Hyleme
A hyleme is - analogous to terms such as morpheme, phoneme or mytheme - a "smallest plot-carrying unit of a narrative material". The term was coined in the context of transdisciplinary research groups on myth research at the University of Göttingen, the method being taken up by the myth researcher Udo Reinhardt and rewarded with the prize of the Peregrinus Foundation in 2023. Narrative material research itself is referred to as hylistics, which was primarily developed as a method for researching ancient myths, but can principally be applied to all genres of narrative material.
In distinction to the literary terms of event and motif, the use of which is primarily limited to literary texts, the hyleme is intended to describe a transmedial unit of narrative material that can be extracted from different medial concretions and is itself "not fixed to a particular medial design or individual language". "Hylemes cannot be postulated deductively, but can only be obtained inductively by extraction from individually available medial concretions. Just as phonemes and morphemes only become tangible in the form of certain individual phones and morphemes, hylemes are only tangible in their different medial forms of concretion." The process of extracting a sequence of hylemes from a medial concretion is referred to as hyleme analysis.
A hyleme as the "smallest action-bearing unit" basically comprises a statement that consists of at least one subject and predicate, to which further objects and/or determinations can be added. Hylemes are always formulated in the active state, even if the logical agent is unknown: instead of "Prometheus is punished", the hyleme reads "Zeus punishes Prometheus" or "NN punishes Prometheus".
Hylemes include not only actions in the narrower sense, but also processes and statements about states and characteristics. Zgoll 2019 distinguishes between dynamic and static hylemes. This division was revised in later publications in favour of a division into punctual and durative hylemes, the latter being divided into durative-constant, durative-initial and durative-resultative hylemes.
Hyleme analysis
In a hyleme analysis, all the information of a given medium - e.g. a text - is reproduced in the standardised form of hylemes. A second step consists of reconstructing the logical sequence of actions, which not necessarily has to correspond to the sequence of statements in the text, as well as any implicit hylemes that can inevitably be reconstructed.Example
A mythical material in the concretion of a text can read as follows:"When Chryse, the daughter of Pallas, was married to Dardanos, she brought with her as a dowry gifts from Athena, namely the shrines of the great gods."The following hylemes can be extracted from this statement:
- Chryse is the daughter of Pallas
- Athena gives Chryse the sanctuaries of the great gods
- Chryse brings the sanctuaries of the great gods to the wedding as a dowry
- Dardanos marries Chryse
Use
Hyleme analysis is a methodological tool for extracting the material from a medium and making it visible in a standardised way. This enables further investigations and insights, especially in the case of mythical hyleme sequences:- Reconstruction of the logical sequence of events in a complexly formulated text
- Reconstruction of the events in a material that has only been narrated in extracts or fragments
- Comparison of different narrative materials or variants or different media concretisations of the same material
- Recognising logical inconsistencies that can be indicators of stratification of a text or material