Mythic Worlds, Modern Words eBook

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words presents a wide range of Campbell’s writing and lectures on Joyce, which together form an illuminating running commentary on Joyce’s masterworks. Campbell’s visceral appreciation for all that was new in Joyce will delight the previously uninitiated, and perhaps intimidated, as well as longtime lovers of both Joyce and Campbell. Now available in a trade paperback edition, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is a masters meet-up between the twentieth century’s quintessential mythologist and its most exemplary literary modernist. Forty years of Campbell’s lectures, articles and unpublished writings on the novels of James Joyce, drawn together by Joycean scholar Edmund L. Epstein, serve as a lens to examine the nature of myth in art and Campbell's own approach to studying it.

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"Just as people influenced you and played an important role in your life, so you are influencing others and playing an important role in their lives. There is a reciprocal influence, a network of interlocked novels. Who wrote all of these? Schopenhauer says, 'It’s as though the world were a dream dreamed by a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dreamed you.'"

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"Purgatory is a purging of ego, and compassion is the purging of ego. Passion is ego, it’s ego-bound. Compassion is the opening. It’s love, and ego is just the opposite to love."

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"Your biology is related to the biology of plants and animals: they too share the life energies — what we might term 'body wisdom,' in contrast to mental wisdom. When you move deeper in dream, when you move into the sphere of the permanent energies of your body, your mental wisdom is gradually extinguished, body wisdom (as it were) rises, and you experience the collective order of dream, where the imagery is identical to the imagery of myth. And since some of these images have not been allowed to play a role in your life, you come into relation to them with surprise."