6/20/2023 0 Comments News fews oriyaThere were painstaking scholastic interrogations on the prevalence of myth and archetypes in our modern literatures, and a linear analysis of texts became the order of the day. While the western academia was being enthralled by the newfound dynamics of the unconscious, our own bhasha literatures were also predictably influenced by it. They were stories that “may give shape to some kind of ritual, some sense of continuity between what we do and what other people did in the past” (Abrams 10). Myth re-appeared before the readers as stories that are told and shared, re-told and re-interpreted by a multidimensional continuity. At the conceptual level, Frye’s project represented the social process of constructing and revitalising myths. Interestingly, Northrop Frye, and not Jung, influenced the studies in myth and archetype that came into circulation in the Indian creative and the academic world a few decades ago. In this age of interdisciplinary scholarship, myth and archetypes have paved the way for fresh interpretation and re-presentations in the realm of literature, an activity, which has always been deriving from myth. Myths of a bygone era being transformed into aesthetic structures, and becoming a way of representing reality, has opened up a new acuity that the mythic analogue involves a “view of the world as a form of timeless, static experience” (Lugowski 42). While Levi-Strauss presented myth as a kind of thought, halfway between precepts and concepts, Barthes looked upon it as a ‘naturalising function’. The structuralist approach, for instance, looks upon myth and archetypes as “subconscious language”, and contentless system of signs. The early discourses identified the presence of underlying mythical patterns in all kinds of literature, and even described imaginative literature as articulations of essential mythic formulas and archetypes but the influential contributions of Claude Levi-Strauss ( Structural Anthropology: 1958, The Savage Mind: 1972, and Myth and Meaning: 1978), and the French structuralist Ronald Barthes ( Mythologies: 1973) have further revised the extant perceptions, and the discourse now calls for less literary approaches to myth. Myth criticism has progressively emerged as an influential discourse in the Western academia, especially after the Jungian submissions of “depth psychology” and “primordial images”, and Maud Baudkin’s path-breaking Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) were substituted by more literarily meaningful construal of Northrop Frye in his canonical work The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The perceptions of myth and archetype have of late been revivified owing to their natural spontaneity, collectivity, and universality.
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