Should I read The Hero with A Thousand Faces before or after

after jung

Not at all. Joseph Campbell is that special sort of figure that decides something is cool so they have to cherry pick their way through mountains of evidence that contradict their super grand unifying theories of everything to hobble together some shaky things which could possible support their ideas, maybe, but probably not. No one asides from Joe public takes him seriously. His ideas just have a certain Romanticism to them so they are popular among non-academics.

tl/dr read works by respected academic figures, not populist hacks.

>>8998371
>tl/dr
Are you allowed to do that on /lit/?

that has to be the dumbest cover i have ever laid eyes upon

File: 9781511360258_p0_v1_s192x300.jpg (13KB, 187x300px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 187x300px

>>8998351
I still don't know who the cover image actually is, but I found the un-whateverized version of the one in OP's post.

The one eyeball really takes away from the spooky gravity of the no-eyes look.

File: 1483601868883.gif (13KB, 680x489px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 680x489px

>>8998375
I'm allowed to do whatever the fuck I want.

>>8998371
Why do you bother writing posts when you don't have arguments?

>>8998473
The vast majority of the things we say have no arguments. 4chan is a pretty terrible format for arguments. I was asked for my opinion on something, I gave it. You also didn't provide an argument either.

>>8998371
Who would you suggest?

Who are the recommended academics in mythology and ancient religion?

>>8999465
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkloristics
There is a decent list of good figures mentioned in the history of the subject in the provided link. I'm not going to name anyone because that list would be thousands long, that's how rubbish and disliked Campbell is in academia. I don't know if you will find them as exciting as Campbell though. I think what makes him so popular is that he doesn't do any of the hard work involved in the line of work he does, so that as a reader you just get to read about his interesting sounding ideas in a vacuum, but his ideas are only interesting because he isn't constrained by actual evidence and scholarship so he's free to talk about things that seem more interesting.

There are some pretty good threads on reddit talking about why people don't like Campbell and who are some good alternatives.
>inb4 reddit go home

>>8999847
René Girard. Mircea Eliade. Frithjof Schuon.

>>8998665
A nice slow board like /lit/ is the perfect format for debate. Now, you were saying something about mountains of evidence.

>>8998351
It really depends on what you're trying to get out of it. If you are a writer doing the regular just-starting-out writerly thing of trying to chronologically read what you've been told is "the Canon," you should probably never read it, or at least not until you've actually had the growing pains of experiencing not-knowing, generative effort, less-pretentious creativity, and what not. If you are merely a student of literature, I think it's kind of truistic knowledge that Campbell is the lazy man's Jung and Jung is the slightly-less-lazy man's Plato w/ elementary Buddhism. Though, it'd take a less grouchier man than me to claim that Campbell isn't a fun, light read.

I like Campbell, I really do.

But I agree with this anon as well >>8998371 >>9000281

I think there is much to be gained from Campbell if you have in mind where he comes from. Campbell, as well as Jung and others on the same line are part of a modernist way to view the world, which sees everything as pointing to the same thing. They just saw the similarities between hindu, african, european, american and so on myths, but they overeact by putting them under some universal rule that would explain their similarities. They have plenty of differences, plenty. And those differences can not be ignored. Part of the reasons they were thinking it was all the same in the beggining was that the western world didn't have the language to access them. Indigenous cultures could only be understood if there was some sort of link to something we recognize. Naturally, what we discovered were that they were "saying" something that was just like we say. The problem is that we can only hear something that we would say ourselves.

Read Levi-Strauss I guess.

>>9000313
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/2xgvvh/can_anyone_provide_context_for_this_joseph/cp0bz5e/
Plenty of arguments and citations from academic figures is made in this thread who think he is a joke.

>/lit/ is the perfect format for debate
Lit is still a board on 4chan and 4chan is a terrible format for actual arguments. I've been on 4chan for ten years and not a single argument has ever approached even an average off the cuff dialogue taken place on campus.

And since you still have not provided any sort of argument or evidence I am going to ask for your sources as to Campbell's respectability in his field since you seem to be so strung up on the need for such things.