Overview:
Claude Levi-Strauss stresses in his essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” that myths possess a “structural law” like laws of science (842).  He explains, “Myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways […] [,] reducing mythology either to idle play or to a crude kind of philosophic speculation” (836).  He contends, “Ancient philosophers reasoned about language the way we do about mythology” (837).  He reaches this conclusion from a background in social anthropology, studying religion and mythology.  He directs critics to initiate a scientific study of myth, just as ancient philosophers initiated the study of language.  He proposes that the best way to examine mythology rests in a systematic dissection and reconstruction of a myth in its many versions.  He refutes, searching for an original more “authentic” version of any given myth, since “Every version belongs to the myth” (843).  Critics collect data (the mythemes:  “the shortest possible sentences”), arrange the data in two categories (time and theme), study the data, and read the cards down the synchronic columns.  The repetition of the themes reveal the overall nature of myths.  According to Levi-Strauss, “The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction[…]” (843).  The concept of the contradiction leads back to Northrop Frye and Carl Jung in their psychological understanding of myths and human archetypes.
Analysis:  The collection of data, the mythemes, presents a daunting task.  The tedious work of writing episodic sentences upon several cards and then arranging them thematically and chronologically arrests the most vigorous critic.  Literary critics record the mythemes  of several versions of the myth and catalogue them into two categories: a diachronic and a synchronic arrangement (838, 842). Then, they would arrange them along diachronic segments and synchronic themes.  If this seems very scientific, Levi-Strauss accomplished what he set out to do.  Moreover, looking at the whole system scientifically suggests that the same thing that transpired in philosophy may one day materialize in mythology and literature. Like mythology, philosophy once included the conversation of cosmology, but today, the conversation of cosmology stays mainly and the world of pseudo-science.  Today, Philosophy deconstructs language:  the meanings of words, of sounds, and of logic and rhetoric.  Likewise, Levi-Strauss’s theory deconstructs myths:  the meanings of mythemes, along diachronic and synchronic axes.  According to Northrop Frye, “Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism” (643).  Thus, the movement of “taste” necessarily evolves from the conversation, allowing a “structural analysis, [to] bring rhetoric back to criticism.” Levi-Strauss answers his call for “a new poetics” (644).  As a cultural anthropologist, his views span a larger vision than that of the study of one myth.  Rather, he looks at myth as yet another piece of the literary conversation. Levi-Strauss views myths as part of a cosmological human framework; therefore, he arranges his mythemes accordingly.  However, this theory reveals that complex mythologies consist of parts for examination, which leads to a greater understanding of the overall human contradiction up for appraisal (843).
 
Questions:
1) How is Levi-Strauss a structuralist? And who else fits into that category?
2) How might we apply Levi Strauss to the literature we have read?