denounce the visage and tear off the mask

| history phd student | us history, 18th century history, art history, homosexuality, architecture, historic fashion... |

[catilinas]

emily wilson translating the odyssey a second time???

[kotkafromjupiter]

my study of baikal seal... oughh i love their big wet eyess

[blankinyourhead]

Jingyi Li - Lean on me

[dogpuppy]

[lyouve]

Books are so cool because there are no fucking ads in them

[centuriespast]

Acropolis Museum

photo by Hilary Harley

[detailsofpaintings]

François-André Vincent, Alcibiade recevant les leçons de Socrate (detail)

1777

[onlymollygibson]

"I asked chatgpt-" well I asked Lady Catherine de Bourgh and she condescended to advise me on the arrangement of my humble abode.

[history-of-fashion]

ab. 1600 Anonym, Netherlands - Portrait of a woman

(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

[vastwinterskies]

good thing they didnt have Grindr during the age of sail imagine coming into range of the enemy and in the tense quiet before the storm all your officers' phones go off

[centuriespast]

DADDI, Bernardo St Catherine of Alexandria 1334-36 Tempera and gold on panel, 62 x 31 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco

[oldpaintings]

Woman with a Cat and Ivy by Juan Nepomuceno María Bernabé del Corazón de Jesús Cordero de Hoyos (Mexican, 1824–1884)

[orteil42]

[publishing research thesis] lol is this anything

[energyprison]

Male Hysteria is a condition where a prolonged lack of prostate stimulation causes the patient to behave eratic and promiscuous, often to the detriment of his own life and the lives of others. Unfortunately it has never been diagnosed even once because nobody cares about mens mental health

[evilvillain123456789]

what you experience is hyperfixation, which is pathological. what I experience is psychosexual obsession， which is also pathological, but in a darkly chic and subversive way. thank you for understanding.

[pangur-and-grim]

alright, I’m annoyed with the class that I’m taking. it’s about writing novels, and I thought it would have cool stuff about balancing your narrative and developing themes etc, but instead she spent the first class talking about how every book fits into the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth template). and I was somewhat of a contrarian, and said “can you give us examples of books that don’t fit into this template?” and she said “no. because all books fit.”

but I dunno man, I just finished reading this Korean book where the plot is just the character having a string of hookups and reflecting on them without changing in any way. I don’t know if it’s possible to contort that into the Hero’s Journey.

[pangur-and-grim]

[caughtthedarkness93]

Even inside the western canon, it doesn't fit very well way more often than people like to admit. Even inside the very stories that Campbell built it off of.

For example: Beowulf does not follow the hero's journey. I have a pet theory that Beowulf is three or four stories that kind of got mashed together since it's a collection of a couple vignettes about this warrior's life and the dragon episode is rather disconnected from Grendel (unless you're John Gardner, who ties it all together in his novel Grendel). Beowulf emerges as a full-blown hero when he enters the narrative, does not have a mentor, does not refuse the call (and rather wholeheartedly embraces it in fact - "Not only am I gonna slay your monster, I'm gonna slay your monster with my ass hanging out to show off"), does not live in the normal world at any point. One could argue he returns with the elixir to his home, given that the later story has him as a king, but the story's not interested in explaining much about how that happened and keeps going after the hero's journey would claim it should end, instead jumping to Beowulf's noble sacrificial death. You really have to squeeze to fit Beowulf into that framework, and by the point where it does, you've lost all semblance of a common structure the monomyth claims to represent. Arguably, the Iliad doesn't it either, given the scope of the story is a lot smaller than some people seem to believe.

Like I get the point that the original post was making about the western canon being so heavy with authors from the US and western Europe and not caring much about works from cultures beyond that, but I feel it's worth noting that even if you grade Campbell's ideas on the most generous possible curve, they don't hold up.

And even if we pretend they did, he never intended them as a writing guide. They were only popularized as one when George Lucas took that structure and adapted it to Star Wars.

And it's always worth mentioning that Maggie Mae Fish did a really good breakdown of Campbell and the Hero's Journey and why it's flawed. It's well worth watching. It's what got me questioning it in the first place.

[seeliequeene]

Birth of Saint John the Baptist (detail), Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1485-90