Antigone can do great work and the journal is doing a disservice to its other authors by standing behind a bad decision
All of us who move into this new, fast digital space make mistakes trying to respond and adapt. I have have RT'd some bad stuff, said stupid things, and thought better of earlier stances.
A good journal should have a public editorial board and a clear statement on where their funding comes from.
They should also consider their constituents.
I think we can go easy on anyone who took Antigone's money and did something else with it. There was nothing disingenuous there and I think we all take compromised funds in one way or another.
But @antigonejournal team, you can help us all set a standard for positive engagement by rethinking the damage that supporting that work can do.
I was super excited to get this article published with @LAReviewofBooks written with @SarahEBond to launch our new #PastsImperfect initiative. The feedback has been great, and it hasn't all been positive
we've received a couple of questions/points that I'd like to mention because they point to some of the challenges of (1) taking academic discussions public and (2) dealing with dearly held topics
1. A few people complained the essay was superficial. They're not wrong! You can't cover nearly 3 generations of scholarship and hundreds of books in a short column
1. The monomyth presents simplified descriptive narrative pattern as a prescriptive tool, overlooking that most myths that have monomythic patterns can be analyzed in different ways for many different functions. Campbell reduces myth to what is useful for Campbell
2. The monomyth oversimplifies a 'hero', ignoring different distinctions: ancient heroes were not about virtue and sacrifice. They were about a. cosmic eras (an age of man, or generation of hemitheoi; b. a heros is a person in their full strength, full "bloom" riffing on "hera"