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The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [548]

By Root 5440 0
Marge Simpson scored more highly than anyone else, real or fictional, as `the best mother in public life'. As an ideal role model, she was admired for her `down-to-earth approach', for the way she held her family together and for her advice to her children such as `listen to your heart, not the voices in your head' (The Times, 17 March 2004).

18. The heart of the Israeli/Palestinian problem lay in that ego-Self confusion which led the Jews so rigidly to identify their collective identity with race and religion. Although Israel was set up as a `democracy; it thus could not develop into a liberal society based on that principle of assimilation which would allow its two main racial groups gradually to come together (as in other societies across the world where different races and cultures had eventually achieved a modus vivendi). The exclusion of the Arabs inevitably set up a classic confrontation between irreconcilable `opposites, each of which, according to the archetypal pattern, was driven to become ever more extreme: the Israelis in their relentless assertion of dominance and expansion into the Palestinian lands surrounding the original territory of Israel, the Palestinians in their increasingly desperate and suicidal opposition to the ruling power. This in turn polarised the outside world into two camps, supporting each side, creating an impasse which, according to the archetype, offered no hope of resolution other than some eventual catastrophe. .

1. The Republic, Book VII.

Table of Contents

Introduction and historical notes

Prologue to Part One

Overcoming the Monster

2 The Monster (II) and the Thrilling Escape From Death

3 Rags to Riches

4 The Quest

5 Voyage and Return

6 Comedy

7 Comedy (II): The Plot Disguised

8 Tragedy (I): The Five Stages

9 Tragedy (II): The Divided Self

10 Tragedy (III): The Hero as Monster

11 Rebirth

12 The Dark Power: From Shadow into Light

Epilogue to Part One: The Rule of Three (the role played in stories by numbers)

Prologue to Part Two

The Dark Figures

14 Seeing Whole: The Feminine and Masculine Values

15 The Perfect Balance

16 The Unrealised Value

17 The Archetypal Family Drama (Continued)

18 The Light Figures

19 Reaching the Goal

20 The Fatal Flaw

The Ego Takes Over (I): Enter the Dark Inversion

22 The Ego Takes Over (II): The Dark and Sentimental Versions

23 The Ego Takes Over (III): Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy

24 The Ego Takes Over (IV): Tragedy and Rebirth

25 Losing the Plot: Thomas Hardy -A Case History

26 Going Nowhere: The Passive Ego. The Twentieth-Century Dead End - From Chekhov to Close Encounters

27 Why Sex and Violence? The Active Ego. The