Rodney Standen
wish the summary on the back was a little more clear, I read this book with the initial impression that it might help my instruction on the teaching of world mythology and the my unit on the monomyth/hero journey.
I teach high school and I wanted to look at little deeper at “the hero”,
Standen takes all his research and pours it into his thesis, It is exactly that, his completed thesis paper, and it reads like such, His language is occasionally forced using a bizarre syntax to try to show off this intelligence, He has a few moments of brilliance and a few lines in which I laughed at his conjectures, The best part of the book is the bibliography, He does a great job threading quotations from Jung, Campbell, Nietzsche, Pound, Ginsberg, and many others throughout to support his points.
Overall, it is a good read, It went quick, but Im glad I read it, Would I read it again No well maybe just do some highlighting of great Jungian thought,
Very frustrating. First off, the thought process is so scattershot that I completely missed whatever the author's "thesis" was supposed to be, though this is indeed some sort of thesis which is somehow a comment on ancient and contemporary concepts heroism.
Often he drops heavy or loaded statements without even bothering to elaborate such as when on page six he writes that "our culture asserts that consciousness and spirit are masculine".
Uh, according to who WTF does that even mean How does a masculine consciousness differ from a female one and what evidence do you have to support that "our society" favors one over the other That's an incredibly loaded and sexist premise to fire off at the end of the introduction, which several sentences later cheerily declares: "individuation and Selfrealization are for everybody.
" It would have been far better to just say that perhaps all the heroes in classical literature are male simply because they were written by men.
Duh.
The author has this idiotic obsession with the word "individuation" which he is likely using in reference to Jungian ideas but which is so overdone that I'm actually skeptical if the man even knows what it means.
One could only "individuate" so much right Individuation is the psychological process by which mature consciousness and selfawareness are developed from childhood to adults, but Rodney Standen continually writes of it as if it were new power levels to be attained in some bad video game or Dragon Ball Z script, without ever explaining.
He uses the word so much that I think I now hate it for one of those things pseudointellectuals throw around in order to sound intelligent.
The summaries and analyses of various literary works and their heroes is cute and occasionally fun until you are continually reminded that each discussion really doesn't contribute towards any sort of thesis at all or until your tolerance of excessive "individuation" breaks.
It's like he decided to spend
each chapter discussing various works he read and threw them into the book on the specious assertion that it has something to do with the vague heading of the "changing face of the hero.
" Psychologically speaking, people need heroes, Heroes are the heart of our fantasies, But our heroes change with the times, For instance "Yesterday's hero, John Wayne," writes Rodney Standen, "could punch and sashay his way across the western plains, Today's John Wayne is a master of martial arts, . . No Superman, but almost able to leap tall buildings, " Here, believes the author, is a single example of the changing face of the heroa hero who has become wise and has made a journey within.
I teach high school and I wanted to look at little deeper at “the hero”,
Standen takes all his research and pours it into his thesis, It is exactly that, his completed thesis paper, and it reads like such, His language is occasionally forced using a bizarre syntax to try to show off this intelligence, He has a few moments of brilliance and a few lines in which I laughed at his conjectures, The best part of the book is the bibliography, He does a great job threading quotations from Jung, Campbell, Nietzsche, Pound, Ginsberg, and many others throughout to support his points.
Overall, it is a good read, It went quick, but Im glad I read it, Would I read it again No well maybe just do some highlighting of great Jungian thought,
Very frustrating. First off, the thought process is so scattershot that I completely missed whatever the author's "thesis" was supposed to be, though this is indeed some sort of thesis which is somehow a comment on ancient and contemporary concepts heroism.
Often he drops heavy or loaded statements without even bothering to elaborate such as when on page six he writes that "our culture asserts that consciousness and spirit are masculine".
Uh, according to who WTF does that even mean How does a masculine consciousness differ from a female one and what evidence do you have to support that "our society" favors one over the other That's an incredibly loaded and sexist premise to fire off at the end of the introduction, which several sentences later cheerily declares: "individuation and Selfrealization are for everybody.
" It would have been far better to just say that perhaps all the heroes in classical literature are male simply because they were written by men.
Duh.
The author has this idiotic obsession with the word "individuation" which he is likely using in reference to Jungian ideas but which is so overdone that I'm actually skeptical if the man even knows what it means.
One could only "individuate" so much right Individuation is the psychological process by which mature consciousness and selfawareness are developed from childhood to adults, but Rodney Standen continually writes of it as if it were new power levels to be attained in some bad video game or Dragon Ball Z script, without ever explaining.
He uses the word so much that I think I now hate it for one of those things pseudointellectuals throw around in order to sound intelligent.
The summaries and analyses of various literary works and their heroes is cute and occasionally fun until you are continually reminded that each discussion really doesn't contribute towards any sort of thesis at all or until your tolerance of excessive "individuation" breaks.
It's like he decided to spend
each chapter discussing various works he read and threw them into the book on the specious assertion that it has something to do with the vague heading of the "changing face of the hero.
" Psychologically speaking, people need heroes, Heroes are the heart of our fantasies, But our heroes change with the times, For instance "Yesterday's hero, John Wayne," writes Rodney Standen, "could punch and sashay his way across the western plains, Today's John Wayne is a master of martial arts, . . No Superman, but almost able to leap tall buildings, " Here, believes the author, is a single example of the changing face of the heroa hero who has become wise and has made a journey within.
Like Luke Skywalker of "Star Wars" fame A hero among a trilogy of heroes that are, in truth, pure Jungian archetypes.
Beginning with Odysseus,,years ago, Standen develops his theme on an age to age basis, He demonstrates that the hero of yesterday, the swashbuckling doer of miracles, has metamorphosed into today's svelte, sophisticated Odysseus, Who goes under the name James Bond,
This engrossing study of man's collective unconscious is supported with resource material drawn from Carl Jung, James Joyce, Nikos Kazantzakis, Tolstoy, Hesse, Maugham, and others.