Ms. MacKenzie's Class



Archetypal Criticism for Students: An Overview“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.” – S. Kunitz The popular saying “when they made you, they threw away the mold” hints that literally the statue or figuratively the person is singular, exceptional, unique.? With no mold or pattern to follow, a duplicate is impossible. An archetype, however, is the mold that has not been discarded.? The archetypal mold, flexible and long-lasting, provides many close copies of the original.? Consider possibly the most popular archetype of all—the Hero.? John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones are strikingly different actors, but as heroes who overcome the obstacles in their respective paths, they are undoubtedly from the same mold, an obviously flexible one given the girth of Wayne.? The hero archetype appears in every culture; it’s a favorite mold of humanity.An archetype then is a pattern or prototype of character types, images, descriptive details, and plot patterns that find their way from our minds to our myths to our literature to our lives. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of stories is how similar they are across all people and ages. Although every society weaves its own distinctive tapestry of myth or lore, we discern common threads and patterns. Even in the stories of cultures widely separated in time and locale, common elements with common meanings recur – symbols, motifs, story arcs, and themes – and they elicit similar responses. So that small shiver of recognition we experience when encountering these elements expresses the timeless, universal feelings that all humans share. A psychologist by the name of Carl Jung, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, first popularized the use of the term archetype when he postulated the theory that, similar to the instincts of animals, humans are born with a “collective unconscious,” a level below the conscious and subconscious, wherein the source of the archetypes or the molds exist.? He believed it was this collective unconscious that gave humans certain predispositions to specific stimuli.? In other words, we all respond to archetypes in the same way because our minds are made the same way and “preprogrammed” by thousands of years of human experience. Jung saw a deeper, more universal and ancient layer, a “memory” from our ancestors, a psychic inheritance common to the whole human race. ? Some texts refer to this idea as a “racial memory,” as in human race.? A fair analogy might be the mind reacts to an archetype in the same way that the body reacts when a doctor taps the knee—reflexively and predictably.? As a product of our collective unconscious, archetypes naturally found their way into our subconscious and our dreams.? Jung believed he could analyze his patients by focusing on the archetypal elements of their dreams.? From dreams, archetypes migrated to myths, the stories we told to explain our world before science arrived to help, the stories that reveal our “deepest instinctual life,” the stories that reveal to us our inner selves. Our psychic archetypes are recurring patterns of images, symbols, themes, and stories that help us make sense of our lives. ? Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, believed that there was really just one universal hero story. Anthropologists like James Frazer have reinforced the universality of archetypes by finding that people who could never have encountered each other have the same archetypes in their myths and rituals.? From mythology, archetypes made the short hop into literature.? From our minds, to our myths, to our literature is a natural progression that shows us that the study of literature is the study of ourselves, archetypes included. So what the heck does one do with archetypes?? Take note of them and use them to explain the story and its appeal to the reader. Patterns that frequent literature and have universal appeal bear watching because they help explain both story and humanity.? The word archetype (pronounced ar-ki-type) is a joining of the Greek prefix arche -, meaning beginning, with typos, meaning imprint. Explain how the meanings of these word parts are significant to the ideas presented in the article. The article mentions often the “universal feelings all humans share.” What are 5 examples of this that you can brainstorm on your own?An analogy is an interesting comparison between two things. Find at least 5 analogies the article makes between archetypes/archetypal theory and something else. The article cites one of the more well-known character archetypes in literature – the hero. Think of at least 3 other types of characters that appear in our stories or film and give an example for each. ................
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