Posted: January 11th, 2016

conduct a mythological analysis

You need to pick a specific text or set of texts and conduct a mythological analysis like those we have done in each lecture throughout the module. You have a lot of freedom here. Your text could be based around a cultural event or a big news story, or it might be a film or a piece of literature. Look at the range of examples I have drawn on in the lectures and choose whatever you feel comfortable with.

Your case study will then provide a mythological analysis by adopting theoretical concepts from the lectures and readings (or beyond via further research if you wish) to analyse your text. You might focus on a specific archetype or various archetypal conventions that various scholars from the module offer approaches to. Or you might adopt other theoretical semiotic approaches (like Barthes) to do your analysis.

Your analysis should simply help us to understand what is going on by using myth theory to explain whatever it is you are looking at. You might want to adopt DMA as your foundation and then draw on whatever myth theory works for your analysis in relation to the archetypal/mythological/ideological contexts concerned.

Think about the discursive aspects that construct particular mythological conventions and how they function ideologically. This is what we have done every week this semester. This is what people have also done during seminar presentations – they have all been fantastic!! Use this experience from seminars and think about the presentations you enjoyed or engaged with the most as examples of mini case studies. Use the readings too – a lot of the readings are good examples of case studies that use conceptual / theoretical approaches to analyse texts.