In Which I Am Totally Confused by a Book

So you liked The Power of Myth?  You're gonna hate this guy's book. (Photo credit: jay mann)

This week, I am supposed to be describing one of the sources I found, and I'm not sure that I can.  Here's the MLA citation for it (sorry, I can't figure out how to do the hanging indent here):

Manganaro, Marc.  Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority:  A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, & Campbell.  New Haven:  Yale UP, 1996.  Print.

And, here's the problem:  I really, really, really don't understand what this guy is saying, partly because of his writing and partly because he's talking about some ideas I never heard of  before (and when I looked them up, I had trouble understanding the definitions.  Semiotics?  Hermaneutics?  Huh?).  Mostly, it seems to me that he is saying that considering myth when you read literature is pointless.  I don't get it, especially since he seems to think that it's okay for T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to do it -- but not Frazer, Frye, or Campbell (he seems to really dislike Campbell).

Finally, here's the kicker:  he doesn't give me anything to work with for my project.  As far as I can see, he is so against this approach that he doesn't try to apply it to see if he gets anything out of it.

I thought that I must be reading this wrong, so I showed it to Dr. Toffee.  She skimmed the introduction, then went to the afterword, and she started laughing.  It appears that I actually read it correctly and he is just trying to convince people that there is no value in myth criticism.  This baffled me even more, and she could tell that I was really messed up.  She asked me, "When you are thinking about your film from the standpoint of myth, are you finding things in the film that you didn't see before?  And, are you enjoying it?"

After a moment's thinking, I said yes and yes.  She said, "then he's wrong, and there is value in it because it makes your experience of this work of art more meaningful for you."

I feel better, but I'm not sure why.

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My Working Thesis Won't Work

Dwarves at the Council of Elrond in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I've got a working thesis for my research project, but I don't think it will work in the long run, since it seems kind of obvious to me.   I need to come up with something that more people will disagree with.  For now, I'm going with "Each of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring is a hero in his own right and on his own hero's journey."  This doesn't really take the archetypes into consideration, and that's what I'm most interested in, which is why I'm not happy with it. 

Just now I thought, or remembered, that I'm confined to the first film (which I have sort of been ignoring), and I'm wondering if you can really tell from FOTR alone that each one is a hero.  I mean, it's obvious once the entire trilogy is over, but at the end of the first film, Frodo and Sam have gone off on their own, Boromir and Gandalf (supposedly) are dead and the rest are split, with Merry and Pippin captured by orcs and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli trailing them.

And, I just thought of something else that deserves its own post, so that's all for now.

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Research Plan- Hero Archetypes

The Power of Interlibrary Loan (Photo credit: Newton Free Library)

I turned in my research proposal on Wednesday, and I think it was okay.  Now I'm supposed to be coming up with a research plan (through 3/27), and I need to get going, because the annotated working bibliography is due on 3/13.  What I've done so far is kind of random:  searching the web for usable (i.e. scholarly) sites, a stab at finding journal articles, and a quick book search.  Even though The Fellowship of the Ring is not a superhero story, I thought that I had found a good book for the project in Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, by Jeffrey J. Kripal, because of the way it was described, so I ordered it on interlibrary loan, but it's not very helpful as far as I can see (it's interesting, though, and I had to keep myself from just reading it anyway).  I'm going to get more organized, starting now. 
Here's my plan:
Week 4 (this week):  Search for book reviews in Academic Search Premier (Dr. Toffee showed us in class that you can click on book review in the document type menu and it'll sort them out for you).  I'll have to skim the reviews for now, and then I'll get at least three of the books from the library or ILL.  
Week 5 (2/18):  Assuming I get the books right away, I'll read their introductions and check the index and table of contents for stuff specifically about heroes and hero archetypes.  And, I'll do the MLA works cited entries and annotations to start my bib.
Week 6 (2/25):  Articles!  Have to find them, then read them, and that may take me through week 7 (3/4).  I want to do the entries and annotations as I go so that all I have to do in order to turn in the bib on 3/13 is double check the MLA rules.
The literature review draft is due on 3/19, so I also intend to pull out the sources for that as I'm compiling the bib.  By that time, I should have a good idea (I hope!) of whatever else I'll need to write the argument essay, which I will then try to locate, and that takes me up to 3/27 (week 9). 

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Elrond's Council and the Heroes

The eponymous Fellowship from left to right: (Top row) Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Boromir, (bottom row) Sam, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Gimli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week, I'm supposed to be answering the question, "What have you found in a scene (using the model)?"  The scene that made me choose The Fellowship of the Ring for my research project is the council scene at Rivendell where representatives of the various groups of Middle Earthers (there has to be a better way of putting that!) are trying to decide what to do about the ring.  What I thought from the beginning is that all of the men arriving for the meeting look like heroes.  The way that they each have their own moment onscreen seems to be saying, "pay attention!  This guy is important."  And the rest of the scene bears that out.  Each of them is on his own quest, with his own priorities and agenda, which leads me to what I think is the biggest discovery I made:  they all volunteer for those reasons, not because of the reason Elrond and Gandalf see as overwhelming, that the ring must be destroyed.

And just now, writing this, it occurs to me that their individual reasons (I'm just guessing at this point) determine the outcomes each of them will experience.  Does that make sense?  We'll see. 

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