Hyleme

It has been suggested that this article be merged with Hylistics. (Discuss) Proposed since May 2024.

A hyleme (from the ancient Greek ὕλη hýlē "wood [in the sense of 'raw material'], substance, matter") is - analogous to terms such as morpheme, phoneme or mytheme - a "smallest plot-carrying unit of a narrative material".^[1] The term was coined in the context of transdisciplinary research groups on myth research at the University of Göttingen,^[2][3] the method being taken up by the myth researcher Udo Reinhardt^[4] and rewarded with the prize of the Peregrinus Foundation in 2023.^[5] Narrative material research (Stoffwissenschaft) itself is referred to as hylistics, which was primarily developed as a method for researching ancient myths, but can principially 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".^[6] "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."^[7] The process of extracting a sequence of hylemes (hyleme sequence) 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 (direct or indirect) 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" (if the agent is unknown).^[8]

Hylemes include not only actions in the narrower sense, but also processes and statements about states and characteristics. Zgoll 2019 distinguishes between dynamic ("Zeus kills Erechtheus") and static hylemes ("Zeus is the king of the gods").^[9] This division was revised in later publications in favour of a division into punctual and durative hylemes, the latter being divided into durative-constant (always applies: "Zeus is the son of Kronos. "), durative-initial (applies at the beginning of the plot, but not forever: "Zeus is unmarried") and durative-resultative hylemes (applies only in the course of the plot: "Zeus is the husband of Hera").^[10]