Theory of Archetypes

 Thinking Activity: Theory of Archetypes

This blog is a response to the thinking activity assigned by Dr Dilip Barad sir. In this blog, I will discuss Archetypal criticism and Northrop Frye's Archetypes of Literature.

What is Archetypal Criticism? What does the archetypal critic do?

Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. The word came from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint". 

"In literary criticism, the term archetype denotes narrative designs, patterns of action, character types, themes, and images that recur in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals."

It dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Archetypal criticism peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991).

The term was adopted and popularized by literary critics from the writings of the psychologist Carl Jung, who formulated a theory of a “Collective Unconscious.” For Jung, the variations of human experience have somehow been genetically coded and passed down through successive generations. These primitive image patterns and situations evoke surprisingly similar feelings in both the reader and the writer.

The first work on archetypal literary criticism applies Jung’s theories about the collective unconscious, archetypes, and primordial images to literature. But Northrop Frey theorized archetypal criticism as a purely literary term. Frey’s work is distinct from anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors, Frazer and Jung.

What is Frye trying to prove by giving an analogy of ' Physics to Nature' and 'Criticism to Literature'?

At the starting of the essay “The Archetypes of Literature,” Frey stated: “Every organized body of knowledge can be learned, and experience shows that there is also something progressive about the learning of literature” (Frey). In addition to that, he says that the opening sentence itself is semantically doubtful because,

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not that he is learning nature. Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to “learn literature”: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature." (Frey)

In this quote, he is proving that Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature. The students of physics can that he is learning physics not nature because physics is only a part of nature. Art is the subject of a systematic study, that’s why it is impossible to learn literature we only can study it which is criticism. So, we cannot expect literature to behave like science.