Mythic Imagination Today

Mythic Imagination Today

Author: Terry Marks-Tarlow

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 9004448438

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Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story as a guide to the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life.


Mythic Imagination and the Actor

Mythic Imagination and the Actor

Author: Marissa Chibás

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-08-02

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1000411877

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In Mythic Imagination and the Actor, Marissa Chibás draws on over three decades of experience as a Latinx actor, writer, filmmaker, and teacher to offer an approach to acting that embraces collective imagination, archetypal work, and the mythic. The book begins with a comparative analysis between method acting and mythic acting, encouraging actors to push past the limits of singular life experience and move to a realm where imagination and metaphor thrive. In the context of mythic acting, the book explores awareness work, solo performance creation, the power of archetypes, character building exercises, creating a body/text connection, and how to be the detective of your own process. Through this inclusive guide for a new age of diverse performers traversing gender, ability, culture, and race, readers are able to move beyond their limits to a deep engagement with the infinite possibilities of rich imagination. The final chapter empowers and motivates artists to live healthfully within the practice and create a personal artistic vision plan. Written for actors and students of acting, American Drama, and film and theatre studies, Mythic Imagination and the Actor provides practical exercises and prompts to unlock and interpret an actor’s deepest creative sources.


The Mythic Imagination

The Mythic Imagination

Author: Stephen Larsen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1996-03-01

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1620550938

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Mythology is the universal tongue of human imagination. As a tool for self-discovery, mythology is also a way of gaining access to the secrets of the psyche. The Mythic Imagination is a quest for the ancient source of vision and meaning in the world of dream, myth, and archetype. In the footsteps of Joseph Campbell, Stephen Larsen guides the reader on a journey through the mythic landscape of the psyche. His insight is that all of us, at one time or another, are engaged in creating personal mythologies that reflect the larger myths of the culture and our own deepest desires and aspirations. This book is a guide for bringing the deeper mythic structures of experience into awareness, for learning to recognize the archetypal content embedded in our dreams and daydreams, feelings, beliefs, relationships, conscious creations, and behavior. Student and authorized biographer of Joseph Campbell, Larsen teaches us how to bring myth into our lives. Reissue of the Bantam bestseller.


Deadly Powers

Deadly Powers

Author: Paul A. Trout

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2011-11-15

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1616145021

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In this illuminating and evocative exploration of the origin and function of storytelling, the author goes beyond the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, arguing that mythmaking evolved as a cultural survival strategy for coping with the constant fear of being killed and eaten by predators. Beginning nearly two million years ago in the Pleistocene era, the first stories, Trout argues, functioned as alarm calls, warning fellow group members about the carnivores lurking in the surroundings. At the earliest period, before the development of language, these rudimentary "stories" would have been acted out. When language appeared with the evolution of the ancestral human brain, stories were recited, memorized, and much later written down as the often bone-chilling myths that have survived to this day. This book takes the reader through the landscape of world mythology to show how our more recent ancestors created myths that portrayed animal predators in four basic ways: as monsters, as gods, as benefactors, and as role models. Each incarnation is a variation of the fear-management technique that enabled early humans not only to survive but to overcome their potentially incapacitating fear of predators. In the final chapter, Trout explores the ways in which our visceral fear of predators is played out in the movies, where both animal and human predators serve to probe and revitalize our capacity to detect and survive danger. Anyone with an interest in mythology, archaeology, folk tales, and the origins of contemporary storytelling will find this book an exciting and provocative exploration into the natural and psychological forces that shaped human culture and gave rise to storytelling and mythmaking.


The Golden Horns

The Golden Horns

Author: John L. Greenway

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008-06-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0820332577

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As an introduction to modern myth, The Golden Horns masterfully encompasses a wide circle of historical and literary materials. John Greenway first establishes the theoretical base of his discussion by examining the nature of time in Norse mythic consciousness. After suggesting several ways in which the mythic apprehension of reality conditioned medieval Icelandic narrative, he then elaborates on the dialectical relationship between myth and reason. Maintaining that myth is neither true nor false but always either expressive or not, the author then traces the origin, rise, and fall of two great modern myths of northern birth: seventeenth century Swedish Gothicism and the Ossianic craze of the eighteenth century--both of which illustrate the singular tension in the modern mind between mythic imperatives and the impulse to de-mythologize. Finally, The Golden Horns traces the romantic belief in a "new mythology" which synthesizes myth and reason from its early acceptance through its eventual repudiation. In his conclusions about the state of myth in the modern world, Greenway postulates that we have inherited the romantic respect for myth as truth but lack the romantic faith in transcendence necessary to establish myth's reality. Consequently, we express our mythic consciousness of who we are in quasi-scientific language, consciously manipulating mythic symbols for social control.


Hagitude

Hagitude

Author: Sharon Blackie

Publisher: New World Library

Published: 2022-10-11

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1608688437

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RADICALLY REIMAGINE THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE “There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.” — from the book For any woman over fifty who has ever asked “What now? Who do I want to be?” comes a life-changing book showing how your next phase of life may be your most dynamic yet. As mythologist and psychologist Sharon Blackie describes it, midlife is the threshold to decades of opportunity and profound transformation, a time to learn, flourish, and claim the desires and identities that are often limited during earlier life stages. This is a time for gaining new perspectives, challenging and evolving belief systems, exploring callings, uncovering meaning, and ultimately finding healing for accumulated wounds. Western folklore and mythology are rife with brilliantly creative, fulfilled, feisty, and furious role models for aging women, despite our culture’s focus on youthfulness. Blackie explores these archetypes in Hagitude, presenting them in a way sure to appeal to contemporary women. Drawing inspiration from these examples as well as modern mentors, you can reclaim midlife as a liberating, alchemical moment rich with possibility and your elder years as a path to feminine power.


Your Mythic Journey

Your Mythic Journey

Author: Sam Keen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1989-09-01

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0874775434

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We all tell stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. These personal myths in turn shape who we become and what we believe—as individuals, families, and nations. This book offers readers the tools to detect the story line in their own lives and to write and tell it to others, opening up a hidden world of self-discovery and meaning. The numerous accessible exercises are followed by examples of personal stories and inspiring quotes to stimulate the journey to the center of one's purpose. "By the art of fantasy and imagination, story and image, these authors map the ways personal stories deepen into transpersonal mythic journeys." —David Miller, Ph.D., Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion, Syracuse University


God and the Creative Imagination

God and the Creative Imagination

Author: Paul Avis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1134609388

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'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis argues the contrary: we see that actually, metaphor, symbol and myth, are the key to a real knowledge of God and the sacred. Avis examines what he calls an alternative tradition, stemming from the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth and Keats and drawing on the thought of Cleridge and Newman, and experience in both modern philosophy and science. God and the Creative Imagination intriguingly draws on a number of non-theological disciplines, from literature to philosophy of science, to show us that God is appropriately likened to an artist or poet and that the greatest truths are expressed in an imaginative form. Anyone wishing to further their understanding of God, belief and the imagination will find this an inspiring work.


The Modern Myths

The Modern Myths

Author: Philip Ball

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-10-17

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0226823849

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With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.