Anatomy of the national myth: archetypes and narrative in the study of nationalism (2016)

"It proposes a method borrowed from the literary theory of Northrop Frye – archetypal criticism – for identifying the four basic forms of emotional architecture that characterise the myths of particular nations: tragic, romantic, comic and satiric."

"Auerbach draws our attention to a key distinction between ‘meta-narratives’ and what have been described elsewhere as ‘micro-narratives’. Meta-narratives are ‘stories about stories… [that] locate national stories within a wider, holistic scheme’ (2009: 295). They are more abstract and more normative than micro-narratives."

2014 Election Campaign: A meta-narrative construction

2016 Monuments: Spatial Fix of the Meta-Narrative

1923-2023: One hundred years of parenthesis: Meta-narration n.2

"National myths are in force in peace times too, of course, but become more apparent at conflict moments, when ethnic discourses shed nuance moments. National myths are in force in peace times too, of course, but become more apparent at conflict moments, when ethnic discourses shed nuance

and ambiguity, solidarity is invoked, and aggression channelled towards the out-group (Kissane and Sitter 2013)."

"Stories delegitimise members of the out-group by broadly ascribing to them negative and, even at times, sub-human characteristics, identifying them as valid targets of violence and discrimination."

BAK, HDP, Metin Akpınar, Barbaros Şansal (long list)

"in national mythology, we may observe several basic narrative archetypes across cases."

"I will suggest that from the work of its foremost author, Northrop Frye, we may adopt a toolkit for the examination of emotions and archetypal national myths. He described four emotional movements in the universe of archetypal narrative: the comic, the romantic, the tragic, and the satiric."

"Accepting the premise of archetypal criticism dictates a recognition that these basic narrative forms are present in all social storytelling, including nationalism."

"Sometimes, the romantic myth is built quite literally around a hero. Alexander the Great in the case of Macedonian and Greek nationalisms or Mustafa Atatürk in Turkish nationalism are easy examples."

"The anchors themselves can be altered – as is apparently the case in contemporary Turkey, for example, where Islamist politicians have sought to reinvigorate commemoration of the Ottoman Empire, in doing so reaching past the figure of Atatürk, which anchored Turkish national mythology for most of the twentieth century (Dana 2014)."

"the emotional structures embedded in national mythologies adopt a finite number of forms across a wide variety of cases"

"The archetypal method used here is an attempt– a thought experiment. [...] The possible contribution for this framework, simply, is to redirect attention to the universal affective structures embedded in narrative, which are overlooked in other schemes, which focus on the more explicit content of narrative, and its effect on cognition."