Evans Lansing Smith

This Skeleton Key Study Guide to Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander lets you read Campbell alongside a Campbell expert, focusing on the origins of myth and the enduring power of metaphor and symbols. In this helpful guide, you'll find chapter summaries, notable quotes, reading suggestions, essay and discussion topics, and prompts for creative projects.The Joseph Campbell Foundation's Skeleton Key Study Guides offer entryways into the work of Joseph Campbell for teachers, students, and myth-minded readers. Written by a contemporary expert in myth, this guide will help you discover the joy of Campbell's insights so you can apply them to your life.

Tikkun refers to the Kabbalistic mythology associated with the Sephiroth, vessels created to contain the energies emanating from the divine (En-Sof). Those vessels were unable to contain those energies and were shattered by their force. The broken shards fall in a shower of sparks into the dark abyss where they are captured by the Archons, demons of the deep. The shattering of the vessels is called Shevirah, and the job of reconstruction Tikkun. The sparks of light trapped in the abyss of the material world represent our souls, trapped in the body. It is our task to put the broken pieces back together in order to create new vessels that can contain the original energies of the divine. Hence, these essays can be seen as containers of the shattered sparks of inspiration that illuminate the literature and the arts which they celebrate. Hence, I dedicate this volume to those creative men and women who composed works of art capable of containing those archetypal energies.Evans Lansing Smith is Chair and Core Faculty of the Mythological Studies Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, CA. In the 1970s, he traveled with Joseph Campbell on mythological study tours of Northern France, Egypt, and Kenya. He has taught at colleges in Switzerland, Maryland, Texas, and California. He is the recipient of awards for distinguished teaching and publication from Midwestern State University in Texas, and the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and he was nominated for the International Writer of the Year by the International Biography Centre (Cambridge, England). His Ph.D. in literature is from The Claremont Graduate School, and he has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch International (London and Dublin), and a B.A. in English from Williams College. He is the author of a novel, two books of poetry, plus eleven books and numerous articles on comparative literature and mythology. He has given presentations for the C.G. Jung Institutes in K snacht and New York City, the Seattle Friends of Jung, the Modern Language Association, the American Association for the Study of Popular Culture, the Study of Myth Conference at Pacifica Graduate Institute, the Ojai Writer's Conference, and the Casa dei Pesci at Circeo San Felice, in Italy. His edited volume of Joseph Campbell's writings and lectures on the Grail Romances was published in 2015, and his edition of the Selected Correspondence of Joseph Campbell in 2019. He has also led mythological study tours focusing on the Grail Romances in England and France. The current volume brings together essays and reflections on the complex interrelationships between literature, film, art, mythology, and life gathered over the course of a forty-year career, so greatly enriched by the simple but now endangered activities of reading, writing, and teaching.

Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld is devoted to the work of one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the post-World War II period of American literature, Thomas Pynchon. Through close readings and broad amplification, this book illustrates that the descent to the underworld is the single most important myth in Pynchon’s work, conferring shape and significance upon each of his novels. This book also offers a unique perspective on postmodernism, which is characterized by ludic syncretism – the playful synthesis of myths from a variety of cultures. In addition, Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld is a major contribution to the study of myth and literature as a whole, through the definition of what Evans Lansing Smith calls necrotypes – archetypal images catalyzed by the mythology of the underworld. This book employs an interdisciplinary methodology that will be of critical interest to scholars of comparative literature, mythology, and religion; to theorists and critics of modernism and postmodernism; to depth psychologists in the traditions of Jung, Freud, and James Hillman; as well as to the broad base of Pynchon enthusiasts and exponents of popular culture.

One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems, but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for ""Divine Comedies"" and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for ""The Changing Light at Sandover"".In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the ""Nekyia"", the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill's poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill's work - not just in ""The Changing Light at Sandover"", where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet's books, before and after that central text.By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill's work.

This book provides an overview of the hero journey theme in literature, from antiquity to the present, with a focus on the imagery of the rites of passage in human life (initiation at adolescence, mid-life, and death). This is the only book to focus on the major works of the literary tradition, detailing discussions of the hero journey in major literary texts.

This book provides an overview of the hero journey theme in literature, from antiquity to the present, with a focus on the imagery of the rites of passage in human life (initiation at adolescence, mid-life, and death). This is the only book to focus on the major works of the literary tradition, detailing discussions of the hero journey in major literary texts. Included are chapters on the literature of Antiquity (Sumerian, Egyptian, Biblical, Greek, and Roman), the Middle Ages (with emphasis on the Arthurian Romance), the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Fielding, the Arabian Nights, and Alchemical Illustration), Romanticism and Naturalism (Coleridge, Selected Grimm's Tales, Bront%, Bierce, Whitman, Twain, Hawthorne, E.T.A. Hoffman, Rabindranath Tagore), and Modernism to Contemporary (Joyce, Gilman, Alifa Rifaat, Bellow, Lessing, Pynchon, Eudora Welty).

An exploration of the myth of descent into the underworld as it informs and shapes a wide range of modern fictions. The author discovers in a series of close readings of works by Strindberg, Yeats, Conrad, Eliot, Lawrence, Mann, Lowry, Broch, and Pynchon the precipitating biographical and cultural crises leading to the symbolic association of death and the imagination. The readings are steeped in Jungian thought, but not enslaved by it. The conclusion yields insights into the essence of modernism that extend our understanding beyond literature into the arts. Contents: Introduction: The Four Chambers of the Underworld; Demon and Daimon: Strindberg, Yeats, and Conrad; T.S. Eliot: Pattern and Purgatory; Soul Making in D.H. Lawrence; Thomas Mann and the "Cult of the Sepulchre"; The Persistence of the Hades Complex; Three Contemporary Books of the Dead; Re-Visioning the Elysian Fields: Physics, Painting and Thanatology.