Quest Schemata: Some Thoughts on the Quest Revealed by this Mystory

Our "hero" wishes to leave her ordinary world: small town southern America, with its requisite insularity, poverty, and lack of opportunities

Our "hero" seeks a way to address her outer problem: escaping her geographical and socioeconmic origins

Our "hero" also seeks an answer to her inner problem: a childhood (and some familial and congregational relationships) that leaves much to be desired

Our "hero" receives a call that offers a way to approach ber inner and outer problems: a thick envelope from a university far enough removed from her ordinary world

Our "hero" encounters a threshold guardian who outlines a set of prescrided rules for the quest: an aforementioned academic advisor in the basement of an old building on a beautiful campus

Our "hero" further encounters a shadow mentor who offers support in her quest: miles away from this first new section of the world, a new advisor who offers her a new trajectory via fiction

Our "hero" discovers a way to solve her already established problems in a special world in which our "hero" feels intially successful in her approach but in which she also encounters challenges (ordeals?) to her escape: Donne and Shakespeare, modernist and postcolonial novels, but then Old English, Beowulf, and, ironically, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and later Victorian

After these moments of failure (or at least Cs), our "hero" looks for a shot at redemeption and resurrection: MA Thesis and an introduction to historical rhetorics

Eventually, her successes and failures make her strong enough to work with a strong willed mentor: or dissertation director(s)