Storytelling and Myth Making: images from film and literature

by Frank McConnell

Storytelling and Myth Images from Film and Literature [Hardcover]

Genres: Film

303 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1979

About the author

Francis DeMay McConnell, known as Frank McConnell, (1942-1999) lived at Santa Barbara, California and was a professor of English at the University of California. He had been awarded his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame and earned his doctorate at Yale. He had then taught at Cormell University and at Northwestern University. He was twice married, and had two children and a stepson.
He published many books on film and literary criticism, as well as the four detective novels described below, and numerous magazine articles. For years he was media correspondent for the lay Catholic journal, Commonweal. He served several times on the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury. He was known for his robustious wit, and was a highly ribald, entertaining and popular teacher.

Reviews

[Thomas Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best, most enlightening scholarly books on film and literature you can find. Written in 1979, it contains fascinating insights into the mythological structure of many films, novels and classic literature, from Beowulf to Star Wars. There's also a page or two of photos from several films where Frank analyzes the imagery in the photos. They include an image from Lawrence of Arabia and one from Duck Soup.

Frank was one of my favorite professors at Northwestern University. I used his book to help me analyze the early films of George Lucas, from THX-1138, American Graffiti, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for my PhD dissertation. This book has an interesting take on the first Star Wars movie, from which I analyzed the following two films. It uses a narrative structure that Frank developed from the work of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. In my dissertation, I used an expanded structure developed from a host of other myth scholars and from the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It's a fascinating field of study. Frank's book is a great starting point, as is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The rest of Campbell's work I found to be restrictive for a fair, scholarly analysis, but Frank's book is one of the best.