1.

Meaning of archetype
An archetype is a reoccurring symbol or motif throughout literature that represents
universal patterns of human nature. The word archetype comes from a compound
Greek word for "origin" and "model". Archetypes are literary devices that employ
the use of a famous concept, person or object to convey a wealth of meaning. The
concept of an archetype appears in areas relating to behavior, modern
psychological theory, and literary analysis. Usage of archetypes in specific pieces
of writing is a holistic approach. Archetypal literary criticism argues that
archetypes determine the form and function of literary works and that text meaning
is shaped by cultural and psychological myths.

2. Types of literary criticism

Literary criticism tries to emphasize on feelings, emotions, passions, and pleasure
that could be isolated from the language of truth: it is science. Archetypal literary
criticism argues that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works
and that text meaning is shaped by cultural and psychological myths. There are
different types of literary criticism:
Meaningful & Meaningless
Criticism majorly deals with a sort of commentary. Frye says that unlike scientific
researchers the critics engage in a sort of over-glorified verbosity that has no
tangible meaning. If one attempts to get an understanding of criticism he will be
thwarted by unstable generalities, abstract comments on the value and highly
rhetorical statements. He criticizes this hollow nature of criticism by suggesting
that they are pseudo- propositions which are statements that seem meaningful at
first glance but turn out to be meaningless once they are philosophically analyzed.
Hence this is the first argument that Frye puts forward in the essay where he makes
a distinction between meaningful and meaningless criticism. He rejected critical
evaluation in favor of a value-free literary science. He dismisses value-judgments
as they mostly reflect the sociological and psychological influences that made the
person say it. He observed that the thing missing from the current criticism was a
central hypothesis or a principle to co-ordinate everything that lay in a disarray.
Frye asserts that archetypal criticism is a meaningful criticism.
i. Archetypical Criticism
Frye synthesized structural criticism and historical criticism and formed a new type
of literary criticism known as archetypal criticism. Archetypal criticism interprets a
text concerning the cultural patterns involved in it and these cultural patterns are
based on myth, rituals, race, nation or social group. We find certain motifs and
images recurring in different mythologies of people widely separated in time and
place and having a common meaning, eliciting comparable psychological
responses and serving similar cultural functions. Such motifs and images have
been called "archetypes". They are described as universal symbols.

ii. Formalist Criticism

Formalist Criticism analyzes the form of a literary work to discover its true
meaning. Formalism holds that true meaning can be determined only by analyzing
the literary elements of the text and by understanding how these elements work
together to form up a cohesive whole. Formalist critics examine a text regardless of
its time period, social/political/religious setting, and author’s background. They
believe that true meaning of the text lies only in the text. Other issues create a false
impression of the text and thus jeopardize the audiences’ interpretation. So, the
formalist critics believe that a text should not be interpreted based on
 Affective fallacy-a reader's response to it
 Intentional fallacy- the author's stated or inferred intention
 Biographical fallacy- author's life
 Contextual fallacies- historical/religious/social contexts

According to formalism, these fallacies are the subjective biases and a text should
be analyzed objectively to determine its true meaning.

iii. Historical Criticism

This approach sees a literary work as a reflection of the author’s life and times or
the life and times of the characters in the work. Critics using this school of thought
investigate how plot details, settings, and characters of the work reflect or are
representative of events, settings, and people in the author’s life or a direct
outgrowth of — or reaction to– the culture in which the author lived.

3. archetypes of myth and archetypes of literature

Archetypes may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types
of literature that conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle. Northrop
Frye, 1957), indicates the correspondent genres for the four seasons as follows:
1. The mythos of spring: Comedy.
2. The mythos of summer: Romance.
3. The mythos of fall: Tragedy.
4. The mythos of winter: Irony

