Star Trek, the Myth of Our Time
In the early 1990s, my friend Kenneth Carter and I saw the "Power of Myth" Bill Moyers special about Joseph Campbell on PBS. Pretty soon, we were noticing new dimensions in the Star Trek episodes we were watching. We came up with the idea to teach a class about this, and we put together a proposal for a non-credit course at UAB Special Studies. To our amazement, they accepted it. We got a lot of publicity at first, and had great enrollment. The publicity died down, though, and we discovered that not many people actually see the UAB Special Studies catalog. Our enrollment slowly declined over the two years or so that we taught the class, but the positive reaction of our students convinced me that better publicity could have sustained interest in the class. We even presented a condensed version of our class for a session at DragonCon in Atlanta in 1994. (Click here to see photos on the DragonCon archive site of Kenneth and me holding forth about our class, and another of us on a panel discussion.)
With Kenneth's permission, I am posting some chapter manuscripts based on the class notes we created for our class. There are numerous citations to other sources, which we endeavored to attribute faithfully and accurately. Part of our method was to cite disparate examples of common themes, and watch the "light bulbs" come on when our students recognized the parallels.
This was a multi-media class, with numerous video clips and posters. I am inserting scaled-down versions of some posters and illustrations that we created for the class.
Contents:
Chapter
4: Prometheus and the Prime Directive
Want to discuss any of this mythology stuff? Send e-mail to Sithbane's Planet at sithbane@charter.net