2009年4篇阅读..docVIP

Passage 1 In order to understand what a myth really is, must we choose between platitude and sophism? Some claim that human societies merely express, through their mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or, revenge or that they try to provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise understand?astronomical, meteorological, and the like. But why should these societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations? On the other hand, psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation becomes too easy: 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 grandmother are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever dialectic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found. Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand, it would seem that in the courts of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belies by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: if the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? It is precisely this awareness of a basic antinomy pertaining to the nature of myth that may