Mythic Patterns Research Articles

The Man at Noah’s Window—The Death of the Old King in Patrick Roth’s Novel Starlite Terrace

Starlite Terrace is a contemporary novel comprised of four interlinked stories about the American film milieu by the German-American writer Patrick Roth. Four protagonists tell their Hollywood-tinged, highly personal life stories to a fifth, who is also the main narrator. In each of their singular collisions with life, a universal and mythical pattern is gradually revealed that gives these so-called ordinary people a dignity they have long since lost in everyday life. Literary scholars are considering Starlite Terrace a brilliant portrayal of the so-called “seeker spirituality” found primarily on the West Coast of California. In fact, the novel is part of Patrick Roth’s own life story, a condensation of his 40 years of experience in Los Angeles, the center of the American film industry. The novel represents a new kind of literature, a new poetics that strives to give expression to an archetypal layer of the unconscious through the writing process, thus bringing together these separate spheres. The highly Jungian worldview is mirrored in the character of Rex, “The Man at Noah’s Window,” among others. In his fixation on the movies and movie stars, he represents an aspect of the narrator’s shadow, a content eventually recognized and accepted. Ultimately, Rex, the “eternal outsider,” embodies the old ailing king in desperate need of rejuvenation. On the level of the collective psyche, the figure of Rex conveys the end of the old God image and the beginning of a new one, as experienced and foretold in the narrator’s archetypal puer aeternus dream.

Perspective of Gender Roles in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

The most actively and purposefully practiced agenda for ages has been based on mythical patterns and beliefs, which are useful in encapsulating and hiding the reality of gender. Likewise, feminist writers and philosophers have investigated the causes, methods, and effects of the longstanding systemic oppression of women through myths. This project concentrates on how modern female writers have reconstructed gender identities to benefit women. The Penelopiad, a 2005 novella by Margaret Atwood defies the conventional ideas of femininity by depicting a variety of strong female characters. The patriarchal dominance that accuses this sensitive gender of passivity and the pervasive misrepresentation of women in mythologies served as the main sources of inspiration for this work. Therefore, this project shows how Atwood reconstructs gender identities in The Penelopiad. This work is examined in this research to see what gender roles the patriarchal Greek culture has assigned to both men and women.

Why is John’s Apocalypse so Bloody? John’s Use and Subversion of Combat Myths in Revelation 19:11–20:10

The question of violence in John’s Apocalypse is a perennial issue producing numerous treatments with a variety of solutions. Nevertheless, very few of the many treatments seriously engage the combat myths of the ANE and how they may relate to the issue of violence in the Apocalypse. This lack of engagement is surprising given that the Apocalypse seems to draw from the plot elements, characters, and overarching concerns common to combat myths. This essay aims to rectify this by situating the Apocalypse within the combat myth tradition. When one does this, I argue that John’s use of the mythic pattern furnished by combat myths renders the violence of the Apocalypse intelligible while at the same time undermining the violent imagery with strategic departures and alterations.

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

BECAUSE THERE IS (NO) HOPE FOR GUIDO CAVALCANTI AND T. S. ELIOT

The aim of the research is to carry out the analysis of the echoes of one of the most famous love ballads composed by the Italian medieval poet Guido Cavalcanti in Thomas Stearns Eliot’s conversion poem Ash Wednesday. Eliot’s reception of Cavalcanti’s poetry is somewhat par- adoxical, since in one of his critical essays the Italian poet is labelled as a “pagan” and Ash Wednesday represents Eliot’s first greater work of high religiosity. Cavalcanti’s poetry was known for not playing as significant a role in the formation of Eliot’s poetic expression as Dante Alighieri’s. On the other hand, claiming that he did not exert any influence on the English author’s work would be wrong. The analysis starts from Eliot’s use of the initial line of Cavalcanti’s ballatetta as a leitmotif concentrating subsequently on the corresponding topics in the works of both authors and the way they are treated. Those are the ones of exile, transience of life, adoration of the Lady, the prob- lem of obstacles preventing hero to reach the ideal and the theme of spiritual fulfilment. The research lays emphasis on the fact that Eliot’s Ash Wednesday is modelled upon the essentially mythical pattern of quest set by Cavalcanti in his ballatetta and proves that Eliot’s poem is a unique attempt to make the poetic tradition of former centuries eternally alive.