Comic and Tragic Vision of Myth

Comic Vision-The comic vision of the human world is a community. The hero is a
representative of the desires of a reader. Here the archetypes of images are
symposium, communion, order, friendship and love. Marriage or and equivalent
communion takes place in the comic version of the life.
Tragic Vision- In the tragic vision of the human world, there is tyranny, anarchy,
isolated man, leader backstabbing the followers, bullying giant of romance,
deserted or betrayed hero. In addition to this, there will be a harlot, witch or
various versions of a terrible mother. The human pattern is followed by divine
entities and heroic and superhuman characters.
There are some patterns of comic and tragic vision of Myth-
i. Human World: In the tragic vision of the human world, there is tyranny,
anarchy, isolated man, leader backstabbing the followers, bullying giant of
romance, deserted or betrayed hero. In addition to this, there will be a harlot,
witch or various versions of a terrible mother. The human pattern is followed
by divine entities and heroic and superhuman characters.
ii. Animal World: In the schema of the animal world, the comic vision of the
world is presented as a community of domesticated animals usually a flock
of sheep or lamb and gentle birds like the dove. the archetypes of pastoral
images are prevalent. In the tragic vision, the animal world is infested by
beastly creatures, birds of prey, wolves, vultures, dragons, serpent and other
monsters.
iii. Vegetable World: In the vegetable world of comic vision, the images of
garden, grove, park, a tree of life, rose or lotus recur. These are the
archetypes of Arcadian images like Marvell’s green world, of
Shakespeare’s forest comedies. The tragic vision of the world includes
 images such as a sinister forest like the one in Comus of Milton or the forest
at the opening of Dante’s Inferno, wilderness, tree of death.
iv. Mineral World- In the schema of the mineral world, the comic vision of life
includes images such as a city, or a building or temple or a stone presented
as a glowing precious stone. The whole comic series especially the tree is
conceived as fiery. archetypes of geometrical images such as starlit dome are
also present. In the tragic vision of life, the mineral world of myth is seen as
rocks, ruins, a geometrical image like the cross.
v. Unformed World- In the comic vision of life in the unformed world, there
is a river, usually fourfold which influenced the Renaissance ideal of the
four humors. In the tragic vision, the world gets transformed into the sea, the
images are of dissolution and the myths of a flood. The amalgamation of sea
and beast images give us leviathan like monsters.

4. collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness

Collective Consciousness
According to Sigmund Freud, a person’s subconscious is shaped through their
relations with certain people in their life. He also thought that organized religion,
like the state and the culture, works as a collective superego that controls and
represses the human urge to be a self. This notion of collective superego was
extended by Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung did not see eye to eye with Freud about the
notion of organized religion. He considered the religious impulse to be naturally
and universally a part of human consciousness. His belief in the universal
consciousness was the central difference between him and Freud, which
permanently separated the two. Freud and Jung disagreed on some key aspects. For
example-
i. Collective Unconscious

One of the central disagreements between Jung and Freud was their differing
conceptions of the unconscious.

Freud’s Position: Freud believed the unconscious mind was the epicentre of our
repressed thoughts, traumatic memories, and fundamental drives of sex and
aggression. He saw it as a storage facility for all hidden sexual desires, resulting in
neuroses, or what we would nowadays call mental illness.
He declared that the human mind centres upon three structures – the id, the ego and
the super ego. The id forms our unconscious drives (mainly sex), and is not bound
by morality but instead only seeks to satisfy pleasure. The ego is our conscious
perceptions, memories and thoughts that enable us to deal effectively with reality.
The superego attempts to mediate the drives of the id through socially acceptable
behaviours.

Jung’s Position: Jung also divided the human psyche into three parts. But in
Jung’s view the unconscious was divided into the ego, the personal unconscious
and the collective unconscious. To Jung, the ego is the conscious, the personal
unconscious includes memories (both recalled and suppressed) and the collective
unconscious holds our experiences as a species or knowledge that we are born with
(for example, love at first sight).
Jung’s take on the human psyche was inspired by his studies into Eastern
philosophy and religion such as Buddhism and Hinduism. He also believed that the
contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material.

ii. Dreams

Freud’s Position: Freud believed that we could learn much about an individual

through the interpretation of dreams. Freud argued that when we are awake our
deepest desires are not acted upon because a) there are the considerations of reality
(the ego) and also morality (the superego) . But during sleep these restraining
forces are weakened and we may experience our desires through our dreams.

Jung Position: Like Freud, Jung believed that dream analysis allowed for a
window into the unconscious mind. But unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that that
the content of all dreams was necessarily sexual in nature or that they disguised
their true meaning. Instead Jung’s depiction of dreams concentrated more on
symbolic imagery. he believed dreams could have many different meanings
according to the dreamer’s associations 

Archetypes are universally inherited prototypes which help us to perceive and act
in a certain way. Jung argued that our distant ancestor’s experience of universal
concepts like God, water, and earth were transmitted through the generations.
People in every time period have been influenced by their ancestor’s experiences.
This means that the contents of the collective unconscious are the same for each
individuals within a culture. These Archetypes are symbolically expressed through
dreams, fantasies and hallucinations.

iii. Religion

Freud’s Position: Although Jewish by heritage, Freud felt that religion was an

escape for most people. Like Karl Marx, he felt that religion was the ‘opiate’ of the
masses and that it should not be propagated. That said ,Freud grappled with the
problem of mythology and religious institutions for most of his life. He collected
many antiquities, most of which were religious, and a Leonardo cartoon, ‘Madonna
and Child with St Anne’ hung in his house. Some scholars have suggested that
Freud saw religion as the disguised psychological truths he felt lie at the heart of
human mental distress.
Jung’s Position: Religion in Jung’s view was a necessary part of the individuation
process, and offered a method of communication between humans. This was based
upon the idea that the archetypes and symbols present in many of the different
religions all translate into the same meanings. Although he did not practice a
specific religion, Jung was curious and explored religions from the archetypal view
point, particularly Eastern philosophies and religions. During the arguments and
correspondence between Freud and Jung, Freud accused Jung of anti-Semitism .

