Heroes and VillainsHercules, Jesus, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, Frodo, Harry Potter, Buffy Summers, Spiderman, Batman, Captain Kirk, Dr. Who, Darth Vader, Sauron, Voldemort, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, the Daleks, the Borg. Almost anybody living in the developed West would be able to group these individuals into two camps: the heroes and the villains. However, what criteria they may use to do this is less clear. Mike Alsford introduces us to a range of heroic and villainous archetypes on a journey through film, television, comic books, and literature. On the way, he addresses questions such as: What is a true hero? What is a true villain? Have we misunderstood these terms? What kind of societal values do our mythical heroes and villains represent? In trying to understand the extremes of hero and villain we are made more aware of our own ethical standards and given a space in which to explore contemporary concerns over notions of right and wrong, good and bad. |
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... dependent upon their capacity to transcend the mundane world and thus to bring into it salvific powers unavailable to ordinary humanity . Campbell puts it like this : - The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a ...
... rational beings , claims Kant , must be regarded as ends in themselves and never as means . It is things and not people that are conditioned and rigidly dependent upon nature and its laws and The Outsider : Heroes and Otherness 27.
Mike Alsford. conditioned and rigidly dependent upon nature and its laws and thus , while things are ultimately of relative value , people are of absolute value . Persons , therefore , are not merely subjective ends whose existence as an ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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