Myth and Meaning

Myth and Meaning
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 41
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134522304

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Lévi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

Meaning and Being in Myth

Meaning and Being in Myth
Author: Norman Austin
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780271039459

Norman Austin has organized his analysis of classical Greek myths around Lacan's dichotomy between (ineffable) Being and the meanings imposed upon Being by culturally determined signifiers. The primary signifiers in myth (the gods), as projections of contradictory meanings, impel human consciousness in contradictory directions: toward heroic self-realization, on the one hand, and into the fear, guilt, and despair resulting from failure, on the other. The gods both reveal and occlude that which they signify--the signified; ultimately, Being itself. Austin includes one chapter on the father's ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and another on Albert Camus's The Stranger, as examples of the power of mythical archetypes to reveal and occlude Being, even when the apparatus of gods has been excluded. Despite their pessimism, ancient myths also affirm that the paradoxes are not insoluble. Austin concludes by outlining the profile of the Universal Self intimated in myth, religion, and philosophy as the joint venture of the world realized in consciousness, consciousness realized in consciousness, and consciousness realized in the world.

Myth and Meaning

Myth and Meaning
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2013-12-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317914422

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken.

Myth and Meaning

Myth and Meaning
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Publisher: Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1978
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Myth

Myth
Author: Robert Alan Segal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2015
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0198724705

This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.

Myth and Meaning

Myth and Meaning
Author: Claude Levi-Strauss
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1995-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0805210385

Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding. The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.

The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C.G. Jung

The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C.G. Jung
Author: Aniela Jaffé
Publisher: Daimon
Total Pages: 192
Release: 1986
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9783856305000

Aniela JeffÃ(c) explores the subjective world of inner experience. In so doing, she follows the path of the pioneering Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, whose collaborator and friend she was through the final decades of his life. Frau JaffÃ(c) shows that any search of meaning ultimately leads to the inner mythical realm and must be understood as a limited subjective attempt to answer the unanswerable. Any conclusion drawn from such a quest is one's very own - its formulation is one's own myth.

The Cry for Myth

The Cry for Myth
Author: Rollo May
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 323
Release: 1991-05-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0393240770

Here are case studies in which myths have helped Dr. May's patients make sense out of an often senseless world. It happens almost daily in a therapist's office. A patient, recalling a person, an event, an emotion, quite unexpectedly supplies a link from a life in the present to one of the durable myths of our culture. In this moment, the myth becomes a mirror, revealing to the patient the source of disturbance and pain in a pattern of behavior that often stretches a year or longer. The healing process begins. The myth, "eternity breaking into time" in Rollo Mays's words, becomes the focal point of recovery. Through tracing myths – whether from classical Greece and Dante's Middle Ages, European legend (Faust and the prototype of Sleeping Beauty), or contemporary American life (Jay Gatsby) -- and relating them to the dreams and associations he encounters in his own practice, Dr. May provides meaning and structure for all who seek direction in a morally confusing world. In this, perhaps the finest achievement of a great therapist, Rollo May writes with "the grace, wit, and style: for which he recently received the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Society.

Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism

Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism
Author: N. J. Girardot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1988
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780520064607

Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism examines some of the earliest texts associated with the Daoist tradition (primarily the Daode jing, Zhuangzi, and Huainanzi) from the outlook of the comparative history of religions and finds a kind of thematic and soteriological unity rooted in the mythological symbolism of hundun, the primal chaos being and principle that is foundational for the philosophy and practice of the Dao as creatio continua in cosmic, social, and individual life. Dedicated to the proposition that ancient Chinese texts and traditions are often best understood from a broad interdisciplinary and interpretive perspective, this work when it was written challenged many prevailing conceptions of the Daode jing and Zhuangzi as primarily philosophical texts without any religious significance or affinity with the later sectarian traditions. While controversial and at times playfully provocative, the methodology and findings of this book are still important for the ongoing scholarship about Daoism in China and the world.