Organic Archetypal Patterns in Literature: Origin, Meanings, Interpretations

The article studies the role and functions of organic archetypal patterns based on the concept of the Tree in literary texts, to which it brings a rich variety of emotive and cultural associations. Being ontologically and epistemologically grounded in the surrounding ecosystems, organic archetypal patterns as a mode of figural modeling run through genres of different epochs and inform their content with a naturalized view of themes, motifs, and situations, which make up the fabric of a work of fiction. Literary figures of this type have their roots in mythological consciousness that at a certain level of human development was instrumental in the categorization of the world and construction of cultural codes as objectivized forms of sensory perception, as pre-discursive human cognitive activity; they have retained till today the symbolic potency of those mythic structures and religious conceptions, often hidden from an uneducated mind. We hypothesize that archetypal patterns forming meaningful connections of language with myth, religion, and art, are used by authors to ensure an integrated understanding of a particular literary piece or its part. Keywords: archetypal pattern, mythological consciousness, ecosystem, cultural code