click hear evaluate my assignment
M.K. Bhavnagar university
department of English
M.K. Bhavnagar university
department of English
Name:- Rathod
Neha R.
Class:- M.A. sem-2
Roll no:- 29
Year:- 2016-2017
Paper:- 7
Assignment Topic:- Northrop Frye - Archetypal criticism
Northrop
Frye:- Archetypal criticism
Introduction
about Northrop Frye:-
Born: Herman Northrop Frye
July 14, 1912
Sherbrook, Quebec, Canada
Died: January 23, 1991 (aged 78)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
School: Archetypal
literary criticism, Romanticism
Main interests:
Imagination, archetype, myth, The Bible
Notable
ideas:
Archetypes
of literature, classless culture
Influences:
Giambattista
Vico, Oswald Spengler, William Blake, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis
Influenced:
Harold
Bloom, Margaret Atwood, B.W. Powe Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSC (July 14, 1912
– January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist,
considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Frye
gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), which
led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting
reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he
developed in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), one of the most important works of literary
theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom
commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as
"the foremost living student of Western literature."[1] Frye's
contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during
which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.
Definition
between Archetypal Criticism:-
· Archetypal
criticism looks in literature for patterns and traces them through works of
classical antiquity into modern text, and interprets those reverberations as
symbols or Manifestations of universal human conflicts and desires.
· The
archetypal means original idea or pattern of something of which others are
copies.
What is archetypal criticism?
Archetypal
criticism argues that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works
that a text's meaning is shaped by cultural and psychological myths. Archetypes
are the unknowable basic forms personified or concretized in recurring images,
symbols, or patterns which may include motifs such as the quest or the heavenly
ascent, recognizable character types such as the trickster or the hero, symbols
such as the apple or snake, or images such as crucifixion (as in King Kong, or
Bride of Frankenstein)--all laden with meaning already when employed in a
particular work.
Archetypal
criticism gets its impetus from psychologist Carl Jung, who postulated that
humankind has a "collective unconscious," a kind of universal psyche,
which is manifested in dreams and myths and which harbors themes and images
that we all inherit. Literature, therefore, imitates not the world but rather
the "total dream of humankind." Jung called mythology "the
textbook of the archetypes" (qtd. in Walker 17).
Archetypal
critics find New Criticism too atomistic in ignoring intertextual elements and
in approaching the text as if it existed in a vacuum. After all, we recognize
story patterns and symbolic associations at least from other texts we have
read, if not innately; we know how to form assumptions and expectations from
encounters with black hats, springtime settings, evil stepmothers, and so
forth. So surely meaning cannot exist solely on the page of a work, nor can
that work be treated as an independent entity.
Archetypal
images and story patterns encourage readers (and viewers of films and
advertisements) to participate ritualistically in basic beliefs, fears, and
anxieties of their age. These archetypal features not only constitute the
intelligibility of the text but also tap into a level of desires and anxieties
of humankind.
Whereas
Freudian, Lacanian, and other schools of psychological criticism operate within
a linguistic paradigm regarding the unconscious, the Jungian approach to myth
emphasizes the notion of image.
What is Northrop Frye’s contribution to the
archetypal criticism?
Bodkin’s Archetypal
Patterns in Poetry, the first work on the subject of archetypal literary
criticism, applies Jung’s theories about the collective unconscious,
archetypes, and primordial images to literature. It was not until the work of
the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that archetypal criticism was
theorized in purely literary terms. The major work of Frye’s to deal with
archetypes is Anatomy of Criticism but his
essay The Archetypes of Literature is a precursor to the book. Frye’s
thesis in “The Archetypes of Literature” remains largely unchanged in Anatomy
of Criticism. Frye’s work helped displace New Criticism as the
major mode of analyzing literary texts, before giving way to structuralism and semiotics.
Frye’s
work breaks from both Frazer and Jung in such a way that it is distinct from
its anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors.
In his
remarkable and influential book Anatomy of Criticism (1957), N. Frye
developed the archetypal approach into a radical and comprehensive revision of traditional grounds both in the theory
of literature and the practice of literary criticism.
For Frye, the death-rebirth myth that
Frazer sees manifest in agriculture and the harvest is not ritualistic since it
is involuntary, and therefore, must be done. As for Jung, Frye was uninterested about the
collective unconscious on the grounds of feeling it was unnecessary: since the
unconscious is unknowable it cannot be studied. How archetypes came to be was
also of no concern to Frye; rather, the function and effect of archetypes is
his interest. Frye proposed that the totality of literary works constitute a
“self-contained literary universe” which has been created over the ages by the
human imagination so as to assimilate the alien and indifferent world of nature
into archetypal forms that serve to satisfy enduring human desires and needs.
In this literary universe, four radical mythoi (i.e. plot forms, or
organizing structural principles), correspondent to the four seasons in the
cycle of the natural world, are incorporated in the four major genres of
comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and satire (winter).
