Ehud Havazelet: Hero Worship: An Agnostic’s Notes (January 2001)

While the hero’s journey remains an important paradigm for fiction writers, our culture has many different and changing versions of heroes.  In this lecture, Ehud Havazelet looks at a range of examples, from John Wayne to Oskar Schindler, and from Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, to examine a variety of heroic modes, including the figure whose heroism is largely posturing and visible, and the hero whose heroism is private and less visible, and even the anti-hero who comes to heroism in unexpected ways.