Collective Unconsciousness
According to Carl Gustav Jung the original ancient psyche lay foundation for our
intellect in the same way as our body structure goes back to general anatomy of
mammals. However, when discussing this foundation, he meant unconscious ideas
and images, which are part of the collective unconscious. After conducting
research on Greek mythology and analyzing the dreams of mentally ill Africans,
Jung came to a theory that major mythological motifs are common for all races at
all times. He thought of the collective (or “racial”) unconscious as hereditary,
interpersonal and resulting from human evolution. Jung rejected the concept of
tabula rasa or the notion that the human mind is a blank slate at birth to be written
on solely by experience. He believed that the human mind retains fundamental,
unconscious, biological aspects of our ancestors. 
Jung proposed that the collective unconscious is a layer of our unconscious
mind we come into this world containing, that connects each one of to the history
of thoughts and behaviors of all of mankind. The collective unconscious contains
what are called “archetypes”. Archetypes are universal concepts we seem to
instinctively know, or what Jung described as “identical psychic structures
common to all”. Archetypes mean that we can have the same thoughts and ideas as
other people we have never met even though they come from an entirely different
background and culture. An example would be the mother child
relationship. Nobody tells us what a mother is, but we react in a certain way to a
mothering figure, regardless where we were born in the world or what our culture,
religion, or race is. Their special status comes from the importance they have
gained across the many generations and the significant role they play in day-to-day
living. Although there are a variety of archetypes, Jung noted the significance of a
set of specific archetypes related with collective unconsciousness-

Persona- The persona is an archetype that develops over time as a result of the
tendency of people to adopt the social roles and norms that go along with living
with other people. From the Latin word meaning ‘mask,’ the persona reflects what
might be defined as our public personality. Attaching too much emotion and
importance to the persona can result in the individual losing contact with his or her
true feelings and identity, which then can become dictated by others (e.g., an
individual with a very shallow and conforming personality). The persona
represents all of the different social masks that we wear among various
groups and situations. It acts to shield the ego from negative images.
According to Jung, the persona may appear in dreams and take different
forms. Over the course of development, children learn that they must
behave in certain ways in order to fit in with society's expectations and
norms.

Animus and Anima- The animus archetype is the masculine aspect of females,
such as being aggressive. The anima archetype is the feminine aspect of males,
such as being nurturing. The well-developed personality contains both masculine
and feminine characteristics.
Jung believed that physiological changes as well as social influences contributed to
the development of sex roles and gender identities. Jung suggested the influence of
the animus and anima archetypes were also involved in this process. According to
Jung, the animus represents the masculine aspect in women while the anima
represented the feminine aspect in men. These archetypal images are based upon
both what is found in the collective and personal unconscious. The collective
unconscious may contain notions about how women should behave while personal
experience with wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers contribute to more personal
images of women.

Shadow- The shadow archetype represents the dark and more primitive side of
personality. Like the id, the shadow represents all of the instinctive and impulsive
aspects of personality typically kept out of the public personality and repressed in
the unconscious regions of the mind. Jung proposed that well-adjusted individuals
learn to incorporate these private aspects of their personality into the persona and
to express them consciously in a socially acceptable form.
Jung suggested that the shadow can appear in dreams or visions and may take a
variety of forms. It might appear as a snake, a monster, a demon, a dragon, or some
other dark, wild, or exotic figure.
Self- For Jung, the most important archetype is that of the self. The self is that
element of the personality predisposing the individual to unite all of the other
aspects of the personality. The development of the self as an archetype reflects the
desire by people across the generations to seek unity and harmony. Within the
individual, the self is the motivating force seeking to achieve unity and harmony
between all the private and public, masculine and feminine, and conscious and
unconscious aspects of the individual. Failure on the part of the self to achieve this
sense of unity and balance can result in the overdevelopment of one aspect of the
personality at the expense of all others. Creating the self occurs through a process
known as individuation, in which the various aspects of personality are integrated.
Jung believed that disharmony between the unconscious and the conscious mind
could lead to psychological problems. Bringing these conflicts into awareness and
accommodating them in conscious awareness was an important part of the
individuation process.

