The American Monomyth

The American Monomyth PDF Author: Robert Jewett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Popular culture
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description

The American Monomyth

The American Monomyth PDF Author: Robert Jewett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Popular culture
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book

Book Description


The American Monomyth

The American Monomyth PDF Author: Robert Jewett
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Jewett and Lawrence examine the American monomyth in popular culture and mass media, driven by recurrent patterns in television, movies, real-life legends, and books. They find tales of redemption that include selfless servants who impassively give their lives for others and zealous crusaders who destroy evil. Starting with the Bionic Woman Jamie Sommers and continuing to such examples as Star Trek, Playboy, Superman, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Little House on the Prairie, the authors find a myth that is rooted in pop materials. It replaces the Christ figure, which has been eroded by scientific explanation, but allows the American culture to remember "supersaviors" who are woven throughout society.

The Myth of the American Superhero

The Myth of the American Superhero PDF Author: John Shelton Lawrence
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802825737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
As the nation seems to yearn for redemption from the evils that threaten its tranquility, the authors maintain that Joseph Campbell's monomythic hero is alive and well, but significantly displaced, in American popular culture.

The Monomyth in American Science Fiction Films

The Monomyth in American Science Fiction Films PDF Author: Donald E. Palumbo
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476618518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
One of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is an elaborate articulation of the monomyth: the narrative pattern underlying countless stories from the most ancient myths and legends to the films and television series of today. The monomyth's fundamental storyline, in Campbell's words, sees "the hero venture forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons to his fellow man." Campbell asserted that the hero is each of us--thus the monomyth's endurance as a compelling plot structure. This study examines the monomyth in the context of Campbell's The Hero and discusses the use of this versatile narrative in 26 films and two television shows produced between 1960 and 2009, including the initial Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983), The Time Machine (1960), Logan's Run (1976), Escape from New York (1981), Tron (1982), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), the first 11 Star Trek films (1979-2009), and the Sci Fi Channel's miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune (2000) and Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003).

The Hero's Journey Toward a Second American Century

The Hero's Journey Toward a Second American Century PDF Author: Michael E. Salla
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313075646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The hero's journey is a process of (re)discovery of the principles that make up the national identity of a country. These principles must then be applied in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. For the seventh time in its history, America has discovered a grand synthesis of power and morality in projecting its resources and principles into the global arena. This makes possible a more assertive, moral foreign policy course in responding to a range of foreign policy challenges. Of these challenges, Salla asserts, the most profound in terms of the scale of human suffering around the planet is that concerning violations of the rights of ethnic minorities. Ethnic conflicts and the humanitarian crises and massive human rights violations they generate form a foreign policy challenge that will preoccupy the minds of policy makers for much of the 21st century. NATO's intervention in the Kosovo crisis is the high water mark for America's seventh hero's journey. The intervention sends a decisive signal to all governments that the U.S. and its allies will no longer remain inactive in the face of states attempting to militarily repress the aspirations of their ethnic minorities. This moral interventionism can safely be extended well into the 21st century if policy makers wisely combine the moral principles and foreign policy challenges that make up both the Second American Century and America's (Seventh) Hero's journey. This provocative analysis will be of interest to all scholars, students, and researchers involved with the development of American foreign policy.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Hero with a Thousand Faces PDF Author: Joseph Campbell
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0586085718
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
A study of heroism in the myths of the world - an exploration of all the elements common to the great stories that have helped people make sense of their lives from the earliest times. It takes in Greek Apollo, Maori and Jewish rites, the Buddha, Wotan, and the bothers Grimm's Frog-King.

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey PDF Author: Joseph Campbell
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 9781577314042
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Joseph Campbell, arguably the greatest mythologist of our time, was certainly one of our greatest storytellers.

Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil

Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil PDF Author: Robert Jewett
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802828590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Grasping this vision honored by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike includes recognizing the dangers of zealous violence, the illusions of current crusading, and the promise of peaceful coexistence under international law.

American Theology, Superhero Comics, and Cinema

American Theology, Superhero Comics, and Cinema PDF Author: Anthony Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135014361
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Stan Lee, who was the head writer of Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, co-created such popular heroes as Spider-Man, Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, and Daredevil. This book traces the ways in which American theologians and comic books of the era were not only both saying things about what it means to be human, but, starting with Lee they were largely saying the same things. Author Anthony R. Mills argues that the shift away from individualistic ideas of human personhood and toward relational conceptions occurring within both American theology and American superhero comics and films does not occur simply on the ontological level, but is also inherent to epistemology and ethics, reflecting the comprehensive nature of human life in terms of being, knowing, and acting. This book explores the idea of the "American monomyth" that pervades American hero stories and examines its philosophical and theological origins and specific manifestations in early American superhero comics. Surveying the anthropologies of six American theologians who argue against many of the monomyth’s assumptions, principally the staunch individualism taken to be the model of humanity, and who offer relationality as a more realistic and ethical alternative, this book offers a detailed argument for the intimate historical relationship between the now disparate fields of comic book/superhero film creation, on the one hand, and Christian theology, on the other, in the United States. An understanding of the early connections between theology and American conceptions of heroism helps to further make sense of their contemporary parallels, wherein superhero stories and theology are not strictly separate phenomena but have shared origins and concerns.

The Heroine with 1001 Faces

The Heroine with 1001 Faces PDF Author: Maria Tatar
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631498827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out. Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. “By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.