It is good news indeed for those of us who believe in the continuing importance and relevance of the study of mythology to modern life and scholarship that this mammoth four-volume source-book of writings on myth (approximately 1,500 densely printed pages’ worth!) has appeared in a series published by a major commercial press that also features entries on key issues in contemporary critical theory and cultural studies such as “Feminism,” “Postcolonialism,” “Deconstruction,” and “Performance.” The press in question, Routledge, has also recently published a second edition of Laurence Coupe’s adventurous study Myth in a parallel series, The New Critical Idiom, where it originally appeared in 1997. So it would appear from these and other signs of publishers’ interest in or enthusiasm for bringing out this kind of work that myth studies are alive and well, and perhaps even making a comeback.
Having selected articles and portions of books ranging in publication dates from 1871 (E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture) to 2004 (Myths America Lives By, by Richard T. Hughes), and having categorized them according to topical rubrics such as “Myth and History,” “Myth and Psychology,” and “Myth and Religion,” the compiler of the work under review, Robert A. Segal, has assembled a cavalcade of scholars and works featuring both the “usual suspects” and some out-of-the-way choices and pleasant surprises. Of the almost eighty entries in the collection, only five are from publications that appeared before 1900 (by Tylor, Müller, Lang, and Robertson Smith), while the majority are from the second half of the last century. Segal, who holds the Chair in Religious Studies in the Divinity School of the University of Aberdeen, has modestly refrained from including any of his own extensive published work on the subject of myth.
In Segal’s introduction, where he sketches the general arc of the definitions, explanations, and analyses of myths in the readings to come, it quickly becomes clear even to a novice in the field that myth, however defined, has rarely been studied by and for itself. Typically, scholars have paired myth with other subjects or used it as a springboard for exploring fundamental issues of human existence, thought, and culture. Consequently, myth as a scholarly subject has given rise to a host of theories, many of which have profound implications and applications extending beyond the mythological realm of story. Whether or not we moderns still have myths or even consider their study worthwhile, these theories have thoroughly permeated modern intellectual discourse, both supporting and challenging key assumptions scholars and civilians entertain concerning humanity’s past and present: about how and what we thought and now think, how and what we believed and now believe (if anything at all), and about the role storytelling played and continues to play in these basic activities of humankind. Books such as Segal’s anthology arise from the urgent need to foster among contemporary and future practitioners of fields in both the humanities and the sciences a continuing and in-depth awareness of the vast body of scholarly literature on myth. Fortunately, introducing the scholars of the future—that is, college-age or even younger students—to this intellectual heritage is not like administering a bad-tasting medicine. As a long-time teacher of college-level courses on myth, I can attest to the fact that young people take to the study of mythology with gusto and vigor, even though at times they find a particular story to be as hard a nut to crack as the most difficult problem or the most complex puzzle they encounter in their other courses.
Given its price and bulk, the work under review clearly was not conceived as a textbook for such courses, but it could be a valuable library resource for students and their teachers seeking to read the original works alluded to in more manageable works such as Coupe’s book mentioned above or Segal’s own Myth: A Very Short Introduction, published in the Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction series (2004). Segal has in some cases thoughtfully included both an article critiquing or building upon an earlier article as well as that earlier article, or, a well-known and important piece, followed by a lesser-known but highly illuminating “sequel” to it. For example, before this reviewer could start to regret the inclusion of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” (the original version published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955), a piece that has already been reprinted often and hardly represents the best of Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of myth (for which see his later Mythologiques), I became thoroughly engrossed in what followed, namely, K. R. Walters’ “Another Showdown at the Cleft Way: An Inquiry into Classicists’ Criticism of Lévi-Strauss’ Myth Analysis” (originally published in Classical World in 1984). This ingenious rehabilitation of Lévi-Strauss’ notorious autochthony thesis vis-à-vis the Oedipus myth is every bit as useful as John Peradotto’s better-known “Oedipus and Erichthonius: Some Observations on Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Order,” published in Arethusa in 1977.
Unfortunately, however, as good as some of the picks are, the readings in Myth: Critical Concepts in Literary and Critical Studies come with no commentary, header notes, explanations of obscure references, or updates whatsoever. These omissions (conditions dictated by the press, one suspects, rather than choices made by Segal) can cause confusion and consternation for both the student and the seasoned scholar. Side by side in Volume Three (under the rubric “Myth and Science/Science in Myth”) we find pieces on Mesopotamian mythology, particularly creation myths, by two well-known specialists, Samuel Noah Kramer (from 1961) and Thorkild Jacobsen (1946). Jacobsen, among other things, rejects Kramer’s translation of a crucial line about the goddess Ereshkigal in a Sumerian poem (173–74). In the 1961 Kramer extract, from the revised edition of the 1944 work criticized in the Jacobsen piece, Kramer translates the line exactly the same way (126). How is the reader not versed in Sumerian or in post-1961 scholarship on Sumerian texts supposed to know who was right and whether later scholarship has resolved the issue one way or the other? Another example of a selection desperately in need of the importation of at least a little more information is in Volume Two (under “Myth and Ritual”), where the reader comes upon an extract from René Girard’s The Scapegoat, translated by Yvonne Freccero (1986). Extensive reference is made in this chapter to a work by the medieval French poet Guillaume de Machaut, yet this work’s title is nowhere given in the extract (presumably having been given earlier in Girard’s book), nor is there any citation of a source for Machaut’s composition. I suppose, putting the best face on the situation, that the absence of a full-fledged apparatus in this rough-hewn source-book—beyond a general introduction, bibliographical entries for the selections, a chronological table, and an eclectic and flawed index—forces the reader to plunge more deeply into the subject matter, on a salutary and heroic quest for background and follow-up. Even so, I very much miss framing comments, notes, and helpful hints for further research of the sort supplied by Alan Dundes for his own myth reader, Sacred Narrative, published by the University of California Press in 1984—a work still very much in demand in classrooms, and deservedly still in print.
Apart from the problem of the bare presentation of his selections, some of Segal’s exclusions and inclusions are puzzling. Nowhere in sight are some living scholars whose work has contributed profoundly to the study of myth: I am thinking here especially of Wendy Doniger, William Hansen, Bruce Lincoln, and Richard Martin. The selection from Georges Dumézil is not actually focused on a mythic story—it would have been more illustrative of his method to choose one of the many other works by this very important and influential scholar that deals with myth specifically. Including Alan Dundes’ “The Flood as Male Myth of Creation” gives the reader a good sense of the analytic approach of one of the most controversial scholars of myth in recent time, but to include his rambling “The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore” as well constitutes overkill that may have embarrassed even Dundes himself. And why are we treated to two selections from Jane Harrison, one of them having to do with “Ritual, Art, and Life”? Perhaps if Segal had supplied (or been allowed to supply) commentary on his selections, the reader would have been better able to make use, and make sense, of the cornucopia that this book provides.
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[Review length: 1401 words • Review posted on January 26, 2011]