John Shelton Lawrence is professor emeritus of philosophy at Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa. He is the author of The Electronic Scholar and coeditor of Fair Use and Free Inquiry. He currently lives in Berkeley, California, where he is a writer, consultant, and Senior Conservation Fellow at the Sierra Club in San Francisco.
Robert Jewett is guest professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Previously he was Harry R. Kendall Senior Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois.
William G. Doty
-- author of Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals
"A major interpretive resource for several disciplines, including
American studies, religious studies, literature, popular culture,
and film studies, The Myth of the American Superhero covers an
astonishing array of expressions of the heroic in American culture.
I have used the authors' approach to popular mythology for many
years and appreciate this rich, up-to-date (right up to the
terrorist events of September 11, 2001, and the films The Matrix
and Fight Club) work. Monomythic expressions now include highly
violent video games and worldwide terrorism. John Shelton Lawrence
and Robert Jewett provide a framework for critiquing a wide range
of movies and literature, including the Disneyfication of the
nation and the lethal patriotism of Timothy McVeigh and the
Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski. The dangers of fascist elements in
Star Wars are confronted as well as the dangerous apocalypticism of
the Left Behind books and films. Ultimately, the authors are
sincerely worried about the shape of Western democracy as it is
threatened by cheap resolutions of complex political and
theological issues. This book will be a major component in my
honors course on the heroic model in life, literature, and film. As
a tool for understanding the dangers of the traditional hero model,
The Myth of the American Superhero has no competition. It is the
sort of book that educates one for a lifetime." Jutta Weldes
"The Myth of the American Superhero is a very timely and
provocative analysis of what John Shelton Lawrence and Robert
Jewett call the 'American monomyth.' In this myth an Edenic
community is threatened by implacable evil from outside. Mundane
democratic institutions, impotent or corrupt, can't cope. With a
convulsion of redemptive vigilante violence, the selfless,
singleminded, sexually repressed, and misogynistic superhero
restores the community to its pristine state and fades into
obscurity. The authors trace this generic story (and its variants)
through many guises: it appears, among others, in Buffalo Bill's
traveling Wild West show, in The Virginian and The Lone Ranger, in
a wide range of twentiethcentury films from John Wayne through
Rambo, in disaster movies and in The Matrix, in the television
phenomenon Star Trek, in the wonderful world of Disney, in video
games, and in 'credotainment.' In this scathing critique the
authors demonstrate the relentless reproduction of a fundamentally
antidemocratic and viciously misogynistic myth that, with fascist
rigor, extols the purifying powers of extralegal violence. Lawrence
and Jewett trace the frightening imitative Werther effect' of this
myth of vigilante redemption in the antisocial violence unleashed
by Bernard Goetz, the Unabomber, and Timothy McVeigh, among others.
The power of this myth to radically undermine the prized American
institution of democracy is ably illustrated in their retelling of
the Ramboesque antics of Oliver North and of even more appalling
North's striking popularity. In the aftermath of September 11,
2001, and the unilateral extralegal violence promised by the Bush
administration to destroy evil on a worldwide scale, exposing and
challenging this American monomyth is of the utmost importance.
Lawrence and Jewett's fascinating and accessible volume does just
that."
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