Archetypal literary criticism

(Myth criticism)
Introduction
• Archetypal or Myth criticism implies an approach
which focuses on the presence and meaning of
myths and archetypes in literature
• Archetype – a term that Carl Gustav Jung uses to
indicate “universal, archaic patterns and images that
derive from the collective unconscious and are the
psychic counterpart of instinct. They are autonomous
and hidden forms which are transformed once they
enter consciousness and are given particular
expression by individuals and their cultures.”
• According to Jung, archetypes manifest themselves in
dreams, myth, art and religion.
• Some of the examples inculde: the trickster,
the flood, the wise old man
Major influences
• James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion, 1890
• His thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that
revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a
sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses
from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.
• The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god,
a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a
goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was
reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend
of rebirth is central to almost all of the world's
mythologies
• Some ideas were considered scandalous: the concept
of the lamb of god as a relic of the old pagan religion
• Influenced: C.G. Jung, S. Freud, W.B. Yeats, W. C.
Williams, R. Graves, James Joyce
• Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious  (1934-55),  Psychology and Religion
(1938)
• Diverged from the original freudian psychoanalysis to
a distinct sistem of ‘’analytical psychology’’, a
discipline which focuses primarily on the individual
psyche and the personal process of ‘’individuation’’
• Developed the concept of the collective unconscious
to refer to a fundamental psychic stratum common
to every being of a given species
• With relation to the collective unconscious, Jung
further elaborated the main concepts of his theory:
‘the archetype’, ‘self-realization’, ‘the complex’, the
‘animus/anima’ aspects and the general psychologic
structure of the ‘persona’
• His views significantly initiated a new perspective on
the study of the cultural phenomena of mythology
and esotericism, as well as the subjects of mental
illness, pedagogy and individual development
Main representatives

Northrop Fry
• Primary domains of interest include the Romantic
poets and biblical mythology: his first critical book,
Fearful symmetry (1947), concerns itself with the
work of William Blake

• His most important work, Anatomy of criticism

(1957), develops the method of interpreting literature
through the mythical patterns recuring in the themes,
forms, plots and genres of literature itself
• He was a major influence on Harold Bloom
• Archetypal criticism:  the study of recurring structural
patterns grants students an emancipatory distance
from their own society, and gives them a vision of a
higher human state 
• ". . . every human society possesses a mythology
which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by
literature”

• Mythology and literature inhabit and function

within the same imaginative world, one that is
"governed by conventions, by its own modes,
symbols, myths and genres“
Robert Graves
• The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic
Myth (1948)
• White godess is a Graves proposes the existence of a
European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and
Death", much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired
and represented by the phases of the moon, who lies
behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various
European and pagan mythologies
• Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is
inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his
proposed White Goddess and of her son.
• Graves concluded, in the second and expanded
edition, that the male-dominant monotheistic god of
Judaism and its successors were the cause of the
White Goddess's downfall
•   The Golden Bough is the starting point for much of
Graves's argument
• Graves derived some of his ideas from poetic
inspiration and a process of “analeptic thought",
which is a term he used for throwing one's mind back
in time and receiving impressions.
Maud Bodkin
• Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934)
• Interpretation of poetry through the jungian archetypes such
as The Divine Despot and the Rebirth in the work of diverse
poets of the european tradition among which are Euripides,
Virgil, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Shelley and T.S. Eliot
• Milton's Paradise Lost is an example of this interrelation of the
two archetypes (Heaven-and-Hell/ Rebirth), where Bodkin
claims that "it is as though the poet's feeling divined the
relation of the concepts of Heaven and Hell to the images of
spring's beauty and of the darkness under the earth whence
beauty comes forth and to which it returns"
Joseph Campbell
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
• The assertation that mythological narratives all share
a common structure; the concept of the monomyth –
a fundamental mythological pattern based on the
archetypal motif of “the hero’s journey”
• “A hero ventures forth from the world of common
day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous
forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is
won: the hero comes back from this mysterious
adventure with the power to bestow boons on his
fellow man”
• The study of structural similarities of classical myths
such as the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, Buddha,
Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus
• Influenced by the Frazer’s concept of mythology as a
primitive attempt to explain the world of nature
Influence on writers
• T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (Frazer)
• James Joyce Ulysses (Eliot described this system as
the "mythic method": "a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history“, )
• W. B. Yeats “Sailing to Byzantium” (Frazer)
• Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Graves)
• Herman Hesse Siddhartha, Steppenwolf (Jung)