Critical Paper #1: Heroes and Monsters (due April 1st!--no joke!)

“There really is no Western counterpart in either the Hellenic or Hebraic tradition to the influence that this originally secular story, transmitted orally through many centuries, has exerted over millions of people…The Ramayana continues to have a profound emotional and psychological resonance for Indians” (Pankaj Mishra, Introduction to Narayan’s The Ramayana)

INTRO: The stories in both Narayan’s version of The Ramayana and Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories are relatively familiar stories of heroes and monsters, which we can find in hundreds of movies and comic books. And yet these stories have survived their historical moment and have literally become myths: they are told and re-told in books, films, TV shows, comic books, etc. The heroes of these tales, such as Rama and Hanuman, have become cultural heroes and religious figures in their own right. And the monsters, such as Jinniki and Yuki-Onna, have terrorized entire generations of children too scared to go to sleep. They are like Mt. Fuji or the Taj Mahal—a living embodiment of the culture and all who speak its language.

PROMPT: For this paper, I want you to examine a work of art that you feel is primed to make the jump from fiction to myth in our own society. This work of art should be something MODERN, meaning within the last 50 years. However, it can be anything from a book, a movie, a TV series, a band, etc., but it should be something that has a significant fan base and has characters that are known outside the work itself. Why do you think this work could become a myth? What elements of the characters and the story propel it beyond mere entertainment? When did people start to notice it? Was it always popular, or did some event or re-telling of the story make it transform into something immortal? Also, why did it start here, for example, and not somewhere else; what does it say about our notions of heroes and villains?

REMEMBER: Be sure to relate it to one or both of the works in class, and discuss how your might follow in the example of Rama or another hero in the epic; or, how your villain might be as horrific and uncanny as some of the monsters in Hearn’s stories. If Hearn and Narayan offer the blueprint for literary mythmaking, how might your work be following the prototype?

REQUIREMENTS

• No page limit: that’s up to you. But do your best work rather than the bare minimum. I’ll grade this one a bit harder than your Group Project, since this is all about you (and you can revise it, too).
• Discuss ONE significant work from the last 50 years that you feel is making the jump from entertainment to mythology
• Discuss and QUOTE from one or both works in class to show how it might share many of the same thumbprints of the previous works
• DUE FRIDAY, APRIL 1^st BY 5pm (no class that day: go to the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival instead!)