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Archetypal Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term “archetype” can be traced to Plato ( arche , “original”; typos , “form”), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle’s translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido ) appeared in English one year after publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (2 vols., 1890,3d ed., 12 vols., 1911-15). Frazer’s and Jung’s texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history.

Jung most frequently used “myth” (or “mythologem”) for the narrative expression, “on the ethnological level” ( Collected 9, pt. 1: 67), of the “archetypes,” which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their “most common and most normal” manifestation in dreams (8:287). Thus criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named “archetypal” and is quite distinct from “myth” criticism.

For Jung, “archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos ” (9, pt. 1: 4), but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his “empirical” data were dreams. In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often insisting that “archetype” named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers.

At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, “archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race” ( Literary Criticism 709). Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung’s specifically named archetypes—” persona and anima and counsellor and shadow” —and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy 291), a practice subsequently followed in some hand books of literary terms and histories of literary criticism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism , essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of “Jungian” critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: “This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious—an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge” (m-12). Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of “archetype” as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention (99).

Northrope Frye/Pinterest

On a general level, Jung’s and Frye’s theorizings about archetypes, however labeled, overlap, and boundaries are elusive, but in the disciplines of literature the two schools have largely ignored each other’s work. Myth criticism grew in part as a reaction to the formalism of New Criticism , while archetypal criticism based on Jung was never linked with any academic tradition and remained organically bound to its roots in depth psychology: the individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the analytic process. Further, myth critics, aligned with writers in comparative anthropology and philosophy, are said to include Frazer, Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright, and Francis Fergusson. But Wheelwright, for example, barely mentions Jung ( The Burning Fountain , 1954), and he, Fergusson, and others often owe more to Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Oedipus Rex, and the Oedipus complex than to anything taken from Jung. Indeed, myth criticism seems singularly unaffected by any of the archetypal theorists who have remained faithful to the origins and traditions of depth, especially analytical, psychology—James Hillman, Henri Corbin, Gilbert Durand, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Evangelos Christou. This article, then, treats the only form of literary theory and criticism consistent with and derived directly from the psychological principles advanced by Jung. Other forms previously labeled “Jungian” are here subsumed under the term “archetypal” because whatever their immediate specific focus, these forms operate on a set of assumptions derived from Jung and accept the depth-psychological structure posited by Jung. Further, Jung termed his own theory “analytical psychology,” as it is still known especially in Europe, but Jungian thought is more commonly referred to today in all disciplines as “archetypal psychology.”

The first systematic application of Jung’s ideas to literature was made in 1934 by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry : “An attempt is here made to bring psychological analysis and reflection to bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our nature there find objectification” (vii). This book established the priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological.

The next significant development in archetypal theory that affected literary studies grew out of the effort made by U.S.-born, Zurich-trained analyst James Hillman (b. 1924) “to move beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy” to formulate archetypal theory as a multidisciplinary field ( Archetypal 1). Hillman invokes Henri Corbin (1903-78), French scholar, philosopher, and mystic known for his work on Islam, as the “second father” of archetypal psychology. As Hillman puts it, Corbin’s insight that Jung’s “mundus archetypalis” is also the “mundus imaginalis” that corresponds to the Islamic “alam al-mithl” (3) was an early move toward “a reappraisal of psychology itself as an activity of poesis” (24). Hillman also discovers archetypal precursors in Neoplatonism, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Proclus, Marsilio Ficino, and Giambattista Vico . In Re-Visioning Psychology , the published text of his 1972 Yale Terry Lectures (the same lecture series Jung gave in 1937), Hillman locates the archetypal neither “in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination” (xi).

Archetypal theory then took shape principally in the multidisciplinary journal refounded by Hillman in 1970 in Zurich, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought . According to Hillman, that discourse was anticipated by Evangelos Christou’s Logos of the Soul (1963) and extended in religion (David L. Miller’s New Polytheism , 1974), philosophy (Edward Casey’s Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , 1976), mythology (Rafael Lopez-Pedraza’s Hermes and His Children , 1977), psycholinguistics (Paul Kugler’s Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , 1982), and the theory of analysis (Patricia Berry’s Echo’s Subtle Body , 1982).

These archetypalists, focusing on the imaginal’and making central the concept that in English they call “soul,” assert their kinship with Semiotics and Structuralism but maintain an insistent focus on psychoid phenomena, which they characterize as meaningful. Their discourse is conducted in poetic language; that is, their notions of “soul-making” come from the Romantics , especially William Blake and John Keats. “By speaking of soul as a primary metaphor , rather than defining soul substantively and attempting to derive its ontological status from empirical demonstration or theological (metaphysical) argument, archetypal psychology recognizes that psychic reality is inextricably involved with rhetoric” (Hillman, Archetypal 19).

Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory

This burgeoning theoretical movement and the generally unsatisfying nature of so much early “Jungian literary criticism” are both linked to the problematic nature of Jung’s own writing on literature, which comprises a handful of essays: “The Type Problem in Poetry,” “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” “Psychology and Literature,” “ Ulysses : A Monologue,” and “Is There a Freudian Type of Poetry?” These essays reveal Jung’s lack of awareness as a reader despite his sense that they “may show how ideas that play a considerable role in my work can be applied to literary material” ( Collected 15:109^. They also attest to his self-confessed lack of interest in literature: “I feel not naturally drawn to what one calls literature, but I am strangely attracted by genuine fiction, i.e., fantastical invention” ( Letters 1:509). This explains his fascination with a text like Rider Haggard’s novel She: The History of an Adventure (1886-87), with its unmediated representation of the “anima.” As Jung himself noted: “Literary products of highly dubious merit are often of the greatest interest to the psychologist” ( Collected 15:87-88). Jung was also more preoccupied with dreams and fantasies, because he saw them as exclusively (purely) products of the unconscious, in contrast to literature, which he oddly believed, citing Joyce’s Ulysses as an example, was created “in the full light of consciousness” (15:123).

