Kenny Le Ch.9 It’s Greek to Me

1. Kenny LeCh.9 It’s Greek to Me Per.4 9-21-11

2. What is Myth? • Myth is a story used to “explain ourselves in ways physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry” cannot (Foster 9). • There are three types of myth: “Shakespearean, biblical, and folk/fairy tale” (Foster 9).

3. Greek and Rome • When most of us think of myth, we think “Greece or Rome” (Foster 9). • Greek and Roman myth is “a part of the fabric of our consciousness” but we barely notice, like there are probably thousands of schools that are named after Greek or Roman history (the Spartans and the Trojans) (Foster 9).

4. Myth shows… • Myth covers tons of human situations. • Myth shows stories of all ages of life including the next life, all relationships “personal or governmental”(Foster 9). • It shows tons of an individual’s experience, “physical, sexual, psychological, spiritual” (Foster 9).

5. Religion and Myth • The connection of religion and myth has issues because when someone thinks the myth is “untrue” then they find it hard to grasp the morale or “religious belief” of the story (Foster 9). • If you believe in the story “Adam and Eve” or not it doesn’t matter, what’s important is to understand the message or morale of the story (Foster 9).

6. Song of Solomon • In this story, “Icarus, the kid, the daredevil,” didn’t listen to his “father’s advice and plunged into his death” (Foster 9). • This may sound like a simple story but it shows so much like “the parental attempt to save the child and the grief at having failed, the cure that proves as deadly as the ailment, the youthful exuberance that leads to self-destruction, the clash between sober, adult wisdom and adolescent recklessness” (Foster 9).

7. Myth affects art and poetry • In 1558 Pieter Brueghel painted a picture, Landscape With Fall of Icarus, Pieter got Icarus from Song of Solomon, Icarus is the kid who fell into the sea (Foster 9). • In the picture there’s a plowman and his ox, beyond him is the sea and you see “a pair of legs…that’s our boy”, Icarus, even though you barely see his presence, but “without the pathos of the doomed boy, we have a picture of farming and merchant shipping with no narrative or thematic power (Foster 9). • There are two great poems based on the painting, W. H. Auden’s “Musee des beaux Arts” and William Carlos William’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” and they both are about Icarus and without Icarus in the painting these two poems wouldn’t have been made (Foster 9).

8. Great Expectations and Myth • In the story Pip learns the story of George Barnwell, an innocent apprentice who later murders his uncle because of a girl ,and he compares himself to him George, “What stung me was the identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self” (Dickens 124). • Pip thinks he’s sort of like George, which makes him feel guiltier, so the story has an impact on Pip.

9. How Myth Affects Us • Myth affects many people’s lives by shaping “our culture and are in turn shaped by it” (Foster 9).

10. Citations • Foster, Thomas C.. How to read literature like a professor: a lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines. New York: Quill, 2003. Print. • Dickens, Charles. Great expectations. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942. Print.