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

the ingenuity of the critic, comparative anthropologist, etc. the list can be continued indefinitely: the triumph of the underdog, the opposable self, the glamorized misfit, one against the many, the pariah/savior, the rebel/victim, etc. Despite the profusion of these abstracted clichés, there is no definitive list of canonized archetypes, and neither is there a working agreement as to how a thematic cliché or other abstracted formula can make it onto the approved list. Some of the paradigmatic configurations are usually grouped, for convenience, in large thematic clusters such as the cycle of life sequence or designated simply as "archetypal situations." George Polti, J. Matthews reports, classified all story patterns into thirty-six dramatic situations, which he viewed as archetypes (2). The number of discrete items in the Thompson-Aarne motif-index runs into the thousands. At the other end of the spectrum, through his universalizing monomythic construct, Joseph Campbell

— organizing in terms of the entire earth

—attempted to prove in effect that all the stories of the world are really one story. As we have seen in our first example, the similarities and differences inherent in the various incarnations of the myth of the hero in mythological narratives in which the particular heroic careers are couched exemplify special issues and problems pertaining to analogy, the intertextual networking of apparently diverse or allegedly kindred plots, and the justification of a paradigmatic reading of texts, either myth(olog)ical or literary. These uncertainties may become especially acute in myth critical transactions premised on the alleged intertextual validity of diverse prefigurative correlations, where the temptation to treat loose analogy as identity' can be especially strong, not to mention conative impulses in assigning attributes and significances to things not otherwise significant. In myth-and-literature transactions the triggering agent is analogy, which, by definition, is bound to operate within an intertextual networking of texts." Intertextuality (and its satellites: interdependence, interlink, influence, the ad infinitum '

kplay of texts," source, residue, etc.) and analogy (together with its satellites: resemblance, sameness, difference, archetype, paradigm, anomaly, etc.) are interrelated within ~ Indeed. I regard all mylh(olog)ical correlations as manifestations of "mandatory" intertextuality. 281