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eveningstar2 's review for:
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell
Campbell is the real deal. There is a reason Joseph Campbell is one of the very, very few academic intellectuals to achieve widespread recognition among popular readers, and this book is it.
Hero With A Thousand Faces is Campbell's exploration of the Hero's Journey, or the 'monomyth,' a broad, modular but clearly defined narrative pattern evident in the hero tales of every mythology, and therefore situated within the core of human storytelling tradition.
Campbell's style is dense and eloquent, but brisk. He tends to leap from example to example and his sentences are rich with metaphor and abstraction, as is expected and necessary in a scholastic work. But Campbell (unlike, say, Derrida or Lacan or Barthes or any number of post-modern scholars) takes no pride in attempting to fog his reader with literary obscurism or messy, abstract language. His style is clear, yet challenging, and reading him is like trying to study an intricately carved and multifaceted jewel.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves mythology, literary theory, storytelling, or is just fascinated by human culture and doesn't mind having their mind blown a few times.
Hero With A Thousand Faces is Campbell's exploration of the Hero's Journey, or the 'monomyth,' a broad, modular but clearly defined narrative pattern evident in the hero tales of every mythology, and therefore situated within the core of human storytelling tradition.
Campbell's style is dense and eloquent, but brisk. He tends to leap from example to example and his sentences are rich with metaphor and abstraction, as is expected and necessary in a scholastic work. But Campbell (unlike, say, Derrida or Lacan or Barthes or any number of post-modern scholars) takes no pride in attempting to fog his reader with literary obscurism or messy, abstract language. His style is clear, yet challenging, and reading him is like trying to study an intricately carved and multifaceted jewel.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves mythology, literary theory, storytelling, or is just fascinated by human culture and doesn't mind having their mind blown a few times.