In Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind" he argues that for years left brainers have ruled the world, but the future will be led by right brainers. He makes a good argument.
As he writes about the importance of stories, he cites Joseph Campbell's ("The Hero with a Thousand Faces") theory that across time and cultures the hero's journey has three main parts: departure, initiation, and return. Here's what he says about it:
quote:
The hero hears a call, refuses it at first, and then crosses the threshold into a new world. During initiation, he faces stiff challenges and stares into an abyss. But along the way - usually with the help of mentors who give the hero a divine gift - he transforms and becomes at one with his new self. Then he returns, becoming the master of two worlds, committed to improving each. This structure underlies Homer's Odyssey, the story of Buddha, the legend of King Arthur, the story of Sacagawea, Huckleberry Finn, Star Wars, The Matrix, and, Campbell would have argued, just about every other epic tale.
George Lucas was influenced by Joseph Campbell's Hero. So I'd say that his movies exhibited these motifs because of that. Same with The Matrix. The rest predated Campbell and Jung.
[Corrected miscapitalization.]This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,
Campbell is/was not well-respected by most other academics like Elizabeth Vandiver or the late Alan Dundes. In their opinion he has a story -- the monomyth -- and he forces reality to fit that story. Vandiver described it as taking part of a myth from here and part of a myth from there and constructing a monomyth that actually doesn't exist either here or there.
No worries. We aren't like some other sites that worry about corrections. I've never understood why those sites care about corrections, but that may be because I am in edit mode at all times (and still make mistakes!).
Not being respected by "most other academics" is a broad statement and hard to verify. However, I don't buy Campbell's (or Pink's) theory because it's oversimplified. There are so many different types of heroes that it can't possibly fit for every situation. However, it's a good discussion point, and Pink does write about some business success stories where it's dead on.
Having considered myself a structuralist for a while, I think it is a useful approach to some problems in the interpretation of folktales, legends, myths, etc. But, it's only one of many methods. Some of his colleagues thought Dundes a little too obsessed with his flavor of neo-Freudianism. In one of his lectures he gave an hilarious rundown of all the major schools of interpretation of a single folktale including an exaggerated, parody version of his own. It brought the house down. Vladimir Propp wrote a book, The Morphology of the Folktale, which is considered a classic in this vein, but he was working within a well-defined niche: a certain kind of Russian folktale. A couple of others who went a little to far might be Jung and Levi-Strauss. They took some basic motifs in European writings and ran with them, trying to find examples in far-flung cultures.
