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Myth and Text: Readings in the Modern Greek Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
‘… they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad … For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.’ J.L. Borges, ‘Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote’
Mythos is used by Aristotle both in its received sense in his day, meaning a story which need not be literally true but has a special institutional status outside of literature, and in a sense which seems to be new in the fourth century B.C., as a rational ordering of events (synthesis ton pragmaton), a mediating term between story (pragmata) and discourse (tragodia). It is specifically by means of mythos (whether invented or traditional) that tragedy (discourse) can be an imitation (mimesis) of action (praxis/story).
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- Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1985