Issues of genre, period, and language were ignored or subjected to gross generalization as Jung searched for universals in texts as disparate as the fourth-century Shepherd of Hermas, the Divine Comedy, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), E. T. A. Hoffman’s tales, Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide (1919-20), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” as well as works by Carl Spitteler and William Blake. But the great literary text for Jung’s life and work was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust , not because of its literary qualities but because he sensed that the drama expressed his own personal myth ( Letters 1:309-10). Further, the text offered confirmation (and poetic representation) of the only direct contribution Jung made to literary theory: a distinction between “psychological” and “visionary” texts ( Collected 15:89-90). This heuristic distinction was formed, however, solely on psychobiographical grounds: Did the text originate in, and remain principally shaped by, the author’s experience of consciousness and the personal unconscious or his or her experience at the level of the archetypal collective unconscious? And concomitantly, on which of these levels was the reader affected? Confirmation of this theory was Jung’s reading of Faust: part 1 was “psychological”; part 2, “visionary.”

Thus Jungian theory provided no clear avenue of access for those outside of psychology, and orthodox Jungians were left with little in the way of models for the psychological analysis of literature. Many fell prey to Jung’s idiosyncrasies as a reader, ranging widely and naively over genres, periods, and languages in search of the universal archetypes, while sweeping aside cultureand text-specific problems, ignoring their own role in the act of reading and basing critical evaluation solely on a text’s contribution to the advancement of the reader’s individuation process, a kind of literature-astherapy standard. This way of proceeding had the effect of putting, and keeping, archetypal criticism on the margins of academic discourse and outside the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines and departments.

Bettina Knapp’s 1984 effort at an authoritative demonstration of archetypal literary criticism exemplified this pattern. Her Jungian Approach to Literature attempts to cover the Finnish epic The Kalevala , the Persian Atar’s The Conference of the Birds , and texts by Euripides, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Corneille, Goethe, Novalis, Rabbi ben Simhah Nachman, and W. B. Yeats. And despite frequently perceptive readings, the work is marred by the characteristic limitless expansionism and psychological utilitarianism of her interpretive scheme.

Given this background, it is not surprising to find in a 1976 essay entitled “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems” the statement that “no purely Jungian criticism of literature has yet appeared” (Baird 22). But Jos van Meurs’s critically annotated 1988 bibliography, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980, effectively challenges this claim. Despite his deliberately selective focus on critical works written in English on literary texts that are, for the most part, also written in English, van Meurs, with the early assistance of John Kidd, has collected 902 entries, of which he identifies slightly over 80 as valid and valuable literary criticism.

While acknowledging the grave weaknesses of much Jungian writing on literature as “unsubtle and rigid application of preconceived psychological notions and schemes” resulting in “particularly ill-judged or distorted readings,” van Meurs still finds that “sensitively, flexibly and cautiously used, Jungian psychological theory may stimulate illuminating literary interpretations” (14-15). The critical annotations are astute and, given their brevity, surprisingly thorough and suggestive. Van Meurs also does a service by resurrecting successful but neglected early studies, such as Elizabeth Drew’s of T. S. Eliot (1949), and discovering value even in reductionist and impressionistic studies, such as June Singer’s of Blake. He notes that Singer’s Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake (1970), though oversimplified in its psychobiographical approach and its treatment of characters as psychological projections of the author, does make original use in a literary context of such Jungian techniques of dream interpretation as “amplification” and of such fantasy-evoking procedures as “active imagination.”

Van Meurs’s bibliography conveys the great variety of Jungian writings on literature even within one language, the increasingly recognized potential for further development and use of Jung’s ideas, and the growth in numbers of literary scholars falling under the influence of Jung. A few names form a core of writers in English (including many Canadians)—Martin Bickman, Albert Gelpi, Elliott Gose, Evelyn Hinz, Henry Murray, Barton L. St. Armand, Harold Schechter, and William Stein— though no single figure has attracted the attention of academic literary specialists, and no persistent commonalities fuse into a recognizable school critics who draw on Jung’s theories. To date, the British Journal of Analytical Psychology and the retitled American Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture are the best resources for archetypal criticism of literature and the arts even though only a small percentage of their published articles treat such topics.

Thus, with the archetypal theorists multiplying across disciplines on the one hand and the clinically practicing followers serving as (generally inadequate) critics on the other, archetypal literary theory and criticism flourished in two independent streams in the 1960s and 1970s. From the theorists, dissertations, articles, and books, often traditionally academic in orientation, appeared; the productions of the practitioners are chronicled and critiqued in van Meurs’s bibliography. And the 1980s saw a new, suggestive, and controversial direction in archetypal studies of literature: the feminist. With some of its advocates supported through early publication of their work in the journal Spring , feminist archetypal theory and criticism of literature and the arts emerged fullblown in three texts: Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981), which self-consciously evoked and critiqued Maud Bodkin’s 1934 text; Estella Lauter’s Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (1984); and Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht’s Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985). This last text explicitly named the movement and demonstrated its appropriation of archetypal theory for feminist ends in aesthetics, analysis, art, and religion, as well as in literature.

Feminist archetypal theory, proceeding inductively, restored Jung’s original emphasis on the fluid, dynamic nature of the archetype, drawing on earlier feminist theory as well as the work of Jungian Erich Neumann to reject absolutist, ahistorical, essentialist, and transcendentalist misinterpretations. Thus “archetype” is recognized as the “tendency to form and reform images in relation to certain kinds of repeated experience,” which may vary in individual cultures, authors, and readers (Lauter and Rupprecht 13-14). Considered according to this definition, the concept becomes a useful tool for literary analysis that explores the synthesis of the universal and the particular, seeks to define the parameters of social construction of gender, and attempts to construct theories of language, of the imaginal, and of meaning that take gender into account.

