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Instructuralism-influenced studies ofmythology, amytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed[1][2]—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes[citation needed] and reassembled in various ways ("bundled")[3] or linked in more complicated relationships. For example, the myths of GreekAdonis and EgyptianOsiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings oficons.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who gave the term wide circulation,[4] wrote, "If one wants to establish a parallel betweenstructural linguistics and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme andphoneme."[5]
Thestructuralist analyzer offolk tales,Vladimir Propp, treated the individual tale as the unit of analysis. The unitary mytheme, by contrast, is the equivalent in myth of thephonemes,morphemes, andsememes into whichstructural linguistics divides language, the smallest possible units of sound, structure, and meaning (respectively) within a languagesystem.
In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss first adapted this technique of language analysis to analytic myth criticism. In his work on the myth systems of primitive tribes, working from the analogy oflanguage structure, he adopted the French termmythème, with the assertion that the system of meaning within mythic utterances parallels closely that of a language system.Roman Jakobson varies this idea, treating mythemes asconcepts or phonemes which have no significance in themselves but whose significance might be shown bysociological analysis.
Philosophers such asDaniel Dennett have also used the term "mytheme".
Lev Manovich uses the termsseme andmytheme in his bookThe Language of New Media to describe aspects of culture with which computer images enter into dialogue.