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| 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.
