Customer Reviews

The Creative Myth and The Cosmic Hero (The Reshaping of Psychoanalysis, Vol 3)

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For those literature students or literary minded people who find the great bulk of critical models often destroy the very art that they purportedly enrich, this book offers a delightfully refreshing approach. A study based loosely on Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, The Creative Myth and the Cosmic Hero proposes a rich interdisciplinary approach to the interpretation of literature as sacred cultural icon and totem for individual direction. While the intended audience of the book is a decidedly academic one, the rhetoric and wordplay of the author are accesible to anyone with a basic knowledge of mythic interplay within visceral cultural myths and contemporary media. While applying the fundamentally structuralist "Monomyth" system to everything from Greek mythology to relatively recent works of fiction and film, Dr. Ron Evans advocates an inclusive and life-affirming approach to the asthetic that enlivens even the most cursory of readings. Delving into the anthropological work of Joseph Campbell, the social philosophies of Otto Rank, and the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung, Evans emerges with a paradigm for literary theory that is both uplifting and intellectually coherant. For those who wish to read inclusively, to draw new life to old texts or provide a critical framework for the appraisal of new ones, I highly encourage this book as an overview of mythic readings. The result is an appreciation for literature as a useful guide through one's own heroic struggle.