Quiz Guide: Classical Mythology Chapter 2
- How did Xenophanes first critique the literal truthfulness of Greek myth?
- What work used wordplay to rationalize the truthfulness of an ancient myth? Explain.
- Explain the meaning and origin of Euhemerism as the book defines it.
- Contrast the medieval and Renaissance approaches to ancient myth.
- Who is an important proponent of the nature myth theory, and what are some of this approach's limitations?
- Explain one of the book's three examples of myths that lend themselves to a ritualistic interpretation.
- Identify and describe the beliefs of one of the most famous proponents of ritual theory.
- Explain an example from the book of a Charter myth or an etiological myth.
- Which modern psychological scholar suggested that myths were products of either wish fulfillment or or an expression of "profound anxieties"?
- Explain an example, besides the Oedipus complex, of a myth that expresses profound human anxieties.
- Give an example of a myth that expresses, according to some scholars, ancient male fears of female hositility.
- Give an example of what Jung would call an "archetypal pattern" or "archetypal life event" expressed in myth.
- What term was used to descripe the images, mental processes, and "innate memories" shared by an entire race or culture?
- Give an example of how myth can express a distorted view of the animus or anima.
- Victor Turner believed that myth and ritual are linked by their "liminal" (threshold or border-crossing) function, helping to ease people through life's difficult transitions. If you can, apply it to the myth of Icarus explained on page 47-48 and explain it here.
- According to narratologists like Mieke Bal, how is the order of events in heroic stories different from events in tragic stories?
- What is unique to greek myth about the "graph of a hero's life"?
- Identify and discuss the approach to myth of one feminist scholar discussed in the book.
- What are two "lenses" or ways to look at Greek myth detailed in Doniger's Implied Spider?