The Power of Myth: Thoughts 1

So, the first readings appear to be from a transcript of a conversation between mythology author Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. The conversations were aired a year after his death on PBS on a program called, unsurprisingly, Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Apparently, Campbell was a popular professor and lecturer in life. I find it interesting that after he graduated, he felt aimless and unsure of his future, so he went on a journey across America, like a modern spirit quest. The Joseph Campbell Foundation states that he wrote in his journal in 1932: "I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects...I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I'm at a loss."(http://www.jcf.org...) But it looks like he was able to use his interests to make a living for himself, in the end.

There's probably lots of kids nowadays that know that feel.

I first ran into Joseph Campbell in High School, in grade 9 or 10, where in one of our units was devoted to the concept of the Hero's Journey and how it related to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. From my teacher's introduction of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, I got the impression that The Hero's Journey was a very influential concept in fictional literature, acting as a guideline to pinpoint the common threads between past heroic myths worldwide as stories about maturation. I suppose it was presented to us as students so that we could determine what makes modern heroic tales compelling. In a way, they echo the tales of the past that endured within the culture they were formed. Some of them still endure even in modern cultures.

The gospel singing Muses were probably stretching it a bit...

I remember reading an article that was written by someone who did a lot of travelling and how they noticed that people everywhere generally had the same hopes, dreams and fears regardless of their cultural differences. You could say these common threads unite us as a species; help us communicate with concepts and images. Therefore these themes and concepts show up in our myths and allow them to cross time and different cultures. Personally, I love myths. Not only because they capture the imagination, but because they have a sort of universal quality to their narratives that come from humanity's fears, hopes and desires as a whole. Since this course is about consumption culture, I'm assuming we'll be coming to the conclusion that through this language of myth, tropes and archetypes, modern businesses perpetuate the consumer culture by appealing to these collective hopes, fears and desires...but advertisers have only a few minutes or a limited area in the newspaper or on a website, so it's easier to use a visual language that many people can relate to and understand.

References after the jump.


References

The Joseph Campbell Foundation. (2012). About Joseph Campbell. Retreived from http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php?categoryid=11