Soooo... while I passionately hate the way that the Hero's Journey and the monomyth has made it into writing orthodoxy, I'm reading Pathways to Bliss, edited speeches by Joseph Campbell. It goes into what makes myth and mythological figures different from stories, and how they play into how we shape and actively transform our lives as individuals.
I also have come to resent the hero's journey. My knowledge of Campbell is quite surface level, but I do remember reading or hearing somewhere that the hero's journey was meant to be a lens of literary analysis, not an actual writing guide.
Soooo... while I passionately hate the way that the Hero's Journey and the monomyth has made it into writing orthodoxy, I'm reading Pathways to Bliss, edited speeches by Joseph Campbell. It goes into what makes myth and mythological figures different from stories, and how they play into how we shape and actively transform our lives as individuals.
Yeah, I have an ambiguous relationship with Campbell's work as well. It's very interesting. But it bothers me to no end that so many people think it's the way to tell a story.
Yeah, esp in the entertainment industry! We should start a Too Hipster for the Hero's Journey club
@Neveesandeh "resent" is exactly the way I feel about it!
Campbell himself is pretty cool. He was looking for patterns in myth, almost in a Jungian collective unconscious sense, and came up with the Hero's Journey. (I feel the same way about Campbell that I do about Foucault. Don't mind his original arguments as an academic, but I can't stand what people *do* with what he wrote).
In this book, it's really interesting to think of stories as transcending time and space to model ways of being and ways of growing. I'd always just thought of folk tales as cautionary tales, he's got another way of looking at it I hadn't considered before.