Ironically, as in the feminist revisioning of explicitly male-biased Jungian theory, the rise in the 1980s of Reader-response theory and criticism and the impetus for canon revision have begun to contribute to a revaluation of Jung as a source of literary study. New theoretical approaches appear to legitimize orthodox Jungian ways of reading, sanction Jung’s range of literary preferences from She to Faust , and support his highly affective reaction to Ulysses , which he himself identified (positively) as a “subjective confession” (i5:io9n). And new theories increasingly give credence to the requirement, historically asserted by Jungian readers, that each text elicit a personal, affective, and not “merely intellectual” response. Even French feminist Julia Kristeva has been brought to praise a Jungian contribution to feminist discourse on the maternal: recognition that the Catholic church’s change of signification in the assumption of the Virgin Mary to include her human body represented a major shift in attitude toward female corporaiity (113). In addition, many powerfully heuristic Jungian concepts, such as “synchronicity,” have yet to be tested in literary contexts.

Archetypal criticism, then, construed as that derived from Jung’s theory and practice of archetypal (analytical) psychology, is a fledgling and much misconstrued field of inquiry with significant but still unrealized potential for the study of literature and of aesthetics in general. Two publishing events at the beginning of the 1990s in the United States may signal the coming of age of this kind of archetypal criticism through its convergence with postmodern critical thought, along with a commensurate insistence on its roots in the depth psychology of Jung: the reissue of Morris Philipson’s 1963 Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic and the appearance of Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino’s multidisciplinary, multicultural collection of essays, C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture.

Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye

Bibliography James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983), Re-Visioning Psychology (1975); C. G. Jung, Collected Works (ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 20 vois., 1953-79), Letters (trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2 vois., 1973-75). James Baird, “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems,” Literary Criticism and Psychology (ed. Joseph P. Strelka, 1976); Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino, eds., C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (1990); Martin Bickman, The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism (1980); Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies in Imagination (1934); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975); Naomi Goldenberg, “Archetypal Theory after Jung,” Spring (1975); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” (1977, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Léon S. Roudiez, 1986); Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985); Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1974); Morris Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic (1963, reprint, 1991); Annis Pratt et al., Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981); Jos van Meurs and John Kidd, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Works in English (with a Selection of Titles after 1980) (1988); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Categories: Archetypal Criticism , Myth Criticism

Tags: Achetypes , Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , Anatomy of Criticism , Archetypal Criticism , Archetypal feminist criticism , Archetypal Patterns in Poetry , Archetypal Psychology , Archetypal Theory , Archetypal Theory and Criticism , Archetypal Theory Criticism , Claude Levi-Strauss , Ernst Cassirer , Evangelos Christou , Francis Fergusson , Frazer , Gilbert Durand , Henri Corbin , Hermes and His Children , Hillman , Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , J. G. Frazer , J. G. Frazer The Golden Bough , James Hillman , Jessie Weston , Joseph Campbell , Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture. , Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious , Jungian Approach to Literature , Leslie Fiedler , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Logos of the Soul , Maud Bodkin , Myth , Myth theory and crticism , New Polytheism , Northrop Frye , Philip Wheelwright , Psychoanalysis , Rafael Lopez-Pedraza , Richard Chase , Spring Journal , Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture , Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought , The Golden Bough , The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye by Diane Dubois LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0035

Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912–January 23, 1991) was misunderstood for decades as a literary taxonomist or member of the archetypal school of literary criticism. Since the late 1970s his work has been subjected to wide reappraisal, revealing not only that his entire output was the result of a highly personal project but also that a spiritual quest and social mission runs throughout. While wrestling with William Blake’s perplexing symbolism as a divinity student in the 1930s, the centrality of biblical imagery in the literary canon became clear to him. From this project Frye’s critical method evolved, as he attempted to perfect a systematic approach to literature that could render any text comprehensible. Frye was astoundingly prolific, writing over thirty books and producing hundreds of book chapters, journal articles, book reviews, editorials, lectures, occasional papers, and sermons. Frye usually wrote about literature, but he also wrote on Christianity and other religions, on education, culture and politics, film, and painting. Situated within the University of Toronto for most of his life, he championed Canadian literature and art before it was fashionable to do so and even produced a handful of short stories. His writings have been assembled and edited to form the Collected Works of Northrop Frye , a collection of thirty volumes published by the University of Toronto Press in an immense project that began in 1993 and took just under two decades to complete. The Pratt Library of Victoria University at the University of Toronto holds a huge archive, including copies of literary works hand-annotated by Frye, these notations providing the most recent primary texts for Frye scholars to dig through for fresh material and insight. Despite his enormous output, Frye tells the same story over and over, of the revelatory and redemptive power of the written word. Frye believed that an education in the humanities was the basis of a democratic society. His “concern and freedom” thesis promotes a stance that is both imaginative and critical; laying between the two extremes of conservatism and radicalism, it promotes thinking beyond the simple reiteration of societal norms and values, without tipping into a potentially hazardous laissez-faire. Politically, Frye can be best described as a left-leaning liberal who, so committed to his belief in the social mission of literary criticism, frequently produced populist and accessible versions of his key ideas to disseminate these to a general audience.

Anatomy of Criticism

Frye 1957 is the most comprehensive statement of Frye’s ideas about literature and is a must-read for every Frye scholar. Frye begins by defending the need for a systematic literary criticism that does not rest on “taste” or value judgements or borrow its methodology from other disciplines or extraliterary concerns. The first of Frye’s four essays divides literature into five modes—mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic—each associated with, but not rigidly aligned to, a specific historical period; revising ideas first worked out in Frye 1950 , the second essay shows how literary symbols operate in accordance to five phases, ranging from simple descriptive function to the most profoundly revelatory, which he calls anagogic. In the anagogic phase, all archetypes are intertextually connected, providing a revelatory and transcendental apprehension of literature as an autonomous and self-generating Order of Words. His third essay aligns the four mythoi of romance, irony, tragedy, and comedy to the seasons of summer, autumn, winter, and spring, showing how literature embodies the entirety of human desire and also its demonic inversion; see also Frye 1957 (cited under Shakespeare ). In the fourth essay, Frye formulates a rhetorical criticism, and, in his conclusion, Frye begins to speculate on the social role of literary criticism; for more on the latter, see entries under Politics and Cultural Theory .

