That at least I'm on board with, I just wonder if it would have taken so much text to state this. I guess the gist of this paper is "Reception of Myth in Pop culture is the actual way myth is received and reinterpreted over the ages (and not what we do in universities)." If I were to hand in something like this, I expect the feedback would run along the lines of "rein deskriptiv, keine erkennbare oder nicht ausreichend herausgearbeitete Fragestellung". I wonder who the intended readers are.

There's a lot of conjecture involved in this statement and I do not find it is being underpinned or justified within the text. To just defer (and vaguely) to some other book in the conclusion is, I am sorry to say, lazy.

The correct way, one might argue if that person is feeling cantankerous.

Really if this was the intented point I wish it had been made sooner.

I legit chuckled, the show obviously had its moments.

ebd.

ebd.

Which I believe is a lot closer to the intended use than what we do with it at Universities.

This is how I imagine the Aorist functions, funnily enough. It's somewhat implicit in the invocation of the muses, and of course Bruno Snell took this notion and ran far and loose with it (1956? --> also, Albin Lesky in '64, lest anyone believe Snell was not already easily disprovable back then.) But while were at it: Who actually knows that there is a direct connection between the Iliad, Bruno Snell, James Jayne (or whatever the nutcases name was) and the modern science fiction series "west world", here one of the very rare cases where it isn't the myth but the nerds studying the myth being (re-)interpeted.

While I'm guessing this point will be made in some point further down, here's mine: This is exactly what everybody else did with it sine the earliest days of myth reception.

But perhaps historicity makes things feel truer, or at least less absurd.

Bin gespannt wie man das begründen möchte (wenn man dabei über die rein deskriptive Interpretation von Phänomenen der Popkultur hinauskommen möchte).

However this often leads to them being different stories completely.

See above.

Which in turn of course presupposes quite a lot of universally comprehensible symbolism. Sounds like a Burkert-Era tenet, and while I'm not myself very bothered by the idea I believe the sort of "universal applicability" statement isn't exactly en vogue in current sociological academia.

I'd also sooner believe that I'm divinely gifted than the idea that my grandpa was. After all, if he was, why didn't he make anything of himself? We project our hopes, even the naive ones, into the present and future. There should be something said about a view of the world where, if you were just to turn back time long enough, "there be dragons" and all kinds of stuff you only read about in books and see in movies.

And all these timeless gods have a peculiar tendency to incorporate values contemporary to their time.

And why not talk about that! The unification and systematication that occurs on the side of the recipient, which is not based in history, but is henceforth referred to as "XY canon" as if it were anything but our contemporaries that made it.

This is a whole lot of extrapolation from very little, and I think you have to be very deep inside your academical niche to have your mind be "immediately drawn" to that conclusion.

Under how big of a rock does one have to live to begine a sentence with "Sigourney Weaver, is [...] famous for" and then not end it with "Alien"?

Whatever that means to them.

But let's put the finger where it hurts for a second: jealousy over the positive and widespread reception of such "decontextualized" and "ahistorical" myth reception is a significant factor in the criticism leveraged at it from the ivory towers.

For a fitting contrast: If we're talking about pop culture, let's talk about 300. Or, better yet, Achilles in the modern adaption of Troy. Despite it's numerous criticisms, I believe Brad Pitt actually embodies what the Iliad considers virtues quite well. It's a point I wouldn't mind discussing: Was the movie not received well because it veers so far from its literary source, or was it not received well because it dares to not cover up some of its "problematic" aspects? Pitt's Achilles was critized for being somewhat of a Chauvinist - god forbid anybody actually reads the damn book.