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. |
From inside the book
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... philosopher Karl Jaspers ( 1883–1969 ) talks about these shocking moments of encounter with the world as ' boundary experiences ' , moments in which our experience of order and meaning and sense is threatened , usually by extreme danger ...
... philosophers such as Plato , Descartes and Kant , all of whom sought to estab- lish an absolute and primarily rational ... philosopher who ever lived , sought to establish the notion of a universe founded upon unchanging absolutes , what ...
... philosopher Hegel made a similar point when he argued that religion - and he had Christianity in mind here - was ... philosophers such as A.J.Ayer , Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein , took this perspective as far as it ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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