LITERARY TERMINOLOGY #7

ENG200.001 -- Introduction to Literary Study

Prof. Eileen Joy

Spring 2005

Figure 1. Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Matthew Brady, photographer)

ALLEGORY: Most simply explained as the presentation of an abstract idea through more concrete means. The typical allegory is a narrative--whether in prose, verse, or drama--that has at least two levels of meaning. The first is the surface-level story line (who did what to whom and when), and the second is deeper level of meaning. Allegory may be defined in many ways: from the general and somewhat cryptic view that it is a story that represents another story, to allegory as a vexing puzzle. Allegory is taken from the Greek word allegoria, meaning to “speak otherwise.” Allegory is generally an extended metaphor in the form of a story or poem that has a literal meaning and a meaning that is derived from outside the narrative itself. Allegory will often employ symbolism, personification, and stereotypical (and, archetypal) characters. Characters in allegory usually represent abstract qualities or virtues whose actions convey a significance often unrelated to the literal narrative. These allegorical meanings may represent political, personal, moral, philosophical, religious, or satiric ideas.

ARCHETYPE:  A plot or character element that recurs in cultural or cross-cultural myths, such as images of the devil in Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." According to Carl Jung, archetypes cross cultures and are embedded deep in the human subconscious and involve memories of situations, events, and relations that have been part of human experience from the beginning. They manifest themselves in dreams but are also expressed in the more consciously structured materials of myths and literature. Myth critics look for an analyze certain recurrent images. character types, and story lines under the assumption that their persistence in literature indicates their presence in the memories of the collective unconscious. The snake is an archetypal figure (or, image) in myth and literature, as is the "wicked woman" who leads men astray, and the "wise man" who always knows the "right path" (think: Gandalf the Good--later, Gandalf the White--in The Lord of the Rings trilogy).

MYTH: A traditional anonymous story, originally religious in nature, told by a particular cultural group in order to explain a natural or cosmic phenomenon. Individual myths are typically part of an interconnected collection of such tales, known as a culture's mythology. Myths generally offer supernatural explanations for the creation of the world and humanity, as well as for death, judgment, and the afterlife. Stories chronicling the adventures of gods and other supernatural forces, especially stories about their various feuds and encounters with mortals, are common, as are tales about the fictional humans who must interact with them. Carl Jung, a noted psychiatrist (who was once a colleague and then later an intellectual enemy to Freud), argued that myths reveal a collective unconscious, a common inheritance of all human beings. Many writers have incorporated myths into their works or created their own mythic frameworks in an attempt to reach their audiences at a universal or primal level of human thought, emotion, and experience.

The definitions above have been partly pilfered from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition). Other additions are the work of the fevered mind of Prof. Joy.