Within the overarching archetypal mythos of
each of these genres, individual works of literature also play variations upon
a number of more limited archetypes – that is, conventional patterns and types that literature shares with
social rituals as well a with theology, history, law, and , in fact, all
“discursive verbal structures.” Viewed arhetypally, Frye asserted, literature
turns out to play an essential role in refashioning the impersonal material
universe into an alternative verbal universe that is intelligible and viable,
because it is adapted to universal human needs and concerns. There are two basic categories in Frye’s
framework, i.e., comedic and tragic. Each category is further subdivided into
two categories: comedy and romance for the comedic; tragedy and satire (or
ironic) for the tragic. Though he is dismissive of Frazer, Frye uses the
seasons in his archetypal schema. Each season is aligned with a literary genre:
comedy with spring, romance
with summer, tragedy
with autumn, and
satire with winter.
· Comedy is
aligned with spring because the genre of comedy is characterized by the
birth of the hero, revival and resurrection. Also, spring
symbolizes the defeat of winter and darkness.
· Romance and summer
are paired together because summer is the culmination of life in the
seasonal calendar, and the romance genre culminates with some sort of
triumph, usually a marriage.
· Autumn is the
dying stage of the seasonal calendar, which parallels the tragedy genre
because it is, (above all), known for the “fall” or demise of the protagonist.
· Satire is metonymized with winter
on the grounds that satire is a “dark” genre. Satire is a disillusioned
and mocking form of the three other genres. It is noted for its darkness,
dissolution, the return of chaos, and the defeat of the heroic figure.
The
context of a genre determines how a symbol or image is to be interpreted. Frye
outlines five different spheres in his schema: human, animal, vegetation,
mineral, and water.
· The comedic
human world is representative of wish-fulfillment and being community
centered. In contrast, the tragic human world is of isolation, tyranny, and the
fallen hero.
· Animals in the
comedic genres are docile and pastoral (e.g. sheep), while animals are
predatory and hunters in the tragic (e.g. wolves).
· For the
realm of vegetation, the comedic is, again, pastoral but also
represented by gardens, parks, roses and lotuses. As for the tragic, vegetation
is of a wild forest, or as being barren.
· Cities,
temples, or precious stones represent the comedic mineral realm. The
tragic mineral realm is noted for being a desert, ruins, or “of
sinister geometrical images” (Frye 1456).
· Lastly,
the water realm is represented by rivers in the comedic. With the
tragic, the seas, and especially floods, signify
the water sphere.
Frye
admits that his schema in “The Archetypes of Literature” is simplistic, but
makes room for exceptions by noting that there are neutral archetypes. The
example he cites are islands such as Circe[1]’s or Prospero’s which
cannot be categorized under the tragic or comedic.
Example of archetypal criticism:-
Example1
The
Hero: He or she is a character who predominantly exhibits goodness and
struggles against evil in order to restore harmony and justice to society e.g.
Beowulf, Hercules, D’artagnan from “The Three Musketeers” etc.
Example 2
The Mother Figure: Such a character may be
represented as Fairy Mother who guides and directs a child, Mother Earth who
contacts people and offers spiritual and emotional nourishment, and Stepmother
who treats their stepchildren roughly.
Some examples are:
In Literature: Lucy and Madame Defarge from
Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, Disely from Faulkner’s “The sound and The
Fury”, Gladriel from “Lord of the Rings”, Glinda from the “Wizard of Oz” etc.
In Fairy Tales: Characters such as the
stepmother in “Cinderella”, fairy godmothers, Mother Goose, Little Red Riding
Hood etc.
In Mythology: The mythological figures of
Persephone, Demeter, Hecate, Gorgon, Medusa
Example 3
The Innocent Youth: He or she is
inexperienced with many weaknesses and seeks safety with others but others like
him/her because of the trust he or she shows in other people. Usually, the
experience of coming of age comes in the later parts of the narratives such as
Pip in Dickens’ “Great Expectation”, Nicholas in Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickelby”,
Joseph from Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” etc.
Example 4
The Mentor: His or her task is to protect the
main character. It is through the wise advice and training of a mentor that the
main character achieves success in the world e.g. Gandalf in “The Lords of
Rings”, Parson Adams in Fielding’s “Josep Andrews”, and Senex in L’Engle’s “A
Wind in the Door” etc.
Example 5
Doppelganger: It is a duplicate or shadow of
a character that represents the evil side of his personality. Examples are in
popular literary works such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Poe’s William Wilson, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde etc.
Example 6
The Scapegoat: A character that takes the
blame of everything bad that happens e.g. Snowball in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”
etc.
Example 7
The Villain: A character whose main function
is to go to any extent to oppose the hero or whom the hero must annihilate in
order to bring justice e.g. Shere Khan from Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”
stories, Long John Silver from Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”” etc
Archetypes in Situations:
Example 8
The Journey: The main character takes a
journey that may be physical or emotional to understand his or her personality
and the nature of the world. For example, Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”,
Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews”, Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travel” etc.
Example 9
The Initiation: The main character undergoes
experiences that lead him towards maturity. We find such archetypes in novels
like Fielding‘s “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”, Sterne‘s “The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”, Voltaire’s “Candide” etc.
Example 10
Good Versus Evil: It represents the clash of
forces that represent goodness with those that represent evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment