THE PATH OF HERO AND BIRTH OF LITERARY NARRATIVE

The Mesopotamian civilization produced the first literary work on Earth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform on clay tablets. This text is based on Sumerian legends of the third millennium B.C. and found its literary form in Akkadian for more than a thousand years, after which it was translated into other languages and was known throughout the Middle East.

The discovery of this text in the nineteenth century and its translation into European languages became a literary event, as the epic allows us to see how the first story about the hero is born, how the narrative is built, which will later become fiction in our modern culture: a novel, a play, a poem, a screenplay…

Having analyzed The Epic of Gilgamesh, we will see the world of ancient Mesopotamia through the eyes of the culture bearers themselves, trace how its narrative reflects a worldview and how it becomes what gives rise to a certain worldview, get acquainted with the story of the power of friendship, the description of the first existential crisis and rebellion against the gods, the search for the meaning of life and the secret of immortality, and also see the oldest version of the Flood.

And most importantly, we will witness the birth of the image of the hero and analyze the Hero’s Journey on the example of an epic. Joseph Campbell’s work The Thousand-Faced Hero and his concept of “monomyth” will help us with this, as well as Volodymyr Propp’s formal method of analyzing fairy tales in his Morphology of the Fairy Tale. The course will allow you to learn how to analyze contemporary narratives, and most importantly, how to build your own.