Frye, Northrop. “Levels of Meaning in Literature.” The Kenyon Review 12.2 (1950): 246–262.

This material is incorporated into the second essay of Frye 1957 . Draws on Dante’s notion of polysemy, stated in a letter to Can Grande della Scala, where Dante, using a medieval method also used by biblical exegetes, described his own work as polysemous, that is, having multiple layers of meaning, ranging from the literal, through the allegorical and moral to the most profound, revelatory level, the anagogic.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Making reference to a staggering breadth of material, Frye presents a persuasive literary typology. Then, in his final essay, Frye writes about Menippean satire, a “creative treatment of exhaustive erudition” and delivers his punchline—that another name for Menippean satire is the anatomy (p. 311). Thus Frye playfully acknowledges that his book is a creative, utopian fiction, positing, while simultaneously satirizing the (im)possibility of an encyclopedic overview of literature.

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Archetypal Criticism: A Brief study of the Discipline and the Sempiternal Relevance of its Pioneers

2021, International Journal of English and Social Sciences

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and theorist. He was born on 14th July,1912 in Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. Harold Bloom called him a "Miltonic figure" (qtd. By Bloom in an interview) of literary criticism for his exemplary and original contributions to the field of literary criticism. Frye was educated at the University of Toronto where he was a theology and philosophy major. He then did his postgraduate degree in English at Merton College, Oxford. In 1939 he returned to Canada and started teaching at Victoria College, University of Toronto where he spent the rest of his literary career. Northrop Frye is viewed as a pioneering critic of archetypal criticism. His first book The Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake written in 1947 was a highly original study of Blake's poetry and is considered a seminal critical work. He shot to international fame with the publication of his book titled The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays written in 1957 "which redirected American literary theory away from the close reading of New Criticism and towards the larger meanings of literary genres, modes and archetypes." (Drabble 386). Regardless of the critical evaluation, he stressed on a value-free science of criticism. Frye in most of his works elaborate a comprehensive map of the literary universe in a schematic series of classifications. He has written over twenty books on various subjects including culture, myth, social thought and archetypal theory. His famous works include The Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, Secular Scripture, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Spiritus Mundi, The Well-Tempered Critic and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Frye was a polymath who had extensive knowledge on various subjects such as western culture, archetypal criticism, religion, anthropology et cetera. The Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, published in 1963 is the collection from which the essay "The Archetypes of Literature" is taken. It was originally published in The Kenyon Review in 1951. Frye analyses literature with respect to various rituals and myths. He drew inspiration from many sources including the Bible, Blake's prophetic books, Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud and James George Frazer. But the main source of influence was the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Frye was immensely influenced by his account of the collective unconscious. But ironically Frye objected to being called a Jungian critic because he said that the literary critics should be concerned only with the ritual or dream patterns and need not concern themselves with how the symbols actually got there.

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This book, concentrating on the works of one of the most outstanding literary critics of the 20th-century, serves three main purposes, as reflected in the three parts of the study. The first is to examine Northrop Frye's mental relationship with William Blake, and explore the ways in which Frye's reading of Blake's poetry influenced Frye’s concept of creative imagination, a central tenet of his criticism. In the course of this process, the book assesses Frye's religious background and his sudden experiences of insight, and examines the problem of perceiving reality as being inside and outside of language. The second part explores how the Bible formed Frye's critical views as represented in The Great Code, Words with Power and The Double Vision, and the process in which he shifted from an esoteric theory to a morally and socially open one. The third part investigates patterns of ideas that connect Frye's theoretical writings to various critical traditions and schools, from Aristotle through T.S. Eliot to deconstruction, reader-response criticism and cultural studies. Kenyeres also examines Frye's language, which in itself gives rise to his diverging critical reception. The study outlines the typical variations in Frye's recognition by the critical world from the 1950s and 60s to our day. The author reveals that Frye has contributed theoretical input to a number of critical approaches, and thereby, at least partially, achieved the otherwise idealistic goal of his critical writings in promoting some sense of unity among critical schools. While the first two parts of the book demonstrate that Frye's reading of Blake and the Bible sets out a pattern of interrelations, stretching well into the realm of both intertextuality and extratextuality, the third part concludes that Frye's concepts are of a generally applicable character, provoking response from a number of critical approaches.

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Archetypal Criticism

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

• The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.2 : German-language Writing and Culture: Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein , 800-present.
• Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah) , Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University) , Herbert Rowland (Purdue University) , Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)
• Literary Theory/ Critical approach
• Date of occurrence 1900
• Austria (Location)

The main proponent of archetypal theory in the twentieth century was C.G. Jung, and the Canadian critic and scholar Northrop Frye utilized archetypal theory in literary criticism, though Frye’s approach differed substantively from Jung’s position. The advent of postmodern theory initially dampened the interest and influence of archetypal theory, but in recent years many writers and scholars have responded to the misconceptions and misrepresentations often found in postmodern critiques of archetypal theory (see for instance, Hauke, 2000; Rowland, 2002). Jung addresses the relevance of archetypal theory in literature and the arts most clearly in

(1966) which contains two significant essays on literature and poetry (first published 1922 and 1930).

Citation: Dobson, Darrell. "Archetypal Criticism". The Literary Encyclopedia . First published 21 June 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1569, accessed 11 April 2024.]

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THIRD ESSAY. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths

From the book anatomy of criticism.

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Chapters in this book (13)

Anatomy of Criticism

By northrop frye, anatomy of criticism summary and analysis of chapter 3.

Summary of Chapter 3

This “Third Essay” is “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths.” In the previous essay, Frye defined archetypes as symbols that recur throughout a culture, in multiple works of art. For instance, there is the archetype of the tree of life. In this essay, Frye turns to myths, which are bundles of archetypal symbols. His task is first to classify the different mythical categories of archetypal imagery, and then to derive some general patterns that deal with categories of literature. Myth, he finally argues, structures literature; individual works of literature draw from the different funds of imagery that different myths provide.

For Frye, there are seven major categories of archetypal imagery, divided according the seven “worlds” of the Great Chain of Being. Derived eventually from Aristotle, but by way of Middle Age Christianity, "The Great Chain of Being" is a hierarchical system for categorizing life. In the version Frye uses, there are seven levels in this hierarchy. From the top to the bottom they are: the divine world, the human world, the animal world, the vegetable world, the mineral world, the fire world, and the watery world. Each of these seven categories can in turn be broken down into five types of imagery, which are similar to the five modes from the First Essay. These are: apocalyptic, romantic, high mimetic, realistic, and demonic.

Remember that, in the First Essay, the modes moving from mythic to ironic were from more divine and powerful to more vulgar and inferior. By analogy, the types of imagery move from the apocalyptic, which is more godly, to the demonic, which is more base and ironic. In between, you have the types of imagery that are more humanistic. Within each “world” of imagery, there is a similar cascade. Let’s start with the “divine world.” Here, moving from the demonic to the apocalyptic is moving from dumb fate to the society of gods. The same can be said of each of the other seven worlds. Here, for instance, is the breakdown of the vegetable world: demonic archetypes are of an evil or enchanted forest; realistic (low mimetic) archetypes are of farms where peasants toil and labor; high mimetic archetypes are of beautiful gardens; romantic archetypes are even better gardens, like the Garden of Eden; and, finally, the apocalyptic vegetable world is Paradise.

Frye fills in all the “mythical” possibilities given the seven different worlds and the five different types. That’s 35 categories! But this is not the main point of the essay. Instead, what really interests Frye are patterns shared by all categories. In particular, he notices that there is a similar cyclical pattern within each myth. Fascinatingly, within each world, there tends to be a division of the cycle into four main phases: “the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death), and the like.” It is this kind of pattern—transcending the different groupings of archetype—that Frye goes on to theorize.

Frye calls the four phases of the mythical cycles “mythoi.” These are structures of myths, which are in turn structures of archetypes. He calls the four mythoi comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire, and he associates each one with a season of the year: spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), and winter (satire). Each of these mythoi has a particular mood, because each is attached to a phase in the life cycle. Comedy, the mythoi of spring, is about birth and joy, for instance, while satire, about wintry death, is bitter and cold. Each mythoi’s mood is an effect of the kinds of archetypal imagery and movement they involve. Thus, Frye has derived four major categories of literary experience by synthesizing what he has written so far about modes, symbols, and myths.

The remainder of this chapter is about the different types of story within each of these mythoi. Frye calls these types of story “phases,” and each mythoi, Frye argues, has six main phases. Comedy, which is about the birth of a society, goes from (1) an ironic phase about the birth of a new society to (2) a quixotic phase in which a society is young to (3) a “typical” phase in which a society comes of age to (4) a “green-world phase” in which society matures to (5) an “Arcadian” phase in which a society settles down and finally (6) a gothic phase in which society collapses.

Romance, which is about individual adventure, goes from (1) the birth of the hero to (2) the innocence of the hero to the (3) quest of the hero to (4) the continued innocence of the hero despite worldliness to (5) an idyllic phase of reflection and finally (5) a melancholic phase of contemplation, an adventure of the mind. Notice both comedy and romance go through phases that look roughly like the life cycle of a person from birth to death; in comedy, these are phases of a society, whereas in romance these are phases of a hero.

Satire’s six phases are (1) satire of the vulgar character or lowly braggart, (2) “quixotic” satire of a rascal, (3) satire of a hero, (4) satire of realism, for instance in the story of the average man who brings about his own downfall, (5) satire of fatalism, for instance in the story of a man defeated by bad luck, and (6) satire of social tyranny, like in dystopian fiction. Tragedy’s six phases are (1) tragedy of lost innocence, such as a fallen woman, (2) tragedy of innocence, such as an unfortunate youth, (3) tragedy of the ascending hero, like the story of the passion of Christ, (4) tragedy of the fallen hero, like most Greek tragedy where heroes have an epic flaw, (5) tragedy of a lack of freedom, as in the star-crossed and therefore helpless lovers Romeo and Juliet , and (6) tragedy of horror, in which the hero is tortured or mutilated. Note that the six phases do not correspond so much to phases of life, but to levels of power.

Analysis of Chapter 3

This is another complicated chapter, because it looks for patterns on multiple scales. First, it groups imagery into seven domains. But it only does this because it wants to see patterns that repeat across the domains. Thus, the mythoi of the chapter are not the seven domain themselves, but a cycle that repeats within each domain: the cycle of life, which takes the primary form of the four seasons. Sometimes, it is easy to lose sight of which pattern is the most important: the level of imagery or the cycle within it. But where Frye ends up is with the cycle, and the four phases of the cycle structure everything else that happens. This is the primary system of this chapter. In chapter 1, it was a gradient of power; in chapter 2, it was a scale of reference, from the most internal to the most external; now, in chapter 3, the primary system is a lifecycle.

