Star Wars and the Hero’s Journey

I was fortunate to teach Star Wars and the Hero’s Journey five times. This course approached the mythological importance of Star Wars in our contemporary society. Because George Lucas cites the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell as his inspiration for the movies, we read Campbell to bring the archetypal imagery of the movies into focus. We delved deeply into the realms of traditional myth, religious doctrine, culture, and history to search for correlations and precedents. The course was punctuated with viewing sessions of all (at the time) six episodes and we augmented our viewing with readings from the work of Campbell, Carl Jung, Mary Henderson, and a handful of other mythologists, psychologists, and cultural theorists. My tagline for this class was, “This class is for anyone who knows Star Wars is important and wants to understand why.”