Friday, May 4, 2012

Bleg: Heroes and Heroines

My friend and colleague Tim Perper sent me the following email:
I need some references to canonical or not-so-canonical work on The Hero in lit crit. I'm looking for the kind of book about which knowledgegable people would say "Oh, you haven't read Warnoff's book? Well, you really MUST, you know --" whoever Warnoff may have been. Also anything by various Big Name critics, especially those Southern School guys with three names, like Walter Tamlake Carothers, whoever HE may have been.

I also need some equally canonical, or if not canonical then equally hip, discussion of differences between the Hero and the Heroine.

If you can throw in some Russian formalists, that'd help too. You know, Obstretchnikov's essay on "The Peasant Hero in Russian Folktales," written in 1923 under the influence of -- well, you get the idea.

In a word, I want the basic stuff, without which one is simply ignorant, like I am at the moment.
The first thing that came to mind was Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, which also turned up at the top of a Google Scholar search. Anyone have any suggestions? Anything in that Google list look interesting?

5 comments:

  1. The thing to hand on my book shelf is a rather battered copy of, The Heroic Biography of Cormac Mac Airt by Thomas O Cathasaigh, Dublin 1977

    Not up to date but the introduction gives a survey and discussion of the herioc bib. and discusses the development of the subject along with a number of the early scholars working in the subject, Vohn Han, Otto Rank, Raglan Campbell, De Vries etc.

    Worth a glance if a copy is easy to get hold of.

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  2. p.s A source I also find fascinating is the Gododdin, A.O.H Jarman's version is probable the most available but also versions by John Koch and Kenneth Jackson.

    Its a complex text a series of elegies ranging from 6th cen. to much later (has an organic development). Not come up for discussion by above named but slotted into the middle is mothers cradle song and the start of the poem makes clear that these warriors are young children. Rather interesting with regard to acculturation of violence and the contrast between the warrior and the settled community which is an ancient tension found from the start in this tradition.

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  3. Part 1
    I was recently asked to comment on a paper about heroes in manga and anime, not only in general, but also specifically suggesting sources the author might want to use from other writers and critics. I’m no expert on Heroes in literature, but I know something about manga and anime.
    The paper talks about the nature of the “hero,” failed heroes in particular, about manga and anime, about Fate/Zero and Madoka Magica, about Emiya Kiritsugu and Homura Akemi, and quite a range of other topics. I suggested that some focusing might help, but some related ideas might be more interesting here.
    Thanks to your comments, it sure looks like there’s not all that much written by Western literary critics about the Hero as archetype – Joseph Campbell did a book on such heroes, and there’s a psychoanalytical literature as well, e.g., Otto Rank. However, there IS a good deal of writing on individual heroes in novels, plays, films, and comics. Franco Moretti did a book on the modern epic that covers a lot of this ground, and there are others as well.
    The basic idea is that the concept of the Hero has changed very drastically in Western literary history – for example, starting with tales of King Arthur and of various Irish folk heroes, from a millennium or more ago, and then running into the “death of the hero” in the 19th century “bourgeois” novel, followed by his resurrection as Anti-Hero in the 20th Century, like Rieux, the anti-hero of Camus’ 1947 The Plague. The first kind of hero (King Arthur) is a man – no women in this literature! – who embodies the nation and its people, beliefs, and ideals in himself. The earliest and greatest was perhaps Beowulf from the 700s in Old English – he is archetype of the Ideal Man of his society. In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a masterful essay about this kind of hero. By contrast, Rieux is simply a physician stranded by World War II in Oran when the black plague strikes...
    With the development of the bourgeosie in Europe starting ca. 1850, heroes like King Arthur and Cormac mac Airt faded away into memory. They have reawakened today only as cardboard fossils in modern video games of sword-swinging “heroes” who fight an endless array of multicolor computer monsters. Those computer game “heroes” are NOT heroes in the original sense of a man of great courage facing moral uncertainty and death – like Odysseus in Homer’s poetry or the heroes in medieval stories of Roland.
    Part of the Sartrean existentialist vision – it arose in France after the end of World War II – denies that such heroes can even exist today. Hegel – who wrote an analysis of these king-heroes – is dead; long live Nietzsche – who wrote about the Lesser Man who supplanted the king-hero. With the Lesser Man comes Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) – a failure, not heroic enough even to be tragic. In US supercomics, we move away from one set of cardboard characters, like early Superman and Batman, to other cardboard characters like Peter Parker as Spiderman and Batman, the Dark Knight: the hero as a neurotic. The bourgeois “hero” has become not a heroic king, but Marcus Welby, M.D., played on US television by Robert Young from the 60s to mid-70s, and Jim Anderson, also played by Robert Young on Father Knows Best from the 50s to the mid-70s.

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  4. Part 2.

    Another Lesser Man is Luke Skywalker – and with Star Wars a new element begins to emerge: the heroine starts to replace the Lesser Man in strength, courage, and just plain rattling warriorship. A much discussed subgenre of the Dangerous Heroine is the rape-revenge film, which has attracted a fair amount of critical attention, e.g., by Jacinda Read.

    And by today we have moved into an era of transnational flow of popular culture, and US viewers have encountered manga and anime. Unfortunately for the simplicity of the argument, Japanese aesthetic ideals of heroism are fundamentally different from Western ideals. One cannot simply start talking about Sailor Moon or Magic Knight Rayearth as if they were US comics or animation: the fundamental vision of the hero is different. A good example is the anime Shiki, a genuinely unpleasant story of vampires and a (male) physician, Dr. Toshio Ozaki, who tries to prevent them from seizing power. But it doesn’t work out like that... and the ending is a bloody failure. And when we get to a story like Mardock Scramble, we see once again a different vision of what a heroine is: Rune Balot is nobody to trifle with, not one tiny bit.

    As art forms, manga and anime do not place particular emphasis on perfection, as do Western tales of the Hero (like King Arthur or his bourgeois descendants, such as Marcus Welby). Instead, the heroes are heroic because they struggle against enemies external and internal even though they not only risk death, but may in fact die. By such standards, Homura Akemi is not a failure at all, but a success of the highest order. She is a heroine because, like Rune Balot and like Kanzaki Hitomi in Vision of Escaflowne, she endures. A good introduction to this ethos of heroism is Hayao Kawai’s 1996 The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan. It is NOT Western.

    So it’s an interesting topic, but one that needs a fair amount of filling in about literary history, about manga and anime, and about recent changes in both Western and Japanese aesthetic ideals of the Hero – and the Heroine. Like I said to Bill in an email, it’s all fodder for the brain! Thanks, everyone, for your help.

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  5. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=f899xH_quaMC&pg=PA907&lpg=PA908&ots=p-UAfaAvVF&dq=cu+chulainn+hero+outside+the+tribe#v=onepage&q=cu%20chulainn%20hero%20outside%20the%20tribe&f=false


    P. 908 above in particular

    R. Sharpe, Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish Idech and the Devil's Men, Eriu, 30 (1973): 75-92. 42.


    K. McCone, Werewolves, Cyclopes, Diberga and Fidnna: juvenile delinquency in early Ireland, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 12 (1986): 1-22.


    http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CainAdamnain.asp

    Its a male vision but throw in Mis as she is somewhat interesting in regard to her frenzy and sexual cure.

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V01-76iQ48gC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=Mis+and+Dubh+Ruis&source=bl&ots=H5lv0XLrXr&sig=oYZ8pz6O1cwSN9qh2jg7JvXj894&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ASWrT8SfAtGy8QP6sO3WBA&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Mis%20and%20Dubh%20Ruis&f=false

    Interesting read thanks.

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