Myth And Prototype

Myth and archetype are two conceptions that run through all Frye's critical thoughts, this thesis just gird the two conceptions, trying to sketch the development of Frye's critical thoughts.As a critical thinker, Frye insisted specially on criticism's independent position. Therefore, at the beginning of his critical exploring, Frye objected to all kinds of existing dependent background critical theory, including Biographical criticism, Psychological criticism, Historical criticism. New criticism is not background criticism, it pay attention to the form and language of the text, but it only emphasize single literature work, ignoring the meaning of social text, so Frye called it "rhetoric criticism". At the basis of extending reading, Frye found some structural factors, such as convention, genre and some repeat used image were very important, finally he called these factors "archetype", and backward archetype to myth. Meanwhile, the value of myth rediscovered in theory and literature practice also made Frye's myth-archetypical criticism have widen background and developing chance.Myth and archetype actually embodied two principles of Frye's critical theory: the independence of criticism and max-scale studying. Before establishing Frye's theory, we firstly review various meaning of myth and archetype, in order to help us understand them profoundly. At that point, I emphasize the difference between Frye's archetype and Jung's archetype, because we have so much mistaken opinions about that. Frye divided the whole Western literature into four narrative patterns, five conventions, five images and seven image scopes. Although it appears a little stiff somewhere, actually it gives us a new theory perspective. Frye's whole literature critical theory helps us understand literature more deeply, understanding in the way of literature, not from background; in the way of the development ofliterature history, not limited in single literature work. Undoubtedly, understand literature aims to understand life.From the concern of literature itself to social context in which literature exist, the meaning of myth and archetype extends, and Frye's thoughts also broaden naturally from literature criticism to culture criticism. He believed criticism should come into being between the tension of concern myth and freedom myth. Frye is a confident and ardent person, he concerned our lives closely through literature and criticism. No matter literature describe us a ideal world with romantic ways or a wreck and enthrall world with irony ways, Frye deemed they were seemly express a world we want to identify with.Study Frye's theory, not for the sake of studying, but with aims to find some valuable enlightenment for our contemporary critical theory. If we can do as Frye said, keep the independence of criticism, keep the balance between literature structure and other culture phenomena, then we have a truly critical path, it may lead us penetrate literature imagination, to life itself, to a ideal world which might not exist but accomplish its existence constantly.