So, that's it? Every book is the same, as it tells the same stories...

So, that's it? Every book is the same, as it tells the same stories? Is literature condemned forever to be simply a path to tell a story, while prose just embellishes it? Won't there ever be any great prose literature (as well as cinema or theatre) as powerful, profound and mostly, free, as music, poetry or painting?

what? No.

What the hell are you talking about, just pick one of your books that that doesn't apply to and be done with it

>as it tells the same story

I guess I didn't make myself clear.

>Is literature condemned forever to be simply a path to tell a story, while prose just embellishes it?
Do you even modernism?

um, the hero's journey is just a type of story bub. ur dense

>he fell for the monomyth

So by this idea Huck Finn, Don Quixote, and Odysseus are all the exact same character. Which i obviously not true; yes they all go on strange adventures and have both ups and extreme downs on said adventures. But it isn't about the fact that the template used for the stories are the same, it's the differences. Because of those differences it makes the same template new and original. All action movies are the same and don't even try to hide the fact that they are. Atleast great fiction while using the same ideals creates the characters and situations a new

Unfortunatelly, OP, I think surrealism is the best we can get from prose in these terms.

Saying they're all the same stories because they share some extremely broad, extremely flexible plot development elements is as stupid as saying humans are all the same boring shit because we all drink water and breathe air and all of the 'culture' we have is 'just' embellishment.

Campbell's main thesis is that all of the hero myths in human history are merely expressions of a single "monomyth" that transcends culture. The trouble is that Campbel achieves this "monomyth" by the simple expedient of including every possible variation into his definition. A hero is called to quest, does or does not accept, is or is not helped by a wise guide, is or is not granted supernatural aid, does or does not fight an enemy who may or may not have supernatural attributes, does or does not survive and does or does not return home. To dilute things even more, Campbell includes an array of other, sundry possibilities in order to be able to encompass as many mythological stories as possible. And yet, despite having crafted a thesis that appears to be so broad as to be almost meaningless, Campbell still has to stretch some of the stories he cites beyond all recognition to fit them under the umbrella. In short, most hero myths probably are part of the Campbellian monomyth simply because Campbell made the monomyth such a big tent that almost any story could fit under it. While this makes his thesis more or less true, it also makes it pretty much completely worthless.

Isnt this how they fucking teach kids to write?

the hero's journey is a pretty shitty pattern to storytelling. Bland AF desu farm

It's a meme cliche, as explained by tarkovsky:
>What can we say constitutes a masterpiece in the West? Even during the Renaissance, it is always the cry of human soul, which expresses a thousand desires: Look how happy I am! Look how unhappy I am! Look how I suffer! Look how I love! Look what villains encircle me! Look how I struggle against evil! Look how I perish under the weight of evil! Look how I prevail! In other words: Me! Me! Me!

heroes journey is just baby's first literary device. its used by the same people who judge a movie's soundtrack by how much they *don't* hear it

I can't even name any books that follow that pattern, maybe beucase I don't read much genre fiction garbage. Hero's Journey is more applicable to movies

He himself was the biggest meme

>He hasn't read the Odyssey
>Or Hamlet
>Or Dante's Comedy
>Or Goethe's Faust
user your pleb is showing.

Plebs don't realize the value of this form.

Explain it to a pleb, then.

It is a tried standard for storytelling that can be extended in many ways. It's the perfect format for the Epic or the epiclike.

if the world is infinite all lies are true

pretty much any story of nights. Tons of plays. Tons of books new and old
>Journey to the west
>A Farewell to Arms
>1984
>Lord of the Rings
sooo much media uses the formula because it works. It is vague enough that almost any genre can use it and bring it far above what the basic outline suggests.

I don't remember the aphorism number, but Nietzsche indirectly defends it in HATH. If I recall he argues that a motif has to be well worn before we can actually do anything with them. Motif has a great many meanings but I think it applies equally to all of them. Whether it's a recurring element within a story or a recurring element shared between stories, a short, recurring succession of musical notes, or recurring characters in a mythical folklore.

When you introduce a motif, there is a lot of very careful and not always rewarding work that has to go in to explaining the motif itself, the reader/listener/viewer can easily be hung up on what are at the end of the day organizational or relatively minor aesthetic details. It's why so many post-Tolkenian fantasy worlds use Elves, Dwarves and Orcs. It's a heuristic that leans on shared cultural backgrounds to expedite some of the story telling. It's the author using a well beaten path down into your mind to discuss other things. For example Dune is a monomythic story, but only an idiot would say it's just an adventure novel considering how it uses the adventure as a 'red thread' to bind together a tale about all kinds of shit, from court intrigues and prescience to planetary ecology.

+1