Frye calls the four mythoi—comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire—“pregeneric.” That means they come before genres, which are what Frye discusses in the next chapter. The meaning of this “pre” is complex, and in fact Frye means two slightly different things by this. On the one hand, mythoi come before genres in the sense that they exist, historically , before them. Comedies exist whether or not books exist; the mythoi of comedy pre-exists the genre of the printed book. On the other hand, Frye means mythoi are logically prior to genres. That means the existence of genres requires the existence of mythoi. Theologically, this kind of relation is often talked about in terms of creation. In theological systems, God is "logically" prior to man. Without God (or gods), you can’t have man. Similarly, Frye seems to be saying that without mythoi, there wouldn’t be genres. It’s not only that comedy and tragedy come before novels; it’s that novels need comedy and tragedy in order to come into existence. The mythoi are more fundamental than the genres.

You will probably have noticed that Frye is using some terms—tragedy, comedy, myth—differently from how he used them in chapter 1. There, myth referred to the highest mode, and tragedy and comedy were types of fiction in which the different modes were explored. Tragedy and comedy, there, were defined in terms of a hero’s relation to society. Here, they are defined in terms of a particular phase of imagery, associated with a particular mood. This is one of the consequences of Frye’s ambition in Anatomy of Criticism . At times, he uses words in their common-sense understanding. The distinction between comedy and tragedy as a distinction of social integration is widely known in literary studies, thus he relied upon it in Chapter 1 because he was primarily interested in explaining the modes, and he did not want to engage with definitions of comedy and tragedy. But now he is interested in comedy and tragedy themselves, and he has to derive a definition of them instead of just using the one everyone else uses. Words take on different meanings according to whether they are being actively derived or simply re-used.

The confusion between this chapter and the first chapter also indicates Frye’s method. He seems to be progressively zooming out. The first chapter was on modes, which are internal to a work of literature. Then he looked at symbols. Now, he is looking at myths, which are collections of symbols. Each chapter synthesizes aspects of the previous one and moves to a higher or larger scale of analysis. This is also why the lengths of the chapters seem to increase as we go. Things get more and more complicated because they have to synthesize everything that came before while also deriving new things to come.

No matter how complicated things get, and even when they look unwieldy, we should remember just how tight Frye’s system is. Once he decides on a principle, he tries to apply it to as many things as possible. In this chapter, for instance, he considers six “phases” within each of the mythoi. This provides for some correspondence between each mythoi. In turn, Frye gives himself—and us—a sort of guide through this thick terrain. We know there have to be six phases, and because each mythoi has its own system, moving from birth to death or from small to large, we can fill in the six phases as positions along a gradient. Thus, the general method of filling in the logical blanks of a given system or subsystem remains consistent in Frye’s work.

Anatomy of Criticism Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism study guide contains a biography of Horatio Alger, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Anatomy of Criticism
• Anatomy of Criticism Summary
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Northrop Frye - The Anatomy Of Criticism

the simple is the opposite of the commonplace Full Text / Complete Text On-Line / E-Text

• THIRD ESSAY: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths

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• Comics / Tirinhas (& boobage).
• Fables of Identity
• The Educated Imagination
• Creation and Recreation
• The Double Vision
• The Bush Garden
• The Anatomy Of Criticism
• The Great Code (empty)
• Words With Power (empty)
• Charles Taylor - A Secular Age
• PREFATORY STATEMENTS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
• FIRST ESSAY: Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes
• SECOND ESSAY: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols
• FOURTH ESSAY: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres
• TENTATIVE CONCLUSION

• Solar Eclipse 2024

What the World Has Learned From Past Eclipses

C louds scudded over the small volcanic island of Principe, off the western coast of Africa, on the afternoon of May 29, 1919. Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory in the U.K., waited for the Sun to emerge. The remains of a morning thunderstorm could ruin everything.

The island was about to experience the rare and overwhelming sight of a total solar eclipse. For six minutes, the longest eclipse since 1416, the Moon would completely block the face of the Sun, pulling a curtain of darkness over a thin stripe of Earth. Eddington traveled into the eclipse path to try and prove one of the most consequential ideas of his age: Albert Einstein’s new theory of general relativity.

Eddington, a physicist, was one of the few people at the time who understood the theory, which Einstein proposed in 1915. But many other scientists were stymied by the bizarre idea that gravity is not a mutual attraction, but a warping of spacetime. Light itself would be subject to this warping, too. So an eclipse would be the best way to prove whether the theory was true, because with the Sun’s light blocked by the Moon, astronomers would be able to see whether the Sun’s gravity bent the light of distant stars behind it.

Two teams of astronomers boarded ships steaming from Liverpool, England, in March 1919 to watch the eclipse and take the measure of the stars. Eddington and his team went to Principe, and another team led by Frank Dyson of the Greenwich Observatory went to Sobral, Brazil.

Totality, the complete obscuration of the Sun, would be at 2:13 local time in Principe. Moments before the Moon slid in front of the Sun, the clouds finally began breaking up. For a moment, it was totally clear. Eddington and his group hastily captured images of a star cluster found near the Sun that day, called the Hyades, found in the constellation of Taurus. The astronomers were using the best astronomical technology of the time, photographic plates, which are large exposures taken on glass instead of film. Stars appeared on seven of the plates, and solar “prominences,” filaments of gas streaming from the Sun, appeared on others.

Eddington wanted to stay in Principe to measure the Hyades when there was no eclipse, but a ship workers’ strike made him leave early. Later, Eddington and Dyson both compared the glass plates taken during the eclipse to other glass plates captured of the Hyades in a different part of the sky, when there was no eclipse. On the images from Eddington’s and Dyson’s expeditions, the stars were not aligned. The 40-year-old Einstein was right.

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens,” the New York Times proclaimed when the scientific papers were published. The eclipse was the key to the discovery—as so many solar eclipses before and since have illuminated new findings about our universe.

To understand why Eddington and Dyson traveled such distances to watch the eclipse, we need to talk about gravity.