The ironic background of cultural and mythical patterns in the 20th-century novel Saul Bellow: characters of the 50s and the 60s

Although Bellow’s novels deal with huge suffering as a rule, very often a duplicitous ironic approach can be detected in the structure of his books and in the configuration of his main characters. The perspective of psychological torment and frailty in Herzog or Mr. Sammler’s Planet is combined with the awareness of an ailing and unusually large body in Henderson the Rain King. This article explores the subtle ironic narrative background in two of his novels and highlights the use of cultural references and mythical allusions as key devices in the construction of characters for which the exercise of suffering is almost a vocation.

Gothic Structures of Being in Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

The current study attempts to uncover Gothic structures of being in Emily Bronte’s novel ‘Wuthering Heights’. The Gothic could be seen as illustrating a comeback to the mystery of the Middle Ages. We see mystery as a search for the unknown, unconscious part of the being. According to Jung, our past is always underlying the structure of our being, lurking beneath the rational, conscious mind. It is a pivotal part of our spirit, as, ‘…Without these inferior levels, our spirit is left hanging in the air’ (Jung, 1997: 41). Jung states that there is a sort of primitive fear regarding the possible contents of the unconscious, a secret terror towards the ‘perils of the soul’ (Jung, 1997: 20). It is these ‘perils’ we are trying to shed light on in the current paper, in the hope of presenting a reading of the novel that will enrich its meaning and clarify some of the mythical patterns which form the basis of the story.

더 나은 배관설비를 위하여: 베케트 후기 작품에 나타난 King Lear에 대한 문학적 암시

This paper tries to understand the nature of Beckett’s literary allusion by way of analyzing the literary allusions to King Lear appearing in his later English texts. King Lear and Beckett’s works bear similarities in terms of the theme of the failure of divine reward, the experiment in human misery and sufferings and the element of the grotesque pantomime. As a frame of reference for our study, there are three major case studies on Beckett’s literary allusions respectively undertaken by Gontarski, Knowlson and Caselli, which respectively shed light on the echoes in the mythical patterns, the generality of quotation and its sensory embodiment and the self-reflective and ironical intertextuality. As this paper analyzes Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and Endgame as the three representative cases of Beckett’s literary allusion to King Lear, Ill Seen Ill Said’s quotation of “vile jelly” is, firstly, found to create profound thematic echoes between the fruitless efforts of its camera-eye and those of Gloucester in King Lear. In terms of the general quotation and its sensory embodiment, the text echoes the senility dramatized in King Lear by materializing the frailty of the one frail remaining eye and the abject body of the old woman. The case of ironical intertextuality in the work is performed in the way in which, the better one understands King Lear, the better one can understands the work in allusion to it itself, as a subtle device in the text bringing about the inversion between origin and product. Worstward Ho sets Edgar’s line “the worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” as a very important preoccupation as well as the most important thematic thread in the work. Endgame illustrates similarities to, and influences from, King Lear in its ethos and pathos. Peter Brook’s iconic 1962 production King Lear so effectively witnessed to and exploited those similarities as to alter the general interpretation as well as the critical opinion of the Shakespearean original. As Beckett himself explained, these literary allusions are like “bits of pipe” that he carefully and meticulously chose for a better working literary construction.

An Archetypal Reading of the Mythic Representations in Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems

Archetypes reveal the shared roles among universal societies. This archetype may create a shared imaginary which is defined by many stereotypes that have not separated themselves from the traditional, biological, religious and mythical framework. In the same way, archetypal criticism represents that body of many stereotypes including plot structure, symbols, character type, themes that occur in mythology, religion, and stories across cultures and time periods. Heaney poetry has rested on a wide range of mythic patterns and archetypal images, particularly the image of the scapegoat/sacrificial victim and earth goddess. His archetypal images have been identified with the contemporary issues in his country. Therefore, this paper explores the underlying archetypal pattern that Heaney implies in some selected poems. These poems target the mythological heritage of his homeland which he either celebrates or criticized. His poems exhibit the poet's unconscious attachment to the universal archetypes which set social phenomena.

Keberangkatan Jaka Sembung Dalam Komik Pendekar Gunung Sembung (1969): Kajian Monomyth

This study aims to find out how far The Departure pattern of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth or Hero's Journey is present in the narration of Jaka Sembung's character in the silat (martial arts) comic Pendekar Gunung Sembung by Djair (1969), and whether the modern characteristics of comics play a role in this mythical pattern. Departure in monomyth is very important. It determines the motivations and goals of the characters in the comic as a whole. Monomyth analysis is applied flexibly to verbal aspects combined with comic visual aspects. The results of the study revealed that there were five sub-stages of The Departure in Jaka Sembung's journey with several modern adjustments.

