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Date Posted: 18:28:46 05/02/07 Wed
Author: DINA COSTA (classification essay)
Subject: TASK TWO

Myth Today


What is a myth, today? You can find so many answers to this simple question. Although we will discuss two of the most important aspects of the myth nowadays, such as: the type of speech of a myth, and the form and the concept because they are close. In addition, we should have in mind that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept or an idea, but myth is a mode of signification, a form.
First of all, the myth is not any type of speech; language needs special conditions in order to become myth. However, we should firmly establish from the beginning is that myth is a system of communication, in other words, has to carry a message. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth; there are no ‘substantial’ ones. Almost everything can be seen as myth; it will depend on the way it is expressed in the speech by the conversion of reality. Mythical speech is made of material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth (pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, which one can reason about them while discounting their substance. This substance has its importance because pictures are more imperative than writing, and can impose meaning at the first sigh, without analyzing or diluting it, but pictures become a kind of writing as son as they are meaningful. Therefore, we shall take language, discourse and speech to mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual.
Secondly, the form and the meaning are presented in a myth in an ambiguous way because the signifier of the myth is full on one side and empty on the other. As meaning, the signifier already postulates a reading, it has a sensory reality, and there is richness in it because the meaning of the myth has a value by belonging to a history. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates only the letter remains. Myth is mainly oral, so when it is written the form is there but the signified is not. To put it differently, the signifier is the form and the signified is the concept.
Finally, it is obvious that myth does not try to hide, but its function is to distort, there is no latency of the concept in relation to the form; there is no need of an unconscious in other to explain myth. Though the form cannot be repeated all the time, the signifier remains mental because the elements of the form are related to place and proximity: the mode of presence of the form is spatial. The concept, on the contrary appears in global fashion, it is a kind of nebula, the condensation, of a certain knowledge, and its mode of presence is memorial. Both are present in the myth speech as spatial and memorial, because a myth is only considered as one if it remains in the memory.

Bibliography
Sebeok, Thomas A. Myth: a Symposium. Indiana University press, London,1955. Seventh Printing (1974).

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