Joseph Campbell has 24 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 19 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 545 ratings. The most-rated is The Power of Myth: Programs 1-6.
Mythic Imagination
Summary
Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. At the age of twenty-nine, after years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone in a jazz combo and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story. That tale, included in this collection, remained the famed mythologist’s only published piece of fiction, until now. In these stories, listeners will find rich mythological symbolism, down-to-earth concerns with the ravages of the Second World War, and singular iterations of Campbell’s famous Hero’s Journey schema - all interwoven into a literary style that anticipates the genre that would years later come to be known as “magical realism.” Compelling in their own right, these seven stories are essential listening for longtime Campbell fans and the many who continue to discover him afresh.
©2012 The Joseph Campbell Foundation. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Correspondence: 1927-1987
Summary
Selected letters capturing ongoing conversations between famed mythologist Joseph Campbell and a remarkable group of artists, seekers, filmmakers, novelists, and scholars This brand-new collection of letters features illuminating conversations between Joseph Campbell and a fascinating cast of correspondents, ranging from friends and cowriters to renegade scholars and fellow visionaries. Including letters from both Campbell and his correspondents, and spanning the course of his entire adult life (1927-1987), the collection demonstrates the lasting influence of Campbell’s work, which inspired creative endeavors and radical shifts in so many people’s lives. Included are exchanges with artists such as Angela Gregory and Gary Snyder; colleagues including Alan Watts, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Maud Oakes; editors of his books, from The Hero with a Thousand Faces to The Mythic Image; and many others who engaged with Campbell in his exploration of humanity’s “one great story.” In selecting the letters, editors Evans Lansing Smith and Dennis Patrick Slattery discovered that the dynamic exchanges formed themselves into what Smith describes as a “narrative, with multiple voices and points of view, dramatic conflict and resolution, character development, and even mystery.” In the end, they found “a portrait not just of Campbell but of a remarkable generation of artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, spiritual seekers, poets, and novelists, all engaged in the creative powers unleashed by mythology.” With crucial historical context provided by the editors, this compelling volume provides vital new insight into Campbell’s personal life and mythological vision.
©2019 Joseph Campbell Foundation. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
Summary
Countless would-be readers and listeners of Finnegans Wake - James Joyce's 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life - have given up after a few pages and "dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of Joyce's book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the listener can venture out on his or her own. This edition includes a foreword and updates by Joyce scholar Dr. Edmund L. Epstein that add the context of sixty subsequent years of scholarship.
©1944, 1961 1944, 1961 by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, © 2005 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Ecstasy of Being
Summary
Joseph Campbell’s collected writings on dance and art, edited and introduced by Nancy Allison, CMA, the founder of Jean Erdman Dance, and including Campbell’s unpublished manuscript “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the book he was working on when he died. Dance was one of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s wide-ranging passions. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a leading figure in modern dance who worked with Martha Graham and had Merce Cunningham in her first company. When Campbell retired from teaching in 1972, he and Erdman formed the Theater of the Open Eye, where for nearly fifteen years they presented a wide array of dance and theater productions, lectures, and performance pieces. The Ecstasy of Being brings together seven of Campbell’s previously uncollected articles on dance, along with “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the treatise that he was working on when he died, published here for the first time. In this new collection Campbell explores the rise of modern art and dance in the twentieth century; delves into the work and philosophy of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and others; and, as always, probes the idea of art as “the funnel through which spirit is poured into life.” This book offers the listener an accessible, yet profound and provocative, insight into Campbell’s lifelong fascination with the relationship of myth to aesthetic form and human psychology.
©2017 Joseph Campbell Foundation (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.