Since at least the days of Isaac Newton, who wrote in 1687, scientists thought gravity was a simple force of mutual attraction. Newton proposed that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe, and that the strength of this attraction is related to the size of the objects and the distances among them. This is mostly true, actually, but it’s a little more nuanced than that.

On much larger scales, like among black holes or galaxy clusters, Newtonian gravity falls short. It also can’t accurately account for the movement of large objects that are close together, such as how the orbit of Mercury is affected by its proximity the Sun.

Albert Einstein’s most consequential breakthrough solved these problems. General relativity holds that gravity is not really an invisible force of mutual attraction, but a distortion. Rather than some kind of mutual tug-of-war, large objects like the Sun and other stars respond relative to each other because the space they are in has been altered. Their mass is so great that they bend the fabric of space and time around themselves.

Read More: 10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

This was a weird concept, and many scientists thought Einstein’s ideas and equations were ridiculous. But others thought it sounded reasonable. Einstein and others knew that if the theory was correct, and the fabric of reality is bending around large objects, then light itself would have to follow that bend. The light of a star in the great distance, for instance, would seem to curve around a large object in front of it, nearer to us—like our Sun. But normally, it’s impossible to study stars behind the Sun to measure this effect. Enter an eclipse.

Einstein’s theory gives an equation for how much the Sun’s gravity would displace the images of background stars. Newton’s theory predicts only half that amount of displacement.

Eddington and Dyson measured the Hyades cluster because it contains many stars; the more stars to distort, the better the comparison. Both teams of scientists encountered strange political and natural obstacles in making the discovery, which are chronicled beautifully in the book No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity , by the physicist Daniel Kennefick. But the confirmation of Einstein’s ideas was worth it. Eddington said as much in a letter to his mother: “The one good plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein,” he wrote , “and I think I have got a little confirmation from a second plate.”

The Eddington-Dyson experiments were hardly the first time scientists used eclipses to make profound new discoveries. The idea dates to the beginnings of human civilization.

Careful records of lunar and solar eclipses are one of the greatest legacies of ancient Babylon. Astronomers—or astrologers, really, but the goal was the same—were able to predict both lunar and solar eclipses with impressive accuracy. They worked out what we now call the Saros Cycle, a repeating period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours in which eclipses appear to repeat. One Saros cycle is equal to 223 synodic months, which is the time it takes the Moon to return to the same phase as seen from Earth. They also figured out, though may not have understood it completely, the geometry that enables eclipses to happen.

The path we trace around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Our planet’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic plane, which is why we have seasons, and why the other celestial bodies seem to cross the same general path in our sky.

As the Moon goes around Earth, it, too, crosses the plane of the ecliptic twice in a year. The ascending node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic. The descending node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic. When the Moon crosses a node, a total solar eclipse can happen. Ancient astronomers were aware of these points in the sky, and by the apex of Babylonian civilization, they were very good at predicting when eclipses would occur.

Two and a half millennia later, in 2016, astronomers used these same ancient records to measure the change in the rate at which Earth’s rotation is slowing—which is to say, the amount by which are days are lengthening, over thousands of years.

By the middle of the 19 th century, scientific discoveries came at a frenetic pace, and eclipses powered many of them. In October 1868, two astronomers, Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer, separately measured the colors of sunlight during a total eclipse. Each found evidence of an unknown element, indicating a new discovery: Helium, named for the Greek god of the Sun. In another eclipse in 1869, astronomers found convincing evidence of another new element, which they nicknamed coronium—before learning a few decades later that it was not a new element, but highly ionized iron, indicating that the Sun’s atmosphere is exceptionally, bizarrely hot. This oddity led to the prediction, in the 1950s, of a continual outflow that we now call the solar wind.

And during solar eclipses between 1878 and 1908, astronomers searched in vain for a proposed extra planet within the orbit of Mercury. Provisionally named Vulcan, this planet was thought to exist because Newtonian gravity could not fully describe Mercury’s strange orbit. The matter of the innermost planet’s path was settled, finally, in 1915, when Einstein used general relativity equations to explain it.

Many eclipse expeditions were intended to learn something new, or to prove an idea right—or wrong. But many of these discoveries have major practical effects on us. Understanding the Sun, and why its atmosphere gets so hot, can help us predict solar outbursts that could disrupt the power grid and communications satellites. Understanding gravity, at all scales, allows us to know and to navigate the cosmos.

GPS satellites, for instance, provide accurate measurements down to inches on Earth. Relativity equations account for the effects of the Earth’s gravity and the distances between the satellites and their receivers on the ground. Special relativity holds that the clocks on satellites, which experience weaker gravity, seem to run slower than clocks under the stronger force of gravity on Earth. From the point of view of the satellite, Earth clocks seem to run faster. We can use different satellites in different positions, and different ground stations, to accurately triangulate our positions on Earth down to inches. Without those calculations, GPS satellites would be far less precise.

This year, scientists fanned out across North America and in the skies above it will continue the legacy of eclipse science. Scientists from NASA and several universities and other research institutions will study Earth’s atmosphere; the Sun’s atmosphere; the Sun’s magnetic fields; and the Sun’s atmospheric outbursts, called coronal mass ejections.

When you look up at the Sun and Moon on the eclipse , the Moon’s day — or just observe its shadow darkening the ground beneath the clouds, which seems more likely — think about all the discoveries still yet waiting to happen, just behind the shadow of the Moon.

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According to Berliner, Lansing "declared" that diversity of NPR's staff and audience was "the overriding mission, the ‘North Star’ of the organization" and that race and identity had "became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace." Several affinity groups dedicated to various subsets of NPR staffers were also formed, including "MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (Black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre ( Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR)."

NPR also began requiring its journalists to log the "race, gender, and ethnicity," among other traits, of their interviewees and sources in a "centralized tracking system" that monitored diversity. 