Violence, Innocence and Redemption in Irvine Welsh’s Chemical Mythos

Abstract Scottish author Irvine Welsh has crafted an internally cohesive cosmology, grounded in mapping a somewhat loosely defined “chemical generation” that helped spearhead a personal brand of anti-Thatcherite counterculture (with an especially heavy focus on the marginalized, disgruntled and boisterous youths of Edinburgh). Examining some of the writer’s most recent and lesser-known works, my essay will argue that a series of archaic mythical patterns, symbols and cosmological coordinates can be shown to guide a large number of the axioms that Welsh employs to refine his own vision of a modern, emergent mythos.

ULOGA IGRANOG FILMA U PROMOVISANJU OSEĆAJA NACIONALNOG IDENTITETA

The study is based on the recreation of issues of national identity, multiple social identities and memories, which are in complex interactions and constant change, touching on the relationship between audio-visual art and ideological mythomania. The starting point is in the McLuhan’s hypothesis (Marshall Mc Luhan, Understanding the Media) that every form of media incorporates itself into the message it conveys and influences the way the message is interpreted, but also that the multiple functions of the message indicate something in order to establish psychological contact with the recipient. Reference examples are focused on the reception and perception of chronologically determined films made in the former Yugoslavia, from the constitution of Yugoslav cinematography to more recent films made in the region, which confirm that conflicts have penetrated everywhere, into the themes of films also, and that every new generation of directors has the right to recycle the forgotten memory, read and interpret the past and its mythical patterns. The approach to the analysis of the work is based on the observation of films as media presentations and interpretations of national contents by genre conventions on which they are based and with which the authors play or violate them. Considering war as a pattern, state or consequence, the films continued the war by other means after which tensions are raised or are an attempt at dialogue between different layers of individual and collective memory that the film suggestively provides. Inevitably, the film must communicate with the audience and it is questionable whether a film in which ideology is dominant and that reflects propaganda, forms an ecstatic understanding of reality and ideas about ourselves and our lives, has the power to become a social event, to have artistic value and its inherent esthetic experience.

An Afterlife of a Scholarly Epic: Frazer's Golden Bough and Lewis's Argument from Myth

C.S. Lewis believed that Jesus Christ embodied, in historical fact, a mythic pattern of dying and rising exemplified by deities such as Balder and Osiris. Taken from James Frazer's Golden Bough, an enormously influential work of early anthropological scholarship, the idea of a generalized ‘dying and rising’ motif is now substantially outmoded. Resting specifically on the resemblance between that motif and the story of Christ, and not (unlike Tolkien's argument from myth) on the gospel's general qualities as a story, Lewis's argument from myth thus presupposes an incorrect vision of actual ancient pagan religion. That shortcoming is not fatal, however. In contrast to Chesterton in The Everlasting Man (another formative influence), Lewis used an aesthetic or ideal, rather than a historical, conception of myth, which he carefully distinguished from the word's ordinary senses. Although Lewis did believe that ancient myth-makers worshipped ‘dying and rising’ gods, the core of his case is ‘our’ apprehension of a mythic quality in such stories and the Gospels, independent of the beliefs of ancient writers or hearers of myths. That conclusion should discourage overly sanguine appropriations of Lewis's arguments, which never developed into a general theory of mythology and, once the historicity of the ‘dying and rising’ motif is set aside, can be developed into a case much like Tolkien's.

American war movies. David Ayer’s Fury as mythologisation of war and soldiers

Both pop culture and modern Hollywood cinema are mainly intended for entertainment. American war films are not free from this vice. A researcher of culture should shun attempts to find hidden symbols, myths and flashes of meanings from distant traditional culture in such films. Contemporary popular mythologies do not represent the same mythical pattern that Eliade wrote about. Popular culture consists of ideas on various topics, borrowings, quotations and fragments of meanings, all patched together. In my view, however, Fury goes beyond pop culture and entertainment. After all, there is also good American war cinema and films that are not mindless borrowings or calques of carelessly patchworked pieces of pop culture. One can look at them and find certain cultural tropes and motifs known to specialists in humanities, such as an initiation journey, the symbolic language of eternal myths or archetypal figures of cultural heroes, all in a version transformed by popular culture, of course. The aim of my article is therefore to analyse David Ayer’s film from the perspective of a culture researcher who seeks cultural tropes and sources of the war hero myth in this cinematic work.

