Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Zsolt K. Virágos: The Twilight Zone of Myth-and-Literature Studies: Analogy, Anomaly, and Intertextuality

Superman is perpetually rescuing Metropolis, U.S.A. Buffalo Bill relieves the frontier territory of the Wild West of its threat from aggressive savages. Chief Brody in Jaws comes from obscurity to save Amity Island from the shark. Paul Kersey in Death Wish and Bufford Pusser in Walking Tall become archetypal superheroes singlehandedly purging evil in contemporary America. In the foreword to the same volume, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov linked the American monomyth to a classical model, the Greek myth of Heracles, offering the following comment to justify the correlation: Heracles just happened by," he came from nowhere. With no thought of personal gain, he made the cause of sympathy and justice his own,, fought the villain, rescued the fair maid, and restored the happiness of the King. Then, scarcely pausing for thanks, he vanished into nowhere, (xiv) This is a somewhat subjective explanation, and the points of similarity cited would more appropriately describe the Lone Ranger than Heracles. The nature of the justification is, however, symptomatic, and it also problematizes some of the potential advantages and inherent limitations of analogous transactions in intertextual relationships, the central theme of the present discussion. Before passing to my main theme, however, it should be pointed out that capitalizing on the accumulated results of extensive studies in Stoff geschlichte, littérature comparée, Gestalt

, folklore research, character typology, comparative anthropology, Joseph Campbell's global synthesis, or of a kind of vague and incidental critical fertility, myth-and-literature studies have churned out—and its representative texts are chock-full of

—an awesome collection of archetypal characters. Just to cite some of the well-rehearsed configurations, besides the hero archetype we have by now separate niches for antiheroes (formerly the hero's hostile opponents; in more recent texts the bungler, the loser, for instance the schlemiel), the Jungian wise fool (the jester, Prince Myshkin), the devil figure (Satan, Faustus, Hawthorne's Rappaccini), the outcast (Cain, lshmael, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Ethan Brand), the double (Poe's William Wilson. Jekyll and Hyde, the Karamazov brothers, Jókay's Baradlay brothers), the scapegoat (Adonis, Christ, Hester Prynne, Major 279