This study presents an alternative approach to the novels of Franz Kafka through demonstrating that the Kafkan protagonist may be conceptualized in terms of mythic archetypes: the knight errant and the pharmakos. These complementary yet contending personalities animate the Kafkan victim-hero and account for his paradoxical nature. The widely varying fates of Karl Rossmann, Joseph K., and K. are foreshadowed and partially explained by their simultaneous kinship and uniqueness. The Kafka protagonist, like the hero of quest-romance, is engaged in a quest which symbolizes man's yearning to transcend sterile human existence.

Hindu religious culture has a rich and long-standing performance tradition containing many genres and regional types that contribute significantly to an understanding of the living vitality of the religion. Because the field of religious studies has focused on texts, the assumption exists that these are primary, and performances based on them are mere enactments and therefore derivative. This thesis will challenge this common assumption by arguing that performances themselves can be constitutive events in which religious worldviews, social histories, and group and personal identities are created or re-negotiated. In this work, I examine the history of performance cultures (understood both as genres and the groups that develop and perform them) in the Telugu-speaking regions of South India from the sixteenth century to the present in order to elucidate the cross-fertilization among various performance spheres over time. / My specific focus is on the figure of Satyabhama (lit. True Woman or Woman of Truth), the favourite wife of the god Kṛṣṇa. Satyabhama represents a range of emotions, which makes her character popular with dramatists and other artists in the Telugu-speaking regions of South India where poets composed hundreds of performance-texts about her, and several caste groups have enacted her character through narrative drama. / The dissertation is composed of four substantive parts - text, context, memory, and mimesis. The first part explores the figure of Satyabhama in the Mahabharata and in three Sanskrit Puraṇic texts. The second examines the courtly traditions of poetry and village performances in the Telugu language, where Satyabhama is innovatively portrayed through aesthetic categories. The third is based on ethnographic work with women of the contemporary kalavantula (devadasi) community and looks at the ways in which they identify with Satyabhama and other female aesthetic archetypes (nayikas). The final section is based on fieldwork with the smarta Brahmin male community in Kuchipudi village, where men continue to perform mimetic representations of Satyabhama through a performative modality known as stri-veṣam ("guise of a woman").

Thesis (M.A.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 90-98.

This study traces archetypal images in selected prose fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and shows his consistent use of such imagery throughout his career, and outlines the archetypal images that Poe uses repeatedly throughout his works: the death of the beautiful woman, death and resurrection, the hero's journey to the underworld, and the quest for forbidden knowledge. The study examines Poe's use of myth to establish and uphold archetypal patterns. Poe's goal when crafting his works was the creation of a single specified effect, and to create his effects, he used the materials at hand. Some of these materials came from his own subconscious; however, a greater portion came from a lifetime of study and his own understanding of the connections between myth and archetypal images.

Significant passages in Alice Walker's writings give evidence of archetypal patterns from Carl Jung and feminine archetypal patterns from Annis Pratt. Since a knowledge of archetypal patterns can influence the total understanding of aspects of Walker's writings, a study of these patterns in the undergraduate classroom benefits the student and opens up another system of analyzing writings, particularly writings by African-American women.

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In The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence departs from traditional literary techniques, going below the level of ego consciousness within his characters to focus on the elemental dynamic forces of their unconscious minds. Using three generations of the Brangwen family, Lawrence traces the rise of consciousness from the primal unity of the uroboros through the matriarchal epoch and finally to full consciousness, the realization of the self, in Ursula Brangwen. By correlating the archetypal symbols characteristic of three stages of consciousness outlined in Erich Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother with the three sections of the novel, it is possible to show that Lawrence utilizes the symbols most appropriate to each stage.

This study analyzes Lloyd Alexander's The Prydain Chronicles through a Jungian lens. Previous scholarship on Alexander's works has briefly considered archetypal criticism, but not extensively. Bruno Bettelheim's thoughts are used intermittently throughout the thesis. This study concentrates on Taran's individuation process, the discovery of true selfhood, and his consequent development of a whole psyche.

This study examines pedagogical patterns associated with wizard, witch, and fairy archetypes in fantasy literature. The fact that magic exists in fantasy literature as a mysterious and elusive element allows narratives to maintain and validate various means of knowledge acquisition – one archetypal form, such as a wizard, pursues a radically different mode of pedagogical engagement with magic than another archetypal form, such as a fairy. According to Carl Jung, archetypes are anchored by ancient elements of mythological lore, yet continuously shape-shift in the present day. My qualitative research process involved close readings of selected passages in popular works of fantasy literature, selected for analysis based on their salient educational themes as well as a presence of witches, wizards, and fairies. I examine how archetypes in fantasy literature frame various approaches to education, investigating whether these pedagogical multiplicities tend to re-codify magic itself. I investigate how these archetypes acquire, dispel, manipulate, and embody magic with opposing or unique tactics, while considering how each archetype confronts the unknown. I also reflect on the relevant folkloric and mythic dimensions of each archetype, examining the extent in which the magical discourse surrounding each archetype relates to ideas about teaching and learning. Each archetype presents pedagogic nuances, subtle parallels, layers, and metaphorical veins of meaning. How does education in fantasy literature establish broad and vexing challenges to the realities that we are familiar with or conscious of in the everyday contemporary educational field? Are there idiosyncratic pedagogical possibilities (and impossibilities) through archetypal representations in fantasy literature, allowing for multifaceted and meaningful representations of teaching and learning? I find that each archetype’s distinct pedagogical model includes variations as well as overlapping representations of creative agency, amplified possibilities, enhanced notions of growth, radical receptivity, calls for empathy, and visions of transformation. After examining each archetype in consecutive chapters, my conclusion summarizes the prismatic meaning of their pedagogical engagements, while reflecting on the implications and cross-pollination of education and magic. The intersection of praxis and knowledge for each archetype induces a mythopoeic imagination in relation to education, as each reconciles and renews significant transformational elements of pedagogy.