Ali Smith interviewed by Caroline Smith

Inverness-born Ali Smith’s first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) was awarded Saltire Society Scottish First Book Of The Year Award. Her short stories and novels including the Man Booker Prize nominated Hotel World (2001) and 2005 winner of the Whitbread The Accidental (2004) are known for their visceral language play and dynamic shifts in view point and time scale delivered in a tightly constructed form. She often treats universal themes – love, death, guilt and illness – with a fleshy, fresh touch that surveys the commonplace and idiosyncratic alongside the monumental. She is currently working on a rewrite of a myth for Canongate’s myth series

Orality and literacy: epic heroes of human destiny?

Human Speech has often been presented as the crucial line dividing humanity from animals, with Literacy then entering in as the fulfiller of human destiny, the redeemer from primitive orality, and, in alphabetic apotheosis, the all-conquering hero of the west's civilising mission. This epic tale, pervasive as it still remains, is now under attack from many directions, not least in the expanding work on multiple literacy practices. This paper takes the complementary line of starting from the 'oral' end of the apparent equation. Building on anthropological fieldwork, experience of teaching at the UK's Open University, and the gathering comparative literature, it questions the limiting linguistic bias of this tale – itself a kind of myth explaining and justifying the social order. Verbal language is just one of many modes and media of human communication and can only be fully understood in conjunction with them. The traditional myth also underplays the multiplex nature of language itself: researchers across several disciplines are now increasingly revealing the multimodal nature of human speech and writing. To focus on narrower definitions of language and, as in the heroic elevation of 'orality' and 'literacy', to propose the treatment of language as the crucial factor in human culture is to proffer a thin and single-line tale of human history and, with it, a misleading and ethnocentric account not only of humanity more generally but also of many of our actual educational practices. It needs to be replaced by a broader, more cross-cultural and more generous model of both learning and communication

Myth in narrative structure of Jeff Kinney’s diary of a wimpy kid

Myth works in narrative of a novel since it deals with the process of generating meaning through a sign form; language. Myth is a mode of signification that elaborates its two sign systems; the linguistic system and the mythical system. The object that has been chosen in this research is Jeff Kinney’s novel titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid. This research concerns to identify and interpret the relation of myth and the mythical characteristics in the narrative structure of the novel through a process that is constructed by the relevant theory. In conducting this qualitative research, an approach that concerns to explore the subjective meanings through which people interpret the world, the different ways in which reality is constructed (through language, images and cultural artifacts) in particular contexts, the researcher uses the theory of myth by Roland Barthes as the theoretical base. Barthes postulates a theoretical model of relation which is according to the researched objects; 1) a linear relation for the text and 2) a multidimensional relation for the picture. Barthes also divides mythical characteristics into: 1) myth as type of speech, 2) myth as semiological system, 3) myth as stolen language, and 4) myth as depolitized language. This research uses the descriptive method which is a method that describes the facts of the data analysis. By using library research as the technique of collecting data, the collected data of this research are narratives that contain words, phrases, and sentences identified as sign forms, and the steps of data analysis include: a) elaborating and identifying the signs (word, phrase, sentence, or discourse), b) classifying or categorizing the data, c) interpreting the entire data, and d) making conclusion. Then, the researcher found the result of this research that myth in the narrative structure of Diary of a Wimpy Kid is constructed by the forms of words, phrases, and sentences in which have the linear relation because the researched object is text. The linear relations for each semiological system in constructing myth are divided into; 1) the primary relation which is literal relation that represents a literal meaning in the linguistic system as the first semiological system, and 2) the secondary relation which is symbolical and indexical relation that represent symbolical or indexical meaning in the mythical system as the second semiological system in which based on the first system. The researcher also found that there are also the categories of mythical characteristics; 1) myth as a type of speech represents messages embedded in the story, the data represent several speeches such as friendship, popularity, gender, diversity at school, family, and culture; 2) myth as semiological system reveals the semiological schema of myth including the linguistic system and the mythical system; 3) myth as stolen language represents words, phrases, and sentence which relate to the mythical speeches of social value and ideology; and 4) myth as depolitized language represents beliefs, values, and ideals based on the ideological fragment of religion

