The Archetypal Pantheon
Archetypes are everywhere, both in real life and in literature around the world, and humans know them all. American Gods is a fantasy novel written by Neil Gaiman in 2001. The book revolves around the premise that every god that has been believed in has manifested into human form and has traveled to America through the minds of immigrants. Shadow Moon is the main character in this novel, which follows his adventure with the American gods. Wednesday, Odin, is Shadow’s boss and also the strongest advocate for fighting the new gods: internet, plastic, and TV. Laura is Shadow’s wife, who died in a car accident at the beginning of the novel, and is staying alive with the help of a magical golden coin. Other characters that
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Lewis, James Cabell, and Tolkien. “The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing ‘I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,’ was C.S. Lewis and the ‘Narnia’ books” (Gaiman). Mr. Gaiman is a modern fantasy author, born in the UK and now living in America. Neil has said that he loved libraries as child, frequenting the local stash of novels which he would read vivaciously. Neil started as a journalist before becoming a full time author, publishing his first novel Duran Duran, an account of a band of the same name. He is a pioneer of the modern comics, making the critically acclaimed Sandman comic series. Gaiman has written books ranged from children stories, to adult novels, to screenplays and TV episodes, many crossing multiple genres at once. Gods and mythology are one of his favorite themes to use in his works, as seen in American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Norse Mythology. Neil uses social media to connect to readers, sustaining a blog with over 1 million followers. He is also a patron of the Open Rights Group and The Science Fiction Foundation. American Gods is one of Gaiman’s most praised novels, winning the Hugo and Nebula award for best fantasy book (neilgaiman.com). In the novel, Shadow goes on a journey to end the disagreement between the old and new gods and gaining self-enlightenment along the way. His hero’s journey takes him to …show more content…
Carl Jung is the father of archetypal criticism and creator of the term collective unconscious. Jung (1875 – 1961) was born in Switzerland and learned from Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytic critic, before breaking off and creating his own literary theory. Because of his shift to the Archetypal theory, also called mythic criticism, Jung was repelled by the psychoanalytic community, until he came up with the idea of a collective unconscious. “Jung’s ideas caused him to be banished from the psychanalytic community for the next five years. During this time, he formulated his own model of the human psyche, which would become his most important contribution to psychology and literary criticism (Bressler).” The collective unconscious is the common knowledge of themes and archetypes that every human has gained from ancestral memory. This is the bases for Archetypal criticism, the reason for humans being able to recognize archetypes and recurring patterns in literature. Archetypal literary works relate to the beliefs, knowledge, and desires of readers through recognizable themes and archetypes (Bressler 149). Archetypes are universally recognized patterns, characteristics, or objects that invoke similar emotional responses from every person. Archetypes give literary works deeper meaning because
In Zora Neale Hurston’s powerful feminist novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” she tells the story of Janie Stark and her journey into becoming a powerful black woman during the time when those words were not spoken together. Hurston uses Janie as an archetype for what we should all aspire to be, because in Hurston’s eyes, and the eyes of many others, Janie is the only character in the novel that gets it right. The thing about Janie that set her apart from everyone else, the reason that she got it right, was not because she was just born that way, but it was because she used all of the trials and hardships in her life to her advantage. She never crumbled or quit, but she continued to move on and use her life experiences to help mold to her
Archetypes are designed to be universal and original models after which similar ideas are patterned. They include, but are not limited to images, recurring themes, symbols, ideas, character types and plot patterns. Archetypes can be expressed in myths, dreams, literature, religion, fantasies and folklore. They are an effective means utilized to evoke strong associations, emotional or physical, to the reader or audience. Carl Jung, a psychiatrist and analytical psychologist, created the term ‘archetype’ and claimed that they could also be applied to literature. Jung recognized that there were recurring and universal patterns in many stories regardless of their cultural or historical period. As a result, he hypothesized that the human conscious contained a collective unconscious relatable to most people. In literature, it is important to recognize archetypal patterns because they hold special symbolic meanings that are representative of universal ideas similar to how the image of a mother represents love and sacrifice and how the color white represents purity and innocence.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung suggested all humanity is innately programmed with a set of primordial images as a collective unconscious. These primordial images, which he called archetypes, are buried deep in the subconscious until a triggering event brings them to the forefront. Artists, writers, musicians and p...
Every story that is read contains archetypes, which is a certain person or thing that is expressed in stories, myths and many other forms of art and literature. The story of Sunday Sunday has many archetypes within it, but the ones that stand out most are the archetypes of Saving the Enemy, Fog, and Love Angles. These archetypes stand out the most because they are found in many childhood classics like Cars and Beauty and the Beast, making the audience familiar with these types of characters and situations. The reason why archetypes are used is because humans have a collective unconscious meaning that people like what they are used to; therefore whenever a story is written it uses these archetypes to make multiple interpretations of the same
In the final chapters of the novel, Grendel, by John Gardner, the literary theory of psychological is highly evident. This type of criticism can be broken down to Samuel Freud's perspective according to the mind and Carl Jung's ideology of mythological criticism which has to concern with archetypes in literature.
