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Examples Of Archetypal Criticism

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CHAPTER II Archetypal criticism
The roots of archetypal criticism

Archetypal criticism is a type of literary criticism that focuses on particular narrative patterns, archetypes, motifs, themes or characters that recur in a particular literary work or in literature in general.
Archetypal criticism has its basis in the application of concepts developed in psychoanalysis and in mythology to the study of literature. The main tendency of this approach to criticism resembles to the early conception of form in Western thought.
Collective unconscious lays beneath the personal conscious and personal unconscious. As Jung said, the collective unconscious is ‘‘a storehouse of knowledge, experiences, and images of the human race. It is a racial memory, …show more content…

As Joseph Campbell says in his popular book The Power of Myth: “Myths deal with great human problems. I know what to do when I come to a threshold in my life now. A myth can tell me about it, how to respond to certain crises of disappointment or delight or failure or success. Myths tell me where I am.” (1988, 15) An archetype can be defined as an original type or model after which similar things are patterned, a prototype, an ideal example. An archetype, as used in literature, is a recurrent, universal pattern that evokes a deep, emotional response invirtually all readers as it strikes a chord in their unconscious memory.The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an organizing principle on the things we see or do. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory.
“For Jung the archetypes taken as a whole represent the sum of the latent potentialities of the human psyche - a vast store of ancestral knowledge about the profound relations between God, man, and cosmos. ” Jacobi

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