How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths

How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths

Embodied Masculine Sovereignty, Reimagined Femininity: Implications of a Soyinkaesque Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther

In more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

Ein Opfer für Ares

Abstract This paper analyses the human sacrifice of Menoeceus in Euripides’ Phoenissae. In the third epeisodion, Teiresias draws on the history of Thebes and its royal family to justify the sacrifice and the choice of Menoeceus as its victim. But what are the ritual or cultural models outside the dramatic fiction that inform this sacrifice and made it under­standable for the contemporary ancient Athenian audience? To answer this question, I discuss possible similarities to pre-battle sacrifice, the pharmakos-ritual, and the mythical pattern of a hero who sacrifices himself for the community. The relation of this sacrifice to the foundation of Thebes, which itself plays a prominent role in the play’s choral odes, is then examined in a concluding section. Here, the crucial question is whether the sacrifice restates the act of foundation and its violence or instead negates and invalidates it.

Riddle of the Talking Quill: Wandering Motives

The subject of the article is an international riddle type about the quill pen, which could be provisionally entitled The Tortures of the Quill. The Lithuanian riddle of this type has over one hundred of the recorded variants, the oldest of which dates back to the beginning of the 18th century, and reads the following way: “Cut my head, take out the heart, and let me speak”. Variants of the riddle differ in terms of using the imperative vs. more neutral indicative – first or third person; frequently, they also include the fourth motive – drinking. Having accumulated all the Lithuanian variants of the riddle – both published ones and those from the archived manuscripts, as well as the international equivalents, historical sources, mythological data, folktales, legends, incantations, proverbs and proverbial sayings, the author reveals the possible connections of these riddle motives with other texts, their migration, and the religious inspirations behind them. Similar motives are discerned in the Greek myths, in the Poetic Eda, in the Western European chronicles and hagiographies describing two historical events - namely, the martyrdoms of the Saint Adalbert of Prague and the Saint Bruno of Querfurt that took place in the end of the 10th and in the beginning of the 11th century. Having surveyed all the varying motives of the riddle the author assumes that the riddle in question does not necessarily follow the descriptions of the definite historical events; rather, both the descriptions and the riddles, as well as other similar texts have been composed by adhering – whether consciously or subconsciously – to certain mythical patterns or religious events, and resonate with them. The riddle of the tortured quill may be depicting a symbolical dying that means rejecting the old nature and rebirth in a new form, having drawn from the otherworldly sources that enable one to utter the divine or prophetical words. This may also include reminiscences of the shamanic rites. Although it is not a direct transmission of a memory narrative – rather, it is more like a wandering textual memory of a once important knowledge. Various folklore texts tend to be recreated and relived from time to time, while the spread of writing signified an enormously important turning point in the human history, worth to be highlighted and emphasized. Riddles used to be an extremely important genre of folklore, related in the ancient Vedic tradition to the knowledge of the world creation and the rituals of its renewal. Such renewal could have connected the new kind of the knowledge bearer and its transmitter – i. e. the quill pen, with the shamanic rituals from the past that require particular spiritual strength and devotion to serve the common good.

The Reconfiguration of Sisyphean Myth in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Akwanya’s Orimili

A literary work fascinates scholars and critics in different ways which may be based on literary experience or interest. In whichever perspective, literature engages the mind with multiplicity of interpretations. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Akwanya’s Orimili have been studied in varied ways but no study, as far as this research is concerned, has looked at either or both texts from the view of configuration of the myth of Sisyphus. Here is a reading that intends to look at the mythic patterns in the two works with respect to the characters of Santiago and Ekwenze Orimili, the protagonists. In the study, attempt is made to define the Sisyphean features, and establish how the patterns are configured in the two texts. The study uses the tool of archetypal criticism, from the perspectives of Northrop Frye, to examine these similar discursive formations in the texts. The study establishes that mythic thinking gives literature rootedness in tradition, and universal appeal.

The Reflected Mythological Patterns on Researchers’ Journey through Literacy Narratives

This paper aims to provide a heroism mythological reflection on the journey of researchers. This study uses the qualitative case study to obtain the comprehension of researchers' metaphor journeys through Monomyth on their research experiences. The documentary analysis is used in this qualitative study with the reflexive narrative because the reflection on experience can help the reader to gain insight into the researcher and their approach during the journey. 15 researcher’s literacy narratives chosen in this study which consists of 8 published literacy narratives and 7 literacy narratives task from participants. Research itself often considered as a journey that extends the existing knowledge and also develops new knowledge of the researcher while wandering in the wilderness of knowledge. Along the way, the researchers with their literacy narratives in this study unconsciously have a similar mythical pattern story as like as the mythical heroes which Campbell (1949) term it as ‘Monomyth’ pattern. The result presented in this paper may facilitate the literate improvements in which to motivate, to help the novice researcher to understand their own hero’s journey and to educate them about the stages that they will experience such as their new transition of conducting their new research.