Gnosticism in Hollywood

The thesis investigates the intellectual history of the concept of Gnosticism in twentieth-century Euro-American philosophy, religion, and popular culture. It proposes three major arguments, each building upon the preceding one. First, through a critical approach to historiography, chapters one to four uphold that thinkers such as Hans Jonas, Carl G. Jung, Eric Voegelin, and American writers indebted to their work, utilized Gnosticism as a diagnostic category to articulate the crisis of Western modernity and to devise new intellectual projects to overcome it. Second, chapter five employs intertextuality and cognitive theories to bypass essentialization and ahistoricization, two key problems that rendered the results of the examined authors’ projects untenable in light of subsequent developments in Gnostic studies; it concludes that Gnosticism and modernity debates can be effectively advanced within the framework of reception history. Third, adopting the terminology of neoformalism, chapters six to eleven show that seven selected millennial Hollywood “mind-game films” contributed to the debates by imaginatively diagnosing the crisis of Western culture and proposing the lens of Gnosticism to overcome it.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/8787e29d-ebc9-4236-a7cb-eef514806ac1