The first warning sign came in the introduction, where the name 'Joseph Campbell' stared me dead in the face, glassy-eyed, unwashed gutter-breath sputtering a theory that refuses to stay dead.
When the Science in Your Storytelling is Sus
https://brologue.net/2024/07/18/author-author-theres-an-evopsych-in-my-book/
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Content warning thread 2/1. literature's cryptid - the monomyth
As Spencer McDaniel writes, The Hero's Journey may be a vox pop method of storytelling, but it's no #Monomyth:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
Content warning thread 3/
The #Monomyth theory is far too blurry to claim any historical provenance. That's why it's nonsense. It promises to be a theory of everything for literature, yet when stood against the historical record, it's no more a crack at making the Philosopher's Stone; a minority of clichés that, today, could be found on TV Tropes with a thousand non-exhaustive sub-articles. Interpreting stories with it involves more shifting goalposts to get them to fit than it's worth.
Content warning thread 4/
And yet, for it to be "thoroughly entrenched in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world," surely it's not all nonsense? Fantasy writer #BrandonSanderson, for example, cites it in this creative #writing lecture:
Content warning thread 5/
It's more accurate to say that the Hero's Journey is a product of the last half-century, urged into relevance from the writers of Star Wars, who found the myth of the #monomyth to be, based on their own experiences, 'true enough.' The problem with this is that once you start judging literature only through what stories have in common, you grow cynical of the idea that literature builds upon itself.
Content warning thread 6/
As Rachael Lefler of Owlcation writes: "Why bother reading both the Aenid AND Watership Down if they're essentially the same book?"
https://owlcation.com/humanities/How-Monomyth-Theories-Get-It-Wrong-About-Fiction
