Analysis Of Claude Levi Strauss s Black As Slacker...

Claude LÃ ©vi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who believed that the myths created and told by a society could be a window into the beliefs and conflicts of that society. As a Structuralist, LÃ ©vi-Strauss saw stories as language and sought to understand their underlying grammar. This he believed centered on pairs of opposite ideas, held by the culture, but creating tension within it — the raw and the cooked, the sacred and the profane, and so on. School of Rock, a 2003 film starring Jack Black as slacker Dewey Finn, shows the tension between a truly American pair of opposites: laziness vs. hard work. While in other mythologies it is a trickster character who mediates between these opposites, the nature of this American pair, and the surrounding culture, make it necessary that the trickster not remain so; he has to join one side or the other. Claude LÃ ©vi-Strauss sought a scientific approach to the interpretation of the meaning of myths. To perform an analysis, he would first collect every version and variant of a myth possible. Each version would be broken down into its individual plot elements, and these elements were then plotted on a chart to show how they fit together. The charts would be compared across variants, and eventually the true meaning of the myth would emerge. Any scientist knows that a large data pool is indispensable for getting good results. Unfortunately, there is only one School of Rock. Though I cannot be so thorough as he would have liked, the