Jung suggested that there were two different centers of personality:

 The ego makes up the center of consciousness, but it is the self that lies at
the center of personality.
 Personality encompasses not only consciousness but also the ego and the
unconscious mind.
 5. deductive analysis and inductive analysis
Inductive Analysis
“The philosophical definition of inductive reasoning is much more nuanced than
simple progression from particular/individual instances to broader generalizations.
Rather, the premises of an inductive logical argument indicate some degree of
support (inductive probability) for the conclusion but do not entail it; that is, they
suggest truth but do not ensure it. In this manner, there is the possibility of moving
from general statements to individual instances (for example, statistical syllogisms,
discussed below). The Inductive method of analysis deals with particular to
general. There are some criticism that helps to understand a work through
inductive analysis-

Structural Criticism
Frye states that that structural criticism helps a reader in understanding a text
through inductive analysis. Inductive analysis is the inference of general truth
through particular truth. In the Shakespearean play Othello, Othello, the Black
moor kills his wife due to jealousy and suspicion. The reader learns the general
truth from the specific incident of Othello that jealousy is always destructive.

Historical Criticism
In historical criticism, the critic interprets a text taking into consideration the social
and cultural demands of society in the production of a text. He discovers the
common symbols and images used by different writers. The symbol of sea is an
archetypal symbol used by many writers. The historical inductive method of
criticism helps the reader to understand the symbols, images and myth.

Archetypical Criticism
Archetypal criticism analyses symbols, images and mythologies used by a writer in
his works. These symbols, myths and rituals have their origin in primitive myths,
rituals, folk-lore and cultures. In archetypal criticism, under the inductive method
of analysis, a critic, moves from the particular truth to the general truth. A
particular symbol or myth leads to the establishment of a general truth.

Properties of Inductive Analysis

 Induction is ampliative. The conclusion of an inductive argument has
content that goes beyond the content of its premises.
  A correct inductive argument may have true premises and a false conclusion.
Induction is not necessarily truth preserving.
 New premises may completely undermine a strong inductive argument.
Induction is not erosion-proof.
 Inductive arguments come in different degrees of strength. In some
inductions, the premises support the conclusions more strongly than in
others.

Deductive Analysis
Deductive reasoning happens when a researcher works from the more general
information to the more specific. Sometimes this is called the “top-down”
approach because the researcher starts at the top with a very broad spectrum of
information and they work their way down to a specific conclusion. For instance, a
researcher might begin with a theory about his or her topic of interest. From there,
he or she would narrow that down into more specific hypotheses that can be tested.
The hypotheses are then narrowed down even further when observations are
collected to test the hypotheses. This ultimately leads the researcher to be able to
test the hypotheses with specific data, leading to a confirmation (or not) of the
original theory and arriving at a conclusion. The deductive method of analysis
deals with the established meaning of work from the general truth to particular
truth. So, to explain deductive method of analysis here Frye illustrates Music and
Painting and furthermore he also conveys that Music and Painting are general
branch of literature while Rhythm is essential in both so,
Music: Inductive method
Rhythm: Deductive method

Rhythm and Pattern

Rhythm is an essential characteristic of music and in painting, pattern is the chief
virtue. Rhythm in music is temporal and pattern in painting is spatial. Literature is
like music and painting. In literature rhythm denotes the narrative which in turn
refers to events and episodes that leads to action. Pattern in literature signifies
verbal structure that leads to meaning of a text. A work of literature should have
both rhythm (narrative) and pattern (meaning). For Frye, rhetoric also comes under
the concept of ‘archetype’, in that it consists of recurrence; examples of such
recurrent, rhetorical archetypes include pattern, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration,
assonance and meter. Rhythm is temporal recurrence; pattern is spatial recurrence.
“Archetypal criticism, therefore, rests on two organizing rhythms or patterns, one
cyclical, the other dialectic” (AC, 106). In “The Archetypes of Literature,” Frye
brings together the idea of the dialectic between the desired and the undesired and
that of the cycle or recurrence.
Properties of Deduction

 In a valid deductive argument, all of the content of the conclusion is present,

at least implicitly, in the premises. Deduction is nonampliative.
 If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Valid deduction is
necessarily truth preserving.
 If new premises are added to a valid deductive argument (and none of its
premises are changed or deleted) the argument remains valid.
 Deduction is erosion-proof.
 Deductive validity is an all-or-nothing matter; validity does not come in
degrees. An argument is totally valid, or it is invalid.

