The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic

Television news magazine crime stories: A functionalist perspective

“…The goal is therefore not to argue from a moral stance what is just, fair or objectionable, but merely what is functional to maintaining the social system's order. 2 See Himmelstein (1984), Hyman (1955), and Raglan (1955) for a discussion of the interrelationship between myth and ritual. 3 In a rare attempt at examining the effects of fiction and nonfiction, Atkins (1983) conducted an experimental study exposing two groups of subjects alternatively to realistic and fictitious television violence in a laboratory setting.…”

“Ritual” in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Community

“…The use of "ritual" has quite properly been associated with myth criticism, but if we examine John B. Vickery's classic collection of essays in this field, Myth and Literature, we may find that as late as the 1960s myth critics held certain notions about ritual that are no longer ten-able. Stanley Edgar Hyman's 1958 essay in that collection stands as the most confident assertion of these beliefs. A great student of Darwin's prose, Hyman seems to view literary theory as undergoing its own modest evolution within the larger progress of the human sciences, from E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture to James G. Frazer's Golden Bough and the applications of Frazer by the so-called Cambridge school of criticism (Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, A.…”