Myth, Language, and Complex Ideologies

Ideologies use for their conservation and propagation persuasive methods of communication: rhetoric. Rhetoric is analyzed from the semiotic and logical-mathematical points of view. The following hypotheses are established: (1) language L is a self-explanatory system, mediated by a successive series of systems of cultural conventions, (2) connotative significances of an ideological advertising rhetoric must be known, and (3) the notion of ideological information is a neutral notion that does not imply the valuation of ideology or its conditions of veracity or falsification. Rhetorical figures like metonymy, metaphor, parable analogy, and allegory are defined as relations. Metaphor and parable are order relations. Operations of metonymic and metaphoric substitution are defined and several theorems derived from these operations have been deduced

Myth- an extension to C

Myth is a programming language that is an extension of C. Myth adds modules, interfaces, tuple returns, and bit sets. These features are very helpful in nearly any programming environment. The Myth language as a whole is a good choice for embedded systems where resources are limited. Modules help organize code into logical groupings. Interfaces provide an automated mechanism to write reusable code. Tuple returns provide a simple mechanism for returning multiple values from a function. Bitsets make it easy to define logical groups of bit flags. Bisets are particularly useful in code that interfaces with hardware. The advantage of Myth is modules, tuple returns, and interfaces without the overhead of full-blown object orientation. Myth has been implemented as a preprocessor that produces C source code

The Torockó myth : notions to the sociographic interpretation of heritage space

The paper shows the development of a myth about Torockó in the literary works (fiction and scientific literature as well). The analysis follows the myth from its foundation in the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. Finally, the paper analyses the symbolic language of monument space as well. Our conclusion is that myth can be interpreted as the basis of cultural heritage space emerging after 1990. The myth fills up the architectural environments with social contents (narratives, memorial images etc.). In fact, the discourses react on the architectural forms as well. The founders of Torockó myth (e.g. Mór Jókai, Balázs Orbán) in the 19th century used a romantic language. They created a picture which influences the view about Torockó until today (for example “lunar landscape”). It is also important to mention that Torockó was a significant site on the “national map” of Hungary. After 1920, as part of Romania, Torockó became the symbol of minority life and the cultural exchange between Hungarians, Germans and Romanians (see the idea of “Transylvanism”). However, the authors continued the tradition of romantic language. Only the third generation – working during the communist dictatorship in the second half of 20th century – changed the language tools. They revised some basic elements of Torockó’s history (like the German origin, see by Zsigmond Jakó). The effect of their work is interesting in the sense that it has not decreased, but strengthened the myth. Finally, the paper shows the heritage transformations of the past two decades from the special aspect of the Torockó myth. This means an understanding of how the heritage protection displays the myth, as well as how the heritage space contributes to maintaining the myth. From this point of view, is important to interpret the reconstruction of mining houses of 17-18th centuries as an act remembering on myth of “freedom”; the renewing of houses from period 1860-1890 as a representation of myth of “German origin”, and so on. Thus, the monument protection of townscape is not only an architectural intervention but in the same time a creation of space of cultural heritage and a social fact of collective memory and historical identity

Mythical language and truth: The “affair” between Ares and Aphrodite in Aristotle

This paper tackles the problem of the relationship between traditional myths (specifically, the myth of Ares and Aphrodite being in love) and truth in Aristotle: are myths false, or do they convey truth in an allegorical language? and, in the latter case, does the lack of exactness of such language make the myth useless for the progress of philosophy, which proceeds by logical inference? In order to understand the relationship between myth and truth, the usage of the term mythologein (to tell mythic tales) by Aristotle is systematically analyzed, by checking, for each instance of this term: (1) who is the subject of the act of telling the myth? (2) is the tale true? (3) if it is not true, does it reflect some aspect of reality? (4) why does the myth teller relate the tale? (5) what is the role of the myth in Aristotle’s argument? Answering these questions will make it possible to exactly understand the meaning of Aristotle’s reference to the myth of Ares and Aphrodite

Dr. Walter Pitman Lecture

Evidence for and implication of the Black Sea Noah\u27s Flood: Geology, Archaeology, Language and Myth. by Dr. Walter C. Pitman. Dr. Pitman will present a special lecture marrying science and myth