Roncevic, Mirela, and Mark T. Bay. "American Gods (Book Review)." Library Journal 126.14 (2001): 153. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
In Fellowship of the Ring, a young gardener, Sam Gamgee, rose from his normal life to do the extraordinary by being a loyal retainer on the most important quests in his history. Sam was only one of the great characters shown in Fellowship, with many more showing different themes throughout the book. J. R. R. Tolkien, living in an age of war and industrialism which led to the creation of this book, was the author of this great novel. He was inspired by his wife Edith and how he had suffered from the war. Tolkien wanted his country to have a great story to call theirs to increase nationalism if war ever started again, so he came up with Fellowship, the first out of the series that Tolkien would work on for 12 years. Fellowship was created by
The book Arrow of God follows the story of African tribespeople who are dealing with newly inhabiting white settlers. It gives a unique perspective on what the native people of Africa went through, and is told from the native people’s eyes (Achebe). The movie District 9 explores a similar situation in which aliens come from outer space and are treated poorly. While attempting to relocate the alien refugees, a man named Wikus is poisoned and slowly turns into an alien and has to live like the species that he so passionately hates (Blomkamp). Though both stories tell the story of a group of people being discriminated against, they tell the stories in two different ways and perspectives.
...hat in addition to the unconscious, to which he referred as the “personal unconscious”, there was also a deeper, more universal layer called the “collective unconscious”. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is a part of the human psyche that contains images, thoughts, and feelings shared by all human beings, organized in underlying patterns, and is modified by each person’s subjective experience (Stevens, 1990; Wedding, Corsini, & Dumont, 2008). Using his own ideas about the psychic structure, Jung began to develop his own theories about dream interpretation. Jung’s theories about dreams were heavily impacted by those of Freud; however, Jung thought that dreams were direct messages, and a natural expression of the unconscious. This was unlike Freud, who believed that dreams are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes (Stevens, 1990; Lear, 2005).
Discovering the meaning and significance of the archetypes in one’s dreams and the dreams themselves were a sort of process that helped lead the individual towards a God. The suffering and process of analyzing the dreams and manifestations of the archetypes was crucial to resolving one’s entire unconscious and thus being at peace with oneself. When this peace was achieved, it allowed the individual to further their religious experience. Jung believed that all humans had a natural religious function and the expression of their unconscious through archetypes and dreams was crucial.
Furthermore, Campbell explained such patterns by using Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, which he was strongly influenced with. Psychological organs that developed through the evolution, is the idea Jung gave of archetypes (Jung 81). To him they are recurring patterns, images and ideas which all humans inherited in their unconsciousness (Volgar 23). In addition, Campbell described his theory as a reoccurring cycle of pattern consisting of three phases: Departure, Initiation and Return, which he calls The Monomyth (Campbell 28), a deep inner journey of transformation that every hero must go through in order to grow (Voytilla vii).
In order to understand Jung's theory of archetypes, the reader must first have an understanding of the reasoning behind them. Carl G. Jung explains the conscious mind by dividing it into three different psyches: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The ego is simply Jung's interpretation of the conscious mind. The personal unconscious is anything that is not presently conscious, but can be. The collective unconscious is a reservoir of human experiences that is passed from generation to generation. It includes the archetypes of self, which are archetypes for different kinds of people or characters in literature (Jung 67). They can be described as things such as déjà vu, or love at first sight. It is the feeling that what is being felt or experienced has been felt or experienced before.
The first theory to be discussed is structuralism, this theory is composed of many different branches. The branches that this paper will be looking into is archetypes. The definition of of archetype is typical images, characters, narrative designs and themes and other literary phenomena. Archetypes have their own form of criticism that is called archetypal criticism. Archetypal criticism means the generic, recurring and conventional elements in literature that cannot be explained through historical influence or tradition.
Psychoanalytic Theory itself has, what seems to be, two contradictory halves: Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first half focuses solely on the author and the unconscious mind; the second considers the unconscious, but prefers to concentrate on outside influences by deconstructing the text itself. According to Freud, interpretation is achieved by examining conflicts and symbols, such as Freudian slips and dream images. These outlets are help to determine whether an individual’s external behavior coincides (or conflicts) with their internal emotion. Freud placed emphasis on sexuality and the Oedipus complex, which is the idea of repressed sexual feelings toward a parent of opposite sex. He also defined three levels of the subconscious mind: the ego, the super-ego, and the id. Barry explains that the stages align with “the consciousness, the conscience, and the unconscious” respectively (93). On the other hand, Lacan, a follower of Freud, concentrated on the relationship between an author and his or her work. He claimed the two were inexorably connected, that objectivity is nonexistent. In an essence: an author’s personality is used to interpret the text and, in contrast, the text is used to gain insight about the author. Regardless of the emphasis, psychoanalytic criticism engages an
Psychoanalytic criticism is a term used to describe how and why a person behaves. There are two different types of psychoanalytic criticisms which were developed by Freud and Jung. Freud’s archetypes are the most common in “The Tell Tale Heart.” Freud’s archetypes are displayed throughout “The Tell Tale Heart” by how the narrator shows Id, which is the most dominant, as he kills the old man, Superego, as he shows remorse, and planning to kill displaying Ego.