Yay I'm pretty excited.

I've finally found something I'm passionate about, and I'm excited to be hitting the state library next week to check it out.
I'm most definitely going to be doing a study of Ancient and Medieval myths and either their modern counterparts or their influence on modern story telling (movies and novels).

http://www.minervaclassics.com/movimyth.htm

Another awesome website to check out ! I like how it mentions that we can either appropriate myths into a modern context / movie, or we can actually subconsciously take elements from the myths and place them in a completely different plot !

This snippet from the website I found to be particular fascinating.


Identifying the elements of myth: The Godfather and Odysseus

Blood spurting from his chest, the young Italian writhes in a dance of death, his body jerking to the rhythm of the machine gun bullets. A shark's ragged jaws open, red and mangled with the flesh of victims, and a man disappears screaming into the bloody throat. Do these scenes, from The Godfather and Jaws, represent an American myth of cruelty and violence? Or should the word "myth" be reserved for more austere and decorous tales, like those we associate with the gods and goddesses of an idealized Greek and Roman antiquity, leaving us to dismiss The Godfather and Jaws as gruesomely hypnotic stories? (A third definition of "myth" would simply say that it is "something that isn't so," which gets us off the hook without supplying an explanation.)

Many people are surprised to learn that ancient myth was often at least as violent, if not more so, than the mayhem of our modern fantasies. The Greek god Kronos castrated his father with a pruning hook, then swallowed his own children; later, he was forced to vomit them up. The accursed hero Atreus cut the children of his brother Thyestes into little pieces, then served them to their father at a banquet. So much for the austere and decorous. But mythologers today define "myth" in a more subtle and discerning way, to include both the Corleone family and the shark, and Kronos and Thyestes, as well as gentler products of the human imagination. Myth is the system of recurring patterns and themes that people use to make sense out of the world. Significantly, ancient and modern patterns often turn out to be the same, even in small details; in their universality, they seem to have an intimate connection with the way all human beings think. The Godfather, and its companion, Godfather II, have been justly praised for excellence in such technical matters as acting and direction; their popularity is enhanced by less pleasant preoccupations: a lust for violence accentuated in recent years; an obsession with the details of organized crime; a cynical belief that only small distinctions separate lawless behavior from ordinary business practice. But deeper, more archaic reasons lie back of the Mafia saga's tremendous vogue. These reasons have to do with the film's mythic content.