What can Greek literature tell us about myth/myth tell us about literature?
Rather than preparing a lecture for this session, I asked students, in the previous lecture, to write any questions they had on this subject on an anonymous card, and hand them in at the end. In the subsequent week, I catalogued these questions into 3 categories, which we discussed in the final lecture as a round-table group (well, as ’round’ as you can get in a tiered lecture theatre).
1. What is the social significance of myth?
This made me wish I’d gone into more theory (or had time/space to go into more) over the course. We talked about how social mores and codes were transmitted through the medium of oral storytelling in pre-literate societies, and how these could then be manipulated on a literary level in later times. Myths explained some contemporary realities, such as aetiologies, and tied in with religion – although, as the Cambridge Ritualists discovered, it is not easy to tell which came first and explain the other: the myth or the ritual…
2. Variant versions
There seems to be no such thing as a ‘canon’ myth, although there are Panhellenic versions, such as Homer, and syncretized versions, such as Apollodorus. But variants existed depending on location, genre, even within the corpus of individual authors…in response to the question of ‘how many variants should we study?’, the consensus seemed to be ‘how ever many you feel you need to in order to understand a particular myth’.
3. Interpretation
We only have to look at the hero-cult seminar to see that our understanding of myths are vastly different to how a Greek would have perceived them. Reception is a fast-growing discipline within Classics, so it’s necessary to understand how and why they mean different things to us. Theory reared its head again – do we need to know about psychoanalysis to understand Oedipus? That, I’m afraid, is an open question…
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, interpretation, teaching
April 14, 2010 at 9:19 pm |
Just thought I would leave a comment to say that I found this ‘lecture’ very helpful. I agree with the idea of including more theory in the module – I found the social significance of myth very interesting in the wider reading that I did and would have liked there to be more of it in the course, rather than focusing mainly on different myths and why authors chose to use different versions, as it gives an idea of why myth was so important in the Greek world.