The heroes’ journey being formed from both Christohper Volger in his book the Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In analyzing the heroes journey, I will establish the need for them in creating a great story using books and films as examples. Going through the stages of the journey and what role they add to the novel. I will analyze Joseph’s Campbell’s version of the monomyth drawing on the value of his analysis of the journey. I will also compare Villain’s by Necessity to other texts, such as, Lord of The Rings to show the traditional way high fantasy novel emulates the monomyth. This essay aims to explore and explain the phenomenon of the Hero’s Journey and the various archetypes known in folklore, and show the ways in which the novel by Eve Forward, Villains by Necessity, conforms to this subject, although her presenting the villains as heroes. The proposed theoretical model is shown to be a viable alternative to post-structuralist approaches as far as the study of action cinema is concerned, with its ample scope serving as its principal advantage. Thus, the thesis proposes terminology that differentiates between cultural units totally dominated by biology, partially tied to it, and completely independent of it, albeit spread in ways reminiscent of biological evolution. In addition to the attempts of revealing glimpses of our evolved nature in the plots, narrative conventions, cinematography, themes, motivations, settings, and character networks in the films, the thesis attempts to balance the hardliner literary Darwinist stance of the dominance of biology over culture, with an acknowledgement of the existence of cultural transmission and stylistic evolution. A particular emphasis is put on the monomyth as a story paradigm that all the films in the case studies share, whose combination of a biologically dictated scaffolding, and cultural brickwork, is an excellent testing ground for the theoretical model. The thesis is divided in four main parts: (1) an introduction, that gives a rationale for the aim, scope, and the design of the thesis, (2) a theoretical framework, which provides both an overview of the theories and fits them in the general model, (3) a part including the case studies, that puts the theoretical approach to the test, and finally (4) a conclusion that gives a verdict on the feasibility of the model and summarizes the findings.
The aim of the thesis is to provide an overview of three contemporary action films: Dredd 3D, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road, through a so-called "bio-structuralist" approach - combining archetypal criticism, literary Darwinism, and narratology, into a unified, holistic theoretical model.
0 kommentar(er)
