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Sather Classical Lectures
Myth. Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures.
Sather Classical Lecture
Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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209 people want to read
About the author
Geoffrey S. Kirk
23 books19 followersGeoffrey Stephen Kirk (3 December 1921 – 10 March 2003) was an English classicist known for his writings on Ancient Greek literature and mythology. He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 1984.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 4, 2012
This is an academic book written in a very ponderous and somewhat arrogant style. If it has any value, it is historical, as a text that helps us to understand the state of mythological studies towards the tail end of the 1960s if that matters to you.
While Kirk can be almost snidely brutal about other academics and there is the prevailing scent of old battles of little current importance, his primary interest is in responding (favourably if cautiously) to the emergence in France of Levy-Strauss' structuralist approach to myth.
This element in the book has some small value but it has to be said that, by the end of the book, after 285 pages of argument, I was still no wiser as to the meaning or function of myth. Occasional insights had scarcely made the effort of reading it worthwhile. It stays in the library - but only just.
While Kirk can be almost snidely brutal about other academics and there is the prevailing scent of old battles of little current importance, his primary interest is in responding (favourably if cautiously) to the emergence in France of Levy-Strauss' structuralist approach to myth.
This element in the book has some small value but it has to be said that, by the end of the book, after 285 pages of argument, I was still no wiser as to the meaning or function of myth. Occasional insights had scarcely made the effort of reading it worthwhile. It stays in the library - but only just.
January 31, 2022
Kirk conveys a lot of information, but does so in a frustratingly arrogant and blatantly sexist/xenophobic way. Works as an overview of the state of mythological research before 1970, if you can read past Kirk's bitchy personal opinions.
August 31, 2016
Spends too much time trash talking the systems of deeper thinkers and better writers, but still makes some good points about the variety of possible origins and functions ("narrative, operative or validatory, and speculative or explanatory") of myth, its nuance, arguments for the localized social meaning of many mythic stories, but also generally a seriousness of purpose, a recurrence of themes, and a connection to a radically different concept of time than the historical/chronological.
August 7, 2020
Me encantó la parte luego de la introducción y del final... sobre todo porque me parece que por ratos no solo discrepa (lo cual está bien) sino que es hasta irrespetuoso con otros autores. De todas maneras me pareció bastante valioso por sus análisis en torno a una nueva visión de los mitos griegos.
August 4, 2022
This was an interesting book on myths, primarily Greek myths. I appreciated the author's skepticism about some of the patterns identified by other scholars. It was very much a common sense approach.
February 14, 2017
The collected opinions of G.S. Kirk
It is certainly possible to write entertaining books about the theory of myth. Kirk failed. This is a very badly written book containing very bad science. Where to begin...
First of all, the writing style is terrible. This book is a jungle, the sentences and vocabulary are vines. One needs a machete to get through. Sentences are long, convoluted and very hard to parse, even for someone fluent in English. Kirk will always use a more difficult word or expression, even if a simpler one is available. It's often unclear what a pronoun refers to or what the implied subject of a verb is. This makes for slow an laborious reading.
Unfortunately, the rewards for this tedious reading are few and far between. Occasionally, Kirk will give a nice piece of analysis, a useful list or an interesting observation. I firmly agree with him, when he (repeatedly) says that there is no one single explanation for the origin and function of myth. There are quite a few other observations that make sense, for instance about the limited role of the gods in Greek myths.
However, most of the book is devoted to Kirk's opinions, intuitions and speculations. In the first chapter he tries to define myth. Simply put his conclusion seems to be that whenever it feels like a myth, it is one. Kirk himself is the ultimate judge on this. He tries to separate folktale from myth, but never succeeds in defining folktale. He believes that fantastic and speculative elements are essential to a true myth, but again fails to define those concepts.
His book is very polemic. There is hardly a scientist on this subject he agrees with and he arrogantly brushes their theories aside as "unlikely", without proving his point or leaving any room for discussion and, even worse, without providing an alternative theory that is better than the ones he rejects.
He seems to have a special dislike of Greek mythology and seems desperate to show that it isn't true mythology (because it lacks speculative and fantastic elements and is too rich in folktale elements), not Greek (derived from Mesopotamian sources) and more like literature. I agree that Greek myth might be a special case, but why so negative? His argument is weak, Greek mythology is full of fantasy and speculation.
I could go into many more details. His definitions are often in fact his opinions and contain many values (a myth is a "serious" story - when is something considered "serious"?), it's unclear to what extent some phenomena need to be present (a myth is usually not about gods, but gods can appear in a myth - how many gods a myth make?!) and sometimes contradictory. He accuses other mythologists of not taking into account all the variants and the whole corpus of myths, but he himself picks and chooses. He jumps to conclusions and accuses others of doing just that. He simplifies and complicated at a whim.
All in all the main value of this book was to sharpen my own opinions against Kirk's and learning a few details from his theories.
It is certainly possible to write entertaining books about the theory of myth. Kirk failed. This is a very badly written book containing very bad science. Where to begin...
First of all, the writing style is terrible. This book is a jungle, the sentences and vocabulary are vines. One needs a machete to get through. Sentences are long, convoluted and very hard to parse, even for someone fluent in English. Kirk will always use a more difficult word or expression, even if a simpler one is available. It's often unclear what a pronoun refers to or what the implied subject of a verb is. This makes for slow an laborious reading.
Unfortunately, the rewards for this tedious reading are few and far between. Occasionally, Kirk will give a nice piece of analysis, a useful list or an interesting observation. I firmly agree with him, when he (repeatedly) says that there is no one single explanation for the origin and function of myth. There are quite a few other observations that make sense, for instance about the limited role of the gods in Greek myths.
However, most of the book is devoted to Kirk's opinions, intuitions and speculations. In the first chapter he tries to define myth. Simply put his conclusion seems to be that whenever it feels like a myth, it is one. Kirk himself is the ultimate judge on this. He tries to separate folktale from myth, but never succeeds in defining folktale. He believes that fantastic and speculative elements are essential to a true myth, but again fails to define those concepts.
His book is very polemic. There is hardly a scientist on this subject he agrees with and he arrogantly brushes their theories aside as "unlikely", without proving his point or leaving any room for discussion and, even worse, without providing an alternative theory that is better than the ones he rejects.
He seems to have a special dislike of Greek mythology and seems desperate to show that it isn't true mythology (because it lacks speculative and fantastic elements and is too rich in folktale elements), not Greek (derived from Mesopotamian sources) and more like literature. I agree that Greek myth might be a special case, but why so negative? His argument is weak, Greek mythology is full of fantasy and speculation.
I could go into many more details. His definitions are often in fact his opinions and contain many values (a myth is a "serious" story - when is something considered "serious"?), it's unclear to what extent some phenomena need to be present (a myth is usually not about gods, but gods can appear in a myth - how many gods a myth make?!) and sometimes contradictory. He accuses other mythologists of not taking into account all the variants and the whole corpus of myths, but he himself picks and chooses. He jumps to conclusions and accuses others of doing just that. He simplifies and complicated at a whim.
All in all the main value of this book was to sharpen my own opinions against Kirk's and learning a few details from his theories.
April 1, 2015
Horribly written. Apparently, Kirk never started a run-on sentence he didn't like. As if that's not bad enough, he insists on adding countless parenthetical asides which further obscure any point he might have originally had.
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August 17, 2012like new
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December 9, 2012like new
December 23, 2017
Read for research.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews