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March 22, 2005
My Current Project: Rethinking Myth
The Pick Ted's Hair contest continues here. In the meantime, I feel I should elevate the tone of this blog a smidge by talking a little about my current research project.
Basically, what I'm trying to do is rethink the idea of popular culture as myth. This is a subject that was explored by some academic writing in the 1970s, but was largely dropped for other, hipper formulations. However, I think it's still a compelling framework, for several reasons:
- Myth may not be a hot topic among film academics, but it's very influential among screenwriters, who take Campbell's The Hero's Journey as a template for storytelling.
- Campbell also has a huge cult among new agers and other spiritual seekers. Myth may be a framework for talking about both ideology and spirituality at the same time.
- While psychoanalytic film theory may seem to be at a dead end, turning from Freud to Jung offers new approaches to thinking about the intersection of culture and subjectivity. Certainly, the universe of Hollywood is populated by archetypes - heroes, shadows, wise men, tricksters. Jung may offer a vocabulary to make sense of these figures, and chart their differences.
- Myth also offers a way to think about participatory fan culture. Hollywood provides the mythos, fans rework the stories, just as the Greek playwrights reworked the familiar stories of their age.
- In a globalized world, the ubiquity of Hollywood stories raises questions about the universality of myth. Campbell argued that what he called "the monomyth" is universal. Jung likewise argued that there's a "collective unconscious" we all share. Does this help explain the worldwide appeal of stories like Star Wars? Certainly, Campbell's and Jung's universalism is unfasionable in anti-essentialist academia right now. Universalism can often mean casual generalization of ethnocentrism. But in a world that needs to imagine a community bigger than the nation, isn't there a place for recognizing the ties that bind us all together? Can't a more subtle, open universalism be a kind of cosmopolitanism?
I taught a class about some of these ideas last fall, Narrative, Myth and Ideology. This fall, I'll be teaching an undergraduate class on some of the same ideas, The Hero's Journey. I'm working on the syllabus for that one right now. I'm also reading up on Jung, who I'm liking even more than I expected to. I recommend Introducing Jung
and Jung: A Very Short Introduction.
So far, I've written one essay as a first hack at some of these ideas: Star Wars and the Dialectics of Myth. If you have a chance, please do check it out and post your comments.
Writing my first book was often a lonely experience. I'm hoping that this time around, I can work out a lot of my ideas here, online.
Posted by tedf at March 22, 2005 03:09 AM
Comments
If you want any help on the myth stuff. I have tons. Considering I have published and presented a little bit on it. Especially, political myth, epic, ideology, sacred myth...etc. Talk to Tanya Cochran about Buffy and Myth, the project we are looking to do
Posted by: Jason at March 24, 2005 05:10 PM
Cool, thanks. I'd love to see your stuff on myth, as well as get some reading recommendations. I know the literature in film studies and anthropology, but I'm sure there's a whole parallel rhetorical theory tradition.
Posted by: Ted at March 24, 2005 10:20 PM
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