The materials given here are based on Leonard & McClure with additional notes added by Bill Stifler, 2005, 2016.
Many of the contemporary approaches to mythology are not new approaches as such but eclectic approaches that categorize existing approaches.
William Doty's Toolkit
In Mythography, Doty recommends students approach myth from as many different mythological schools as seems appropriate to the material being studied. He suggests students think about myths by asking a "systematic series of exploratory questions" using a variety of "research procedures" centered around "five central concerns":
- Social
- Psychological
- Literary, textual, performative
- Structural
- Political
Bruce Lincoln's Ideological Narratives
In Theorizing Myth, Lincoln sees myth as "ideology in narrative form." An ideology is a system of beliefs or ideas that can govern a society, religion, political philosophy, or other social grouping. Lincoln's approach involves studying a myth within its historical and cultural context to determine the ideologies which shaped it and continued to modify it as its telling progressed through time. Lincoln's approach is too complex and involves detailed scholarly analysis which is beyond the time constraints for the undergraduate student. For the most part, students using Lincoln's approach must depend on what scholars have determined (Leonard and McClure 24). However, students who have grown up as part of another ideological system (international students, Native American students, students in a particular religious belief system, and so on) might be able to share their unique perspective on a myth.
Wendy Doniger's Telescopes and Microscopes
The 19th century ethnologist Adolf Bastian identified in myths what he called "elementary ideas," which he saw as universal to all myths. (Campbell 3). Doniger uses a similar technique, "stripping individual myths to their 'naked' narrative outlines." This is her telescopic view, where individual details are less important than the universal traits shared between myths (Leonard and McClure 24). Bastian also argued that myths contain other "ethnic" or "folk ideas," which express local differences. It was the search for these folk ideas that prompted, for instance, the Grimm brothers research into German folktales (Campbell 3). Much like Bastian and others focused on the individual myth stories for their unique folk character, Doniger suggests students of myth focus on the individual social, political, and performative contexts of a myth in order to understand how myths operate ideologically. This is her "microscope view." Doniger sees these two approaches to the study of myth as a means of maintaining balance, shifting "between the 'microscope' of a single telling to the 'telescope' of the world's numerous variations on a mythological theme" (Leonard and McClure 24).
Robert Ellwood's "Real Myths"
"Ellwood argues that what we call 'myth' does not exist." "[W]hat we call myth 'is always received from an already distance past, literary, . . . a step away from primal simplicity." The "real myth" is grounded in a lived experience. What we study are the literary artifacts recalling the myth. As literary artifacts, the myths we read have been carefully crafted into a literary narrative that is distanced from the original sentiment that energized the myth. Therefore, myth has meanings for its hearers which is separate from the literary story that has been preserved (Leonard and McClure 25).
Reading Myth
A literary approach to myth allows us to use all of the tools from the various approaches to myth we have learned while still recognizing the literary qualities of the myths as interesting stories about human nature (Leonard and McClure 25).