"I wouldn't have a problem with it if we were also looking at trying to figure out people's perspective, their viewpoint. I didn't love it, but I also think it was very limited. If we were going to do it, let's go all the way," Berliner told The Free Press founder Bari Weiss on her "Honestly" podcast. 

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DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital that tracking sources based on their identity "artificially disrupts the process of sourcing and researching the news."

"A tracking system is certainly designed to chill the reporting process and alter the normal journalism instincts to go where the story can best be told," McCall argued. 

"The obsession at NPR on race and diversity post-George Floyd is a microcosm of the destructive impact of DEI," Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News Digital. "Rather than focusing on the accuracy of a source's information, the source's race, ethnicity, and other identities were tracked and used to measure reporting performance. The news and reporting mission were inevitably corrupted."

NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin sent a memo to staff Tuesday saying she and her leadership team colleagues "strongly disagree" with Berliner's essay and are "proud to stand behind the exceptional work" of their journalists.

"We believe that inclusion - among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage - is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world," Chapin wrote. "We track sources… so we can expand the diversity of perspectives in our reporting." 

While diversity of skin color took priority at NPR, Berliner told Weiss "diversity of outlook" had ultimately fallen by the wayside, pointing to his own stats that found while 87 of NPR's editors were registered Democrats, zero were Republican. 

Berliner also acknowledged the irony of NPR's diversity push, which resulted in 2023 with only 6% of its audience being Black and 7% being Hispanic, something he stressed "doesn’t come close to reflecting America" since NPR's audience is "overwhelmingly White and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns." 

NPR did not respond to requests for comment. 

Original article source: NPR's 'obsession' with DEI, diversity 'tracking system' scrutinized following veteran editor's bombshell essay

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

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She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Opinion Guest Essay

My Faith Forbade Eclipse Gazing. Now It Inspires My Art.

Credit... Photo Illustration by Balarama Heller for The New York Times

Supported by

Photographs and Text by Balarama Heller

Mr. Heller is an artist based in New York City.

• April 7, 2024

As a child growing up in the Hare Krishna community in the United States, I was forbidden to be outside during a solar eclipse.

In our version of Vedic astronomy , eclipses are believed to be a deeply inauspicious time when the demon Rahu’s decapitated head chases the sun and the moon. In this chase, Rahu’s head obscures or swallows the sun. A visceral fear would sweep our community as an eclipse approached. We crowded into the inner sanctum of the temple to recite prayers, hoping to counteract the forces of darkness that were consuming our universe. As totality enveloped us, a profound sense of unity between our community and Lord Krishna crescendoed. As Rahu receded, the sun gradually dispelled the darkness, bringing collective relief as the forces of goodness triumphed over chaos once more.

Many ideas in Vedic cosmology (which seeks explanations for both human and nonhuman affairs throughout the universe) depict the physical universe as profoundly animate and vibrant. Some explanations for the mechanics of the observable world mirror modern understandings of concepts like the atom , the cyclic nature of time at scale and quantum mechanics’ “ many worlds ” theory. But it is still an ancient set of beliefs where planets possess their own personalities, akin to living deities or demons. I am no longer religious, and do not believe in god nor superstition. But growing up, I regarded existence as a grand stage where conflicting energies of chaos and order perpetually and cyclically clash, each vying for supremacy before gradually reconciling and reaching a delicate equilibrium where they coexist in a harmonious, unified balance.

Observing the sky and fully embracing the belief that an eclipse occurred owing to a demon’s attempt to devour the moon or sun shaped my early worldview. But over the years, my exposure to scientific readings — especially “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, which sought to explain the scientific method to the general public — gradually transformed those views. I shifted away from a mythic-religious perspective and embraced modern science, and learned that a solar eclipse is the moon passing between the earth and the sun, obscuring our view of the sun.

This transition didn’t diminish my sense of awe and wonder toward the cosmos. If anything, it only heightened my appreciation for the complexity of the universe, my curiosity to learn more and my desire to translate these cosmic mysteries through my artistic practice. Celestial bodies aligning with each other now seems like a more miraculous event than a demon head flying through space.

Ontological questions have always been at the root of my artistic practice. My work is an attempt to tap into the mythologies we’ve inherited from our ancestors through cave paintings, religious texts and other materials — and reinterpret them into a modern context that pays homage to these ancestors while creating a new vocabulary of archetypes that are relevant to our era. I believe these archetypes can represent the outer limits of our rational understanding, and live side by side with the gods of old mythologies.

I am grateful for the upbringing that immersed me in a mythological worldview at a young age. I now have a bridge of understanding not only to our ancestors but also to billions of living people who hold beliefs that cannot always be explained by science. As the drama of the cosmos plays out in our tiny and insignificant corner of the universe, events in the sky like solar eclipses are now our mirrors, reflecting our projections and beliefs.

The total solar eclipse, with masses of humanity witnessing it, is the closest most of us will get to the overview effect — the rare experience astronauts have when they are in space and look back to see the Earth, and feel an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. The experience of solar eclipse totality is often described in a similar way : a brief glimpse into an altered state where for a few moments, everything under the sun is reminded simultaneously of its relationship to the whole.

Although god and superstition hold a less prominent place in many of our minds these days, it’s crucial to acknowledge that for millenniums, seers, mystics, alchemists and pagans served as the scientists of their time, employing whatever tools were available to comprehend the turmoil surrounding them. Science is humble, and by definition remains open to revisions and updates as new information comes to light. The study of the physical universe, especially events as rare as solar eclipses, should be seen as an act of reverence — an offering to the infinite mystery we find ourselves living in.

These multiple exposure images were created in studio, using colored lights and cutouts, composed in camera, and finalized in postproduction.

Balarama Heller is an artist based in New York City. His 2019 project, “Sacred Place,” was published in Aperture magazine , and is a forthcoming book with text by Pico Iyer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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