Poétique des mythes dans la Grèce antique

Initiation à la culture hellène, cet essai sur ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler la poétique de la ' mythologie grecque ' se fait aussi manifeste. The Poetics of Myth in Ancient Greece Myths are not mere plotlines. In Greece as elsewhere, these traditional narratives exist only in poetic or plastic forms that are themselves linked to particular social and cultural circumstances. To give them their true depth, both enunciative and anthropological, is to showcase their insertion into continually different forms -- epic poems; ritual praise of an athlete, tragedy, nascent historiography, Hellenistic poetry -- and thus to reveal the successive functions of the myths, reinvented and reoriented over and over in terms of both interior logic and morals. This book reviews the history of these rewritings. The author writes: 'Responding to pedagogical concern and to the need to inform a student audience seeking initiation into Hellenic culture via the study of texts, this practical essay on the poetics of what we have agreed to call Greek mythology would also be, all modesty aside, a sort of act of faith: a reaction to structural analyses which were often, being carried out from a legitimately comparative standpoint, too sensitive to the common elements presented by a variety of symbolic manifestations, smoothing over differences, contrasts, and enunciative contexts; the cultivation of an approach aware of its own presuppositions and proceeding with a certain rigor; and, lastly, a protest against the supermarket neo-liberalism which has nowadays invaded all the humanities equally, and which, extolling the virtues of eclecticism, competition, and individualism (media-friendly if possible), has relegated to the trashcans of Western intellectual history all concern for method and epistemological coherence.' The Author Claude Calame is professor at the University of Lausanne. He has notably published Narrative in Ancient Greece (Méridiens Klincksieck, 1986), Theseus and the Athenian Imagination (Payot, 1996), Myth and History in Greek Antiquity (Payot, 1996), Eros in Ancient Greece (Belin, 1996).