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The Broken Hours by Jacqueline Baker7/5/2023 The second myth Ball analyzes in his book is Frankenstein, the full potency of which was cemented with James Whale’s 1931 film version. IN HIS NEW BOOK, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination, Philip Ball argues that “the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas.” These stories, which “everyone knows without having to go to that trouble” of reading them, have “seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood.” Modern myths - of which Ball identifies seven, starting with Robinson Crusoe and ending with Batman - are not, despite their origins in specific texts, so much singular narratives as “evolving web of many stories - interweaving, interacting, contradicting each other” - but with one thing in common: “ rugged, elemental, irreducible kernel charged with the magical power of generating versions of the story.” This fecund capacity to produce new narratives is what allows these myths to do their “cultural work”: they “erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears and dreams.”
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