Travis Langley doubts he would have written Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight if he hadn’t been at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia.
“Our administrators have encouraged our teaching creatively and offering courses unique to this university,” psychology professor Langley says. The book grew from his course, “Psychology in Literature.”
“Each student selects a character like Hamlet, Ahab, or Huck Finn to analyze in many ways throughout the semester,” Langley says. “The first time I taught the class, I demonstrated how to do each assignment by doing them all myself with Batman as the example, and I just kept writing.”
As for Batman - is he crazy or what? Langley writes that actor Adam West of the 1960s Batman TV series asked him the same thing.
The answer takes a book to say. But if the Caped Crusader is nuts, he’s not the only one.
“Batman,” Langley writes, “is that part of us that wants to scare all of life’s bullies away.”
Style, Pages 33 on 04/22/2014