Annotated Bibliography

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.

3. SIMILE

In trying to organize the iterations of hog-faced women across the centuries, I became convinced that a timeline tool would be helpful. SIMILE’s scroll function and the ease with which annotations may be added makes it seem like a good fit for my work. Ray Siemen’s talk on Friday, February 8, confirmed that SIMILE is a viable, robust visualization tool. His team used it to map different hands in the Devonshire manuscript. As I currently have identified twenty discrete mentions, portraits, or tellings of hog-faced women, an annotated timeline will make the rise and fall of her popularity across centuries much more immediately apparent. SIMILE works when pointed at an XML-file, so this would also be a good time to do some basic mark-up of the iterations for the web.

4. Derrida, Jaques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. 278-294.

5.  Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

In his book, Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek’s cover picture is the Romanian flag with a hole cut out of its center. Zizek describes the photograph: “the rebels [are] waving the national flag, with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole at its center.” He goes on to call this moment a “salient index of the ‘open’ character of a historical situation ‘in its becoming,’ as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one” (i). When looking at medieval and renaissance monster-culture, the seventeenth century also marks a watershed moment in the perception of anomalous creatures. Previous understandings of the marvelous fail to hold, or are “cut out,” as the realm of the monstrous moves out of the purview of religious prognostication and out from under the thumb of aristocratic collectors. Instead, cheap print brings monstrosity even to those who are unable to attend fairs and popularizes a new kind of secular monster whose implications are “open.”