The Myth of the Student Hero and the “Dreaded Lit Review”

Endnotes

The perspective used in this book is a combination of ideas related to myth and ideology. Drawn from various sources (works by Kenneth Burke, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Helena Bassil-Morozow), the ideas sometimes clash with one another or are used in different ways by the various authors. It is beyond the scope of this monograph to offer a unified theoretical perspective. However, the basic framework is an integration of archetype and ideology. Useful discussions also include Laurence Coupe's Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction (2005) and the rhetorical criticism of Rushing and Frentz (1989, 1991) and mythic analyses of comic book superheroes including Batman (Terrell 1993, 2000) and Spiderman (Koh, 2009). It is worth noting that the presence of myth in comics is mentioned in Carl Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959/1969), which cites an article by Alan McGlashan, "Daily Paper Pantheon: A New Fantasia of the Unconscious," which was published in The Lancet on Jan. 31, 1953. The article cites ideas that are common to both Carl Jung and Kenneth Burke.

My representation of "The Myth of the Student Hero and the Dreaded Lit Review," is also guided by Joseph Campbell's mythic perspective, where the hero leaves the world, goes into a strange new world, and then returns, with something of great value that will help the hero's culture, tribe, society, or world. Campbell is well-regarded in terms of his popularizing the idea of myth (cf. Ricketts, 1993; Segal, 1987).

The primary concern is the application of ideas about myth and ideology to the study of students' comics. The comics may be thought of as rhetorical responses that students create after having finished writing a "standard academic paper," specifically, a "literature review." While I view the assignment of the "literature review" as a "normal" assignment for college students, the literature review is often a source of shame by students. And the students' comics serve as compensatory creative work that addresses that shame. My analysis of students' comics suggests the presence of a myth that is also an ideological resistance to, and affirmation of, the political power structures that guide student life within the context of my class, and university life in general. Similar to Bassil-Morozow (2015), I view the "shadow" and the "trickster" as "two developmental stages of the same phenomenon--the drive to be an individual, to be a personality, to leave one's mark on the world" (p. 56). Students' feelings of guilt and shame are not revealed in the text of the "literature review." However, those feelings of guilt and shame, as well as triumph and accomplishment, are reflected in the students' comics.

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