“Monomythic Patterns in Literature”

Impact for Students:

Students become literary sleuths as they explore the many faces of the monomyth, the source of all human storytelling. Thought-provoking essential questions guide students to make connections between ancient myth and modern fiction, as well as to understand the ways that each story adheres to the time-tested formula of loss, journey, test, and reconciliation.

Students discover the consistent mythic patterns that underlie all stories, regardless of country of origin or date of composition. Emphasis is placed on high-level analytical thinking and on the comparative mode.

Impact for Teachers:

Organized around universally applicable essential questions and themes, this course develops critical reading and thinking. Students are enlisted in the adventure of identifying and linking the underlying patterns and meanings shared by all literary works.

The works selected for this course present a cumulative, consistent, and suitably varied reworking of just a few core ideas: the loss, journey, and testing of the protagonist (hero), and the ubiquitous human yearning for a past perfection, situation, or bliss that must be restored as one moves forward in time.

Each CD Contains:

Clearly written teacher guides for six seminal myths, nine short stories, two novels, and a variety of poems and prose selections. These simple beginnings lay the foundation for exciting comparative reading and interpretation.

From this well-established first-year base, students and teachers may confidently journey forward in subsequent years to create meaningful encounters with the entire canon of American, British, and world literature.

The in-depth commentaries provided for this initial selection of works establish key linkages from text to text, key questions for reading and discussion, and meaningful connections to all future coursework. Texts of myths and poetry are provided on the CD. Short story and one-act play selections are either already present in your school’s resource collection or downloadable from the public domain.

Excerpts from the Introduction to This Course:

Dear Teacher,

This package and its sequenced readings are the product of thirty years’ experience teaching an articulated and aligned curriculum in high-performance public schools. Its contents have been tested with over 5,000 students, each of whom has come to delight in coursework rooted in essential concepts to which they return again and again as they journey forward to acquire new skills and apply new learning.

This is a truly articulated curriculum. Each learning activity builds upon the one that preceded it and prepares the way for the next to come.

The familiar neighborhood of inquiry established by this approach answers two challenging questions that often trouble students. The first is, “Why are we doing this?” The second is, “What does this have to do with me, and with our class activities?”

A thematic curriculum that centers upon universally important human and cultural questions, rather than one organized by chronology or national location, is best positioned to answer questions like these.

Our goal at the secondary level should be to equip students to engage in meaningful and personally relevant activities, including:

Thoughtful reflection about history and progress.

Thoughtful reflection about the trade-offs between personal desires and social obligations.

The ability to read carefully and to make intelligent, evidentiary connections between diverse narratives.

The ability to confidently answer big-picture questions such as, “How does literature present us with an image of the forces and events that shape human experience?”

In this thematic curriculum, questions such as “What is literature concerned with?” can be continuously applied to any work that is read. Students find themselves at the center as they consider the similarities and differences between works from different cultures that explore the same enduring ideas.

The center of this literature course is meaning-making: interpretation, comparative reading, and understanding how stories from around the world converge around and reinterpret universal themes.

An approach like this is what makes the journey through this course both meaningful and purposive for students.

Humanities Curriculum

Thematic and Literary Goals:

  • Students acquire a framework for reading and thinking about literature.
  • Students identify structural elements such as plot, theme, and setting, as well as language use, including symbolism, irony, connotation, and denotation.
  • Students confirm that fundamental story patterns and themes span and link cultures and historical epochs.
  • Students appreciate a unifying metaphor behind all storytelling.

Reading Assessment Targets:

  • State both literal and inferred main ideas and provide text-based support.
  • Use graphic organizers to analyze and compare themes and main ideas in two or more texts.
  • Develop questions before, during, and after reading.
  • Compare and contrast recurring themes, similarities, and differences.
  • Examine how an action leads to long-lasting effects.
  • Judge the effectiveness of an author’s use of literary devices and language.
  • Draw conclusions about style, tone, and mood based on language choice.
  • Identify the persuasive effects of vocabulary.
  • Compare the development of an idea or concept in two or more texts.

Excerpts from the Text Commentaries Created for This Course:

“Virtually every story that has ever been written features this pattern, and with the emergence of written language that accompanied the birth of civilization, such storytelling continues the tradition of sympathetic magic.”

“Orpheus comes very close to achieving his goal. But he must fail for the very same reason that Isis cannot immortalize the son of the King of Syria, and for the very same reason that Osiris must fit, and must want to fit, into Set’s coffin.”

“Stories that feature this pattern not only replicate seasonal cycles, but also retell the long and difficult journey undertaken when our ancestors made the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.”

“It is clear that Daedalus contravenes deep laws, but he does so out of necessity.”

“Highway 77 is not an Eden. The Dionysiac wildness of the place suggests something other than Ovid’s Golden Age. Certainly, Highway 77 represents the world before civilization, or the world to which we shall return when nature reasserts domination over the city of man.”

“If the Poughkeepsie is the River Styx and the ‘Polacks’ are the composite Charon, then do they row Kip to the land of death, or from death to life?”

“Osiris floats down the River Nile in a coffin, and Kip floats down the Poughkeepsie in a racing shell. Kip has been figuratively slain. The dread hand of tradition and the ethical dilemma of ambivalence play the role of Set, while Mary plays the role of Isis.”

“If Updike’s A&P is a symbol for the Garden of Eden, then Lengel must be its Jehovah.”

“We are led to question the ‘beach.’ While it appears to be a paradise of independence and freedom, it may represent the world of obligation that all adults must enter.”

“Regarding the Ovidian myth of history, Ayn Rand positions herself as both futurist and capitalist and declares war on collectivist romanticism.”

“Bradbury’s world is a world of limits. The journey to the past is a step into the coffin of Osiris.”

“How astonishing Bradbury’s mix is: we return to Eden, but the act of returning is itself a fall and expulsion.”

Test score results for students who have benefited from this combined package are available here.

One Year of Free Email Support:

Teachers always take a chance when they try a new curriculum. Too often, they are left on their own to interpret instructions or gauge progress. Whenever questions arise about implementation, interpretation, or whether student work is on track, I am available to help.

All queries will be answered within 24 hours, and often within just a few hours. I am fully committed to your success in using this program.