The Sanskrit Hero

The Sanskrit Hero
Author: Kevin McGrath
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004137297

At the hand of the hero Karna this book offers a model for 'heroic religion', having to a large extent shaped not only the Indic epics, but also cognate Indo-European epics, such as Homer's Iliad.

The Hero and Hero-Making Across Genres

The Hero and Hero-Making Across Genres
Author: Amar Singh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000462587

This book critically examines how a Hero is made, sustained, and even deformed, in contemporary cultures. It brings together diverse ideas from philosophy, mythology, religion, literature, cinema, and social media to explore how heroes are constructed across genres, mediums, and traditions. The essays in this volume present fresh perspectives for readers to conceptualize the myriad possibilities the term ‘Hero’ brings with itself. They examine the making and unmaking of the heroes across literary, visual and social cultures —in religious spaces and in classical texts; in folk tales and fairy tales; in literature, as seen in Heinrich Böll’s Und Sagte Kein Einziges Wort, Thomas Brüssig’s Heroes like Us, and in movies, like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in the short film like Dean Potter's When Dogs Fly. The volume also features nuanced takes on intersectional feminist representations in hero movies; masculinity in sports biopics; taking everyday heroes from the real to the reel, among others key themes. A stimulating work that explores the mechanisms that ‘manufacture’ heroes, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, film studies, media studies, literary and critical theory, arts and aesthetics, political sociology and political philosophy.

The Hero's Quest and the Cycles of Nature

The Hero's Quest and the Cycles of Nature
Author: Rachel S. McCoppin
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2016-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476625751

This examination of the heroic journey in world mythology casts the protagonist as a personification of nature--a "botanical hero" one might say--who begins the quest in a metaphorical seed-like state, then sprouts into a period of verdant strength. But the hero must face a mythic underworld where he or she contends with mortality and sacrifice--embracing death as a part of life. For centuries, humans have sought superiority over nature, yet the botanical hero finds nothing is lost by recognizing that one is merely a part of nature. Instead, a cyclical promise of continuous life is realized, in which no element fully disappears, and the hero's message is not to dwell on death.

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours
Author: Gregory Nagy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2013-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674075420

The ancient Greeks’ concept of “the hero” was very different from what we understand by the term today. In 24 installments, based on the Harvard course Gregory Nagy has taught and refined since the 1970s, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores civilization’s roots in Classical literature, a lineage that continues to challenge and inspire us.

Demystifying Leadership

Demystifying Leadership
Author: Asha Kaul
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-07-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9354351093

Can leadership lessons be learnt from the Mahabharata? Demystifying Leadership positively asserts that we can and probes inquiry in the lives of six characters-Bhishma, Ashvatthama, Karna, Shakuni, Kunti and Krishna. It studies these characters in inescapable situations as they navigate through life by demonstrating values, decision-making ability, integrity and principles. Within the given constraints, some of these characters swim and rise, while others sink in moral turpitude. Extrapolating these successful and not-so-successful character traits to corporate leaders and linking them to scholarship, the authors provide lessons for leaders and managers operating in diverse situations. Borrowing from different disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, politics and psychology, Demystifying Leadership proposes to link essentials of leadership in the form of a Leadership Triangle comprising six levels: positive personality, peace with personal identity, purpose, positive use of power and politics, paradoxical leadership and principled pragmatism. It takes a grounded approach in amalgamating mythology and leadership through scholarship and practice.

Arjuna–Odysseus

Arjuna–Odysseus
Author: N. J. Allen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-11-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000652009

Bringing together the study of the Greek classics and Indology, Arjuna–Odysseus provides a comparative analysis of the shared heritage of the Mahābhārata and early Greek traditions presented in the texts of Homer and Hesiod. Building on the ethnographic theories of Durkheim, Mauss, and Dumont, the volume explores the convergences and rapprochements between the Mahābhārata and the Greek texts. In exploring the networks of similarities between the two epic traditions, it also reformulates the theory of Georges Dumézil regarding Indo-European cultural comparativism. It includes a detailed comparison between journeys undertaken by the two epic heroes – Odysseus and Arjuna – and more generally, it ranges across the philosophical ideas of these cultures, and the epic traditions, metaphors, and archetypes that define the cultural ideology of ancient Greece and India. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of Indo-European comparativism, social and cultural anthropology, classical literature, Indology, cultural and post-colonial studies, philosophy and religion, as well as to those who love the Indian and Greek epics.

The Nay Science

The Nay Science
Author: Vishwa Adluri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199931356

The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities. The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.

Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies

Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies
Author:
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 2291
Release: 2024-10-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031481291

This reference work is an important resource in the growing field of heroism studies. It presents concepts, research, and events key to understanding heroism, heroic leadership, heroism development, heroism science, and their relevant applications to businesses, organizations, clinical psychology, human wellness, human growth potential, public health, social justice, social activism, and the humanities. The encyclopedia emphasizes five key realms of theory and application: Business and organization, focusing on management effectiveness, emotional intelligence, empowerment, ethics, transformational leadership, product branding, motivation, employee wellness, entrepreneurship, and whistleblowers; clinical-health psychology and public health, focusing on stress and trauma, maltreatment, emotional distress, bullying, psychopathy, depression, anxiety, family disfunction, chronic illness, and healthcare workers’ wellbeing; human growth and positive psychology, discussing altruism, authenticity, character strengths, compassion, elevation, emotional agility, eudaimonia, morality, empathy, flourishing, flow, self-efficacy, joy, kindness, prospection, moral development, courage, and resilience; social justice and activism, highlighting anti-racism, anti-bullying, civil disobedience, civil rights heroes, climate change, environmental heroes, enslavement heroes, human rights heroism, humanitarian heroes, inclusivity, LGBTQ+ heroism, #metoo movement heroism, racism, sustainability, and women’s suffrage heroes; and humanities, relating to the mythic hero’s journey, bliss, boon, crossing the threshold, epic heroes, fairy tales, fiction, language and rhetoric, narratives, mythology, hero monomyth, humanities and heroism, religious heroes, and tragic heroes.