ARCHETYPE: An original model or pattern from which other later copies are made, especially a character, an action, or situation that seems to represent common patterns of human life. Often, archetypes include a symbol, a theme, a setting, or a character that some critics think have a common meaning in an entire culture, or even the entire human race. These images have particular emotional resonance and power. Archetypes recur in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, fairy tales, dreams, artwork, and religious rituals.

(atavistic and universal images, symbols, and situations dealing with the fundamental facts of human life); happened not to the individual but to his ancestors - they are coded in our mind, memory, consciousness

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Jung was a student of Freud, but he rejected Freud's ideas of infantile sexuality and he held that Freud's psychoanalytic process was too simple, too concrete, and too focused on the individual child's development rather than the collective development of cultures as a whole.

Jung developed an alternative concept called the collective unconscious, a shared collection of transcultural images and symbols known as archetypes that would resonate powerfully within the human psyche.

In Jung's psychology an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.

“On the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art””

• Poems influence the reader because they provoke “a stirring in mind” which is beneath his/her consciousness

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS - this term refers to a shared group of archetypes passed along to each generation to the next in folklore and stories or generated anew. Within a culture, the collective unconscious forms a treasury of powerful shared images and symbols found in our dreams, art stories, myths, and religious icons.

shared experiences of a race or culture, such as birth, death, love, family life, and struggles to survive

Archetypal patterns - emotional tendencies, determined by experiences of the race/community - may be discovered in literature by reflective analysis

ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM: The analysis of a piece of literature through the examination of archetypes and archetypal patterns in Jungian Psychology

Northop Frye “The Archetypes of Literature”

- poems are born,like poets, not made, so a critic must use `literary psychology' to connect the author with his verse

- each poet has his individual formation of images; but some images are common for many authors - these common images are archetypal symbols

- the search for archetypes = literary anthropology

- we have archetypes of images and of genres

- literature is strongly connected with pre-literary categories: myth, folk tale, ritual

- their relation is one of DESCENT

- movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up

(like with a painting - if we want to see it in total, its composition, we need to back up)

- Literature has its rhythm - narrative and pattern - meaning

RHYTHM: recurrent movement - based on natural cycle (day/night, seasons)

PATTERN: oracular (prophetic) origin - not so obvious

Archetype of solar cycle/seasons/human life - common points 4 PHASES

Central Myth

1. The dawn/spring/birth romance, rhapsodic poetry

2. The zenith/summer/marriage, triumph comedy, pastoral, idyll

3. The sunset/autumn/death tragedy, elegy

4. The darkness/winter/dissolution satire

Critic's task - to show how all literary genres are derived from the quest-myth

Joseph Campbell - The hero with a 1000 Faces:

• All myths share fundamental structure - MONOMYTH

• The hero is an archetypal figure

Examples of archetypes found cross-culturally include the following:

(1) Recurring symbolic situations (such as the long journey, the difficult quest or search, the pursuit of revenge, the descent into the underworld, redemptive rituals, fertility rites, the great flood, the End of the World),

(2) Recurring themes (such as pride preceding a fall; the inevitable nature of death, fate, or punishment; blindness; madness; taboos such as forbidden love, patricide, or incest),

Orestes, Hamlet, King Lear - ambivalent feelings towards parents, conflict of generations

(3) Recurring characters (such as witches, Don Juans, the femme fatale, the wise old man as mentor or teacher, star-crossed lovers; the caring mother-figure, the braggart, the villain in black, the oracle or prophet, the underdog who emerges victorious),

(4) Symbolic colors (green as a symbol for life, vegetation, or summer; black as a symbol of evil; white as a symbol of purity; or red as a symbol of blood, fire, or passion)

(5) Recurring images (such as blood, water, pregnancy, phallic symbols, the ruined tower, the rose, the lion, the snake, the fall from a great height).

The Cambridge Ritualists, the myth and ritual school, were a recognised group of classical scholars, mostly in Cambridge, England, including Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray (who was actually from the University of Oxford), A. B. Cook, and others. They earned this title because of their shared interest in ritual, more specifically their attempts to explain myth and early forms of classical drama as originating in ritual, mainly the ritual seasonal killings of eniautos daimon, or the Year-King. They are also sometimes referred to as the myth and ritual school.

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