From Expressive Language to Mythemes: Meaning in Mythic Narratives

Abstract

It is no secret that there are many ways of thinking about myth, or that myths have multiple layers and levels of meanmg. These certainties provoke a number of uncertainties when we attempt to define myth or interpret its meaning. In this essay I will have relatively little to say about the problem of defining myth, but will rather occupy myself which interpretive strategies rooted in the study of language. If we can agree that myth can or must be a story, and that stories are necessarily composed of narrative discourse, then we are well on the way toward recognizing the importance of language as one parameter for assessing the meaning of myth. But our quest will deliver us into some curious paradoxes, when we learn that scholarly programs originating in the study of language can arrive at very different places, and that the very notion of story may be deleted altogether from the enterprise.