Like all bookish, film, tv and box-set-loving, literary, narrative bores and writer-types, I am very interested in Joseph Campbell’s mythic structure the hero’s journey, or monomyth, as it sometimes goes (a word borrowed from James Joyce). In the monomyth, just on the rare off chance that you had a hangover on that day it was covered in your media studies class, there are 17 (or 12 in a slightly simpler version) stages for our hero to go on. If we ever read or watch something that we can’t retro-fit these stages to, like the sophisticated narratologists and Soviet folklorist wannabes that we are, it often means that we have endured an unsatisfactory narrative.
A story that no one knows they are in…
A story that no one knows they are in…
A story that no one knows they are in…
Like all bookish, film, tv and box-set-loving, literary, narrative bores and writer-types, I am very interested in Joseph Campbell’s mythic structure the hero’s journey, or monomyth, as it sometimes goes (a word borrowed from James Joyce). In the monomyth, just on the rare off chance that you had a hangover on that day it was covered in your media studies class, there are 17 (or 12 in a slightly simpler version) stages for our hero to go on. If we ever read or watch something that we can’t retro-fit these stages to, like the sophisticated narratologists and Soviet folklorist wannabes that we are, it often means that we have endured an unsatisfactory narrative.