Abstract

The Story of Josh is a novel in free verse drawing on the Jesus myth, but set in a modem North American context. The project was first inspired by Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red . The novel is written in verse lines because the symbolic resonance of poetry better lends itself to the re-telling of myth than prose. The novel tells the story of a Jewish boy growing up in North American; the text leaves most settings unnamed to preserve some of the universality that the Christ myth has come to represent. The story explores the idea of being 'chosen.' The Western ideal of the individual as reigning supreme (as signified by Christ) - the shift of focus from communal identity to individual identity - creates both an inflated sense of self and a deep sense of isolation in the Western psyche. The novel examines the cultural consequences of the historically dominant concept of mind/body dualism in the Western psyche. The perspective of the individual as dual, with the mind posited as higher, divine, and predominantly masculine, and the body posited as lower, profane, and predominantly feminine, has informed imbalances of power throughout history. Through the character of Isobel, a childhood friend of Joshua's, the novel incorporates the historically dismissed and mistreated symbolic and embodied feminine into the concept of personhood as represented by the Christ-figure. The novel draws on C. G Jung's concepts of the personal and collective unconscious, the archetypes, and the project of individuation.