Bibliography by Tassie Gniady

By tassie_gniady, [The Visual Pig]

1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structural Anthropology. Trans. by Monique Layton. New York: Basic Books, 1963. 206-231.

Lévi-Strauss begins by approaching the idea that myths can be bent to serve any purpose:

If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings (207-208).

Instead he turns to linguistics and the difference between langue and parole, the first “belonging to a reversible time” and the second “being nonreversible” (209). Myth is made up of both langue and parole, but Lévi-Strauss believe the most important “properties [of myth] are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level, that is, they exhibit more complex features than those which are to be found in any other kind of linguistic expression” (210). Instead he posits the idea of “gross constituent units” or mythemes that occur at the level of the sentence. The myth to be examined is broken down into the shortest possible sentences, and each sentence is written on an index card that has a number reflecting the chronology of the story. The cards are then used to group the sentences to create what Lévi-Strauss calls a “harmony” which may be read “diachronically along one axis—that is, page after page, and from left to right—and synchronically along the other axis, all the notes written vertically making up one gross constituent unit, that is, one bundle of relations” (212). Finally, Lévi-Strauss explains the importances of taking into account all the different iterations of a given tale. He writes:

If a myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take all of them into account….We shall then have have several two-dimensional charts, each dealing with a variant, to be organized in a three-dimensional order…so that three readings become possible: left to right, top to bottom, front to back (or vice versa). (217)

It is the reading of all of these variants and the correlation of differences that leads to “the structural law of the myth.”  Lévi-Strauss goes on to caution “that it cannot be too strongly emphasized that all available variants should be taken into account” (218). Remember that he includes Freud’s reading of the Oedipus myth by way of example, and this emphasis on every version is reveals the work of this chapter:

to create a chart or “harmony” for each extant version of the hog-faced woman tale and do for them what Lévi-Strauss does for the Zuni origin myth. I will also use his equation to consider the entire myth: Fx(a):Fy(b)≈Fx(b):Fa-1(y)

Here, with two terms, a and b, being given as two functions, x and y, of these terms, it is assumed that a relation of equivalence exists between two situations defined respectively by an inversion of terms and relations, under two conditions: (1) that one term be replaced by its opposite (in the above formula, a and a-1); (2) that an inversion be made between the function value and the term value of two elements (above, y and a). (228)

2. Gliffy

Gliffy’s flowchart-rendering capabilities remind me of the BASIC programming classes I took in middle school. However, here I have used it’s diagramming capabilities not to construct an input-output flowchart, but to better organize the virtual note cards required by Lévi-Strauss’s mythemic approach. Cards can be any shape and size and manipulated with ease. Unfortunately, due to the diachronic organizational requirements, the movement of one “note card” requires reshuffling of all the note cards come after it chronologically. For this reason, while Gliffy was useful in sketching out first drafts of mythemic structure, it will not be used other than as a stepping stone to my final project because it is not dynamic enough.

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4. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

McLuhan is one of the leading figures in media criticism and theory.  His project in Understanding Media is “to understand the effects of the extensions of man,” which he defines as “the technological simulation of consciousness” as expressed through varying media like the spoken and written word, clothing, ads, games and of course, comics (McLuhan 3-4).  Famously proclaiming “the medium is the message,” McLuhan argues that the content delivered by a medium obscures the character of the medium itself (8-9).  He then distinguishes between two forms of media, hot and cool, hot being filled with “high definition” data or information such as radio or film, and cool media, where very little information is provided, and therefore much of the information must be filled in by its receptor (i.e. one who senses, or receives information).  Cool media, like comics, “demand… involvement in [the] process… [and] require participation in depth” (McLuhan 31).  McLuhan later devotes a single chapter specifically to comics.  Comparing twentieth-century comics to the rudimentary woodcut of the prior century, McLuhan argues that comics “offer very little visual information or connected detail… [providing] a participational and do-it-yourself character” (165).  In addition, because of their “participational” quality, they “belong to the world of games, to the world of models and extensions of situations elsewhere” ((McLuhan 169).  Due to this characteristic nature of the comics medium, comics can act as a subversive reaction to more dominant, “hot” media.  Therefore, McLuhan proclaims that “the iconic age is upon us,” and calls for a better understanding not of comics’ content, but of its form, for a clarification of the medium itself (167-9).  “Our need now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and cartoon, both as challenging and changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press” (McLuhan 169). 

5.  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.  New York:

        New York UP, 2006.

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