Hi all.
I was thinking about this last night, the reason that, although I enjoy Joseph Campbell's work immensely and think it's a wonderful contribution, I haven't ever been able to see it as quite correct. It seems that what he really did in explaining how myth operates is, quite literally, create a primer on literary conflict. It deals with the rising action, the climax, the falling action, noting the various ways that each can be expressed, that sometimes they're expressed with this mechanism, sometimes this other one, sometimes both are used. Maybe Joseph Campbell never really meant it as anything more than this. It doesn't seem to me like much more than a bare permutable skeletal structure, before any meaning is really applied besides entering a conflict, dealing with it, and coming to a resolution. It's almost like to me, it's far more important an observation for literature than it is for religion, and really only applies to religion secondarily in that myth is literary by nature, whether oral stories or written. Maybe the real contribution Joseph Campbell made was in helping to more greatly develop humanity's sense of myth as literature and literature as myth.
What are your thoughts?
Dauer
I was thinking about this last night, the reason that, although I enjoy Joseph Campbell's work immensely and think it's a wonderful contribution, I haven't ever been able to see it as quite correct. It seems that what he really did in explaining how myth operates is, quite literally, create a primer on literary conflict. It deals with the rising action, the climax, the falling action, noting the various ways that each can be expressed, that sometimes they're expressed with this mechanism, sometimes this other one, sometimes both are used. Maybe Joseph Campbell never really meant it as anything more than this. It doesn't seem to me like much more than a bare permutable skeletal structure, before any meaning is really applied besides entering a conflict, dealing with it, and coming to a resolution. It's almost like to me, it's far more important an observation for literature than it is for religion, and really only applies to religion secondarily in that myth is literary by nature, whether oral stories or written. Maybe the real contribution Joseph Campbell made was in helping to more greatly develop humanity's sense of myth as literature and literature as myth.
What are your thoughts?
Dauer