A Blustery Sunday

"...we can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one unconventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature" (100).

It's amazing that everything in literature is derived from something else written previously, a mere copy of another work. Wouldn't it have been amazing to be one of the first to write a story or orally tell a story that was thought as somewhat original? The groundbreakers didn't even know they were paving a path for authors today or breaking ground; they were just telling stories - stories that we know by heart to this very day. Today we are fed and refed the same story over and over again that uses the same plot and the same archetypes.
As I read Frye's Archetypes of Literature, I was reminded of Joseph Campbell's idea of The Hero's Journey (which Frye refers to as "the quest of the hero") and the criteria for such a story - a story that has been told and retold with the very same elements and will continue to be retold until humanity ceases to exist. It is the reason why modern stories (I don't dare call them "novels") like Harry Potter are so widely popular. Having never read the series myself, I cannot make specific literary notes on the books, but I have watched the movies (and I have two incredibly obsessed adult roommates), and can safely say that the phenomenon is so widely read because it follows a recipe, a formula, if you will; it is the same formula that has been used since Greek mythology, and we, as readers, cannot seem to get enough of it even though we know the events to come. Here is a link on Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the place in which the components to "The Hero's Journey" can be found. The formula and analyzation of this "quest" or "journey" that we have seen a thousand times is remarkably dead-on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces (Thank you, Wikipedia).

Vocab terms from class on Friday September 5th:

trope
–noun
1. Rhetoric (there's that word again!).
a. any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense.
2. a phrase, sentence, or verse formerly interpolated in a liturgical text to amplify or embellish.
3. (in the philosophy of Santayana) the principle of organization according to which matter moves to form an object during the various stages of its existence.

monad
–noun
1. Biology.
a. any simple, single-celled organism.
b. any of various small, flagellate, colorless ameboids with one to three flagella, esp. of the genus Monas.
2. Chemistry. an element, atom, or group having a valence of one. Compare
3. Philosophy.
a. (in the metaphysics of Leibniz) an unextended, indivisible, and indestructible entity that is the basic or ultimate constituent of the universe and a microcosm of it.
b. (in the philosophy of Giordano Bruno) a basic and irreducible metaphysical unit that is spatially and psychically individuated.
c. any basic metaphysical entity, esp. having an autonomous life.
4. a single unit or entity.

*Thanks to dictionary.com