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings of icons.
Overview
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who gave the term wide circulation,First described, as a "gross constituent unit", in {{cite journal Lévi-Strauss, La poetière jalouse, Paris, 1985 (The Jealous Potter, Chicago, 1988) pp. 144-46.
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 language structure, he adopted the French term mythème, with the assertion that the system of meaning within mythic utterances parallels closely that of a language system. Roman Jakobson varies this idea, treating mythemes as concepts or phonemes which have no significance in themselves but whose significance might be shown by sociological analysis.
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 with which computer images enter into dialogue.
Citations
General and cited references
References
- "mytheme – Definition of mytheme in English by Oxford Dictionaries".
- Similarly, in [[memetics]] a [[meme]] is the smallest memetic unit that has [[semantics. semantic]] [[Meaning (linguistics). meaning]] and in a language or dialect, a [[phoneme]] (from the {{langx. el. φώνημα, ''phōnēma'', "a sound uttered") is the smallest [[segment (linguistics). segmental]] 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).
This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.
Ask Mako anything about Mytheme — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.
Research with MakoFree with your Surf account
Create a free account to save articles, ask Mako questions, and organize your research.
Sign up freeThis content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.
Report