6. four phases of myths and quest myth

Myth is a pivotal informing power that gives archetypal significance to rituals and
archetypal narrative to the oracular. Myth is archetype and vice versa, but we use
the term myth relating to narrative and archetype when we speak about
significance. Writers use the patterns in their work consciously or unconsciously
and it falls upon the critic to detect these archetypes and to explicate the patterns in
the work. Those who really excel at their archetypes are usually called gods in the
myths. If we extract the archetypes from a myth or a play, we see the plot more
clearly and understand their actions better. According to Northrop Frye myth have
four phases-
The Phases of Myth
i. The dawn, spring and birth- Myths surrounding the birth of a hero, his
revival and resurrection, of creation and the defeat of the power of darkness,
winter and death. The subordinate characters are the father and mother. This
archetype is characteristic of dithyrambic poetry which was an ancient
Greek tradition of poetry dedicated to the Greek God of fertility and wine,
Dionysus. Here Frye uses the term comedy in the traditional meaning of the
word. He means that the hero starts at a low point and ascends to a higher
position as the story progresses.
 ii. The zenith, summer, marriage or triumph- This constitutes the myths of
apotheosis- the elevation of someone to a divine status, of sacred marriage
and entering into Paradise. The subordinate characters here are that of the
companion and the bride. This is the archetype of romance. Romance is
correlated with summer because in this mythos the hero goes on minor
adventures and falls in love. Romance is correlated to summer because
summer shows the culmination of life in the seasonal calendar. Romance
always culminates with some sort of triumph, usually in the form of
marriage.
iii. The sunset, autumn and death phase- The myth of fall, of the death of God,
of violent death and sacrifice and of isolation of the hero. Subordinate
characters are the traitor and the siren. He does not use the word tragedy to
denote sadness. In such a narrative the main character descends from his
initial point. Also, from the bright state of summer, it has reached a point of
degeneration and decay. Autumn is the dying stage of the seasonal calendar
and it parallels the ‘fall’ of the protagonist.
iv. The darkness, winter and the dissolution phase- The myth of triumph of
the dark powers like the floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of Hero
and Gotterdammerung which means “twilight of the Gods" in German. It
shows a collapse of a society or dream marked by catastrophic violence. The
subordinate characters are the ogre and the witch. This is the archetype of
satire and irony. It is called ironic because in winter everything is in a state
of frigid dormancy. Everything appears stagnant and lifeless. But that is not
a permanent condition.
Therefore, comedy, romance, satire and tragedy are the four classifications of myth
that Frye identifies, and these four myths combined to form the quest of the hero or
the quest myth.
Quest-Myth
In most religions, there is a central quest by the heroes which becomes the
narrative structure of the religious scriptures.
Messiah Myth-Among the Christians, the quest-myth is that of a Messiah who
goes on a quest for the Holy Grail. The literary critic then takes the sacred religious
scriptures as the primary documents that have to be studied to obtain a
comprehensive view of the archetypes and the recurring patterns. The critic makes
a study of the genres and he zooms in to elucidate a text in terms of a myth. This
type of criticism is called the inductive method of analysis were the critic moves
from the general truth that is a myth, to the elucidation of the particular truth in a
text.
There are some opinions of Frye about Quest-myth-
 Frye calls the Quest Myth the original starting point of all the genres, Hence
the inception of all the literary genres lies in the ancient narrative of quest
myth.
 He proceeds to talk about the two authorities of archetypal criticism who
influenced him hugely-
-The first one is Carl Jung and his concept of a collective unconscious or
racial memory.
-The second one is Ruth Benedict’s book Patterns of Culture in which he
distinguishes between the Apollonian and Dionysian cultures, named after
the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Dionysian cultures are
ostentatious and flamboyant while the Apollonian cultures have value,
restraint and modesty.
 Frye attempts to find out the similarity between religion and literary
criticism. In criticism, the hero is treated as a remnant of human. As far as
the critic is concerned, God is a character in a human story like in the case of
John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Bible.
 Frye wonders whether the correspondence between these two antithetical
factors the original source of all imaginative life is. The correspondence
between the antithesis is where art begins. In myth god or hero is important
because these characters who are portrayed like humans have superhuman
powers over nature and this overtime gave rise to the vision of an
omnipotent personality.
 Frye elucidated the central archetypal images. The vision of innocence in the
human world correspond to the unfallen world of heaven in religion and this
vision may be called the comical vision of life. The tragic vision sees the
quest only in the form of its ordained cycle.
 Frye gives us a table of contents where he attempts to decode the central
pattern of the comic and tragic visions. The context of a genre determines
how an image or symbol is interpreted. Frye outlines five different spheres
in his schema namely- human, animal, vegetation, mineral and water.