1 / 19

ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY. LECTURE 7: MYTH CRITICISM. Myth Criticism. in the States from 1930s to 1980s most flourishing bw. 1940s and 1960s main figures: Francis Fergusson, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Wheelwright, the English Maud Bodkin, and the Canadian Northrop Frye

baugher
Download Presentation

ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY LECTURE 7: MYTH CRITICISM

  2. Myth Criticism • in the States from 1930s to 1980s • most flourishing bw. 1940s and 1960s • main figures: Francis Fergusson, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Wheelwright, the English Maud Bodkin, and the Canadian Northrop Frye • distrust of technology, yearning for spiritual significance and nostalgia for the sense of communal harmony (modern!) • a movement, not a school, thinking about literature and criticism dependent upon the theories of myth derived from anthropology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and folklore studies

  3. MYTH • mythos, ‘word-of-mouth storytelling’ • sacred myths – legends - folktales • originally stories that sanctioned rites (beliefs and actions) • embody ancient social, moral and spiritual values • multi-functional narratives: magical, ritualistic, historical, and cognitive functions • a way of understanding the world • man’s poetry-making abilities produced them

  4. Myth Criticism • influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890, collection of fertility myths) • the modernist view of turning back to primitive or mystic foundations of man opposed to abstract mental consciousness (mythos vs. logos) • it offered higher truths and communal forms of life, ancient wisdom and meaningful sources for man in an indifferent hostile world • it studies connections bw. literature and myth (cf. mythopoetics)

  5. Varieties of mythopoetics -- ”literature is displaced mythology” • formal approach: share features of plot, character, theme, and imagery (matrix) • thematic: matrix of common topics, elements • cultural: essential narratives imparting knowledge and wisdom • psychological: originally derive from ritual and related to the deep layers of the human soul archetypal approach of archetypal criticism – Jung!

  6. Carl Gustav Jung’s archetypes • located the impersonal and universal source of myths and literature in the collective unconscious, from where the primordial images, the archetypes come • archetypes: figures, places, acts, events • they also emerge in the materials of art, dreams, or folktales (e.g. Garden, witch, sacrifice, sword etc.) + in popular culture! • reading them, we are no longer individuals, but the race (vs. Freudianism)

  7. Northrop Frye, ”The Archetypes of Criticism” (1951) • first titled as ”My Credo”; Anatomy of Criticism (1957) • he thinks that literature as a whole has a coherent and closed system and criticism, accordingly, needs to articulate all the elements of the system • ”impossible to ‘learn literature’”, only criticism can be taught: it is supposed to be scientific and systematic (positivist view) • he attacks sentimental commentaries or literary chit-chat (e.g. Mr Eliot), and structural or rhetorical analysis (CP 95)

  8. Northrop Frye, ”The Archetypes of Criticism” 2 • to find ”a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis” (CP95B-96A) • giving total coherence • to rely on the data collected by structural analysis but try to find larger patterns • question of genres: whether existed before the actual works or developing • pre-literary unifying categories: ”archetypes of genres and images” (myth!)

  9. Northrop Frye, ”The Archetypes of Criticism” 3A- archetypes in recurrent patterns of the natural cycle:SEASONS / PARTS OF THE DAY / AGES OF MAN

  10. Northrop Frye, ”The Archetypes of Criticism” 3B - SEASONS / LIFE OF THE HERO / SUBORDINATES/ GODS / GENRES - from the QUEST MYTH

  11. Frye’s 2nd pattern of archetypes(CP 99-100)

  12. Frye’s criticism (or critique of his criticism) • all poetic images and symbolic elements can be placed in this pattern • over-simplification? • it works with e.g. Coleridge’s ”Kubla Khan” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (quest in 7 parts, sea archetype, characters of Death and Life-in-Death); with Shakespeare’s works • his works on Shakespeare, Blake (FearfulSymmetry,1947), on the Bible (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, 1982)

  13. Myth Criticism: new ideas ++ • in literature the writer’s ”signature” – the sum total of invidual factors in a work – is imposed upon the universal archetypes (L. Fiedler) • poetry, like myth, gives ”the sense of beyond,” – the realm of the possible, the paradoxical and the mysterious, opposed to the real, the known, and the actual (Philip Wheelwright) • mythical thinking is inherent in the thinking process (beyond logic and science)

  14. Maud Bodkin ++ • to find Jungian archetypes in poetry (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination, 1930s) • archetype of Heaven (garden in spring) and Hell (desert or winter), e.g. in Milton’s PL • triad of the Devil – the Hero – God • flower symbols, star imagery in poems • favourite: rebirth archetype (vitality of spring) also related to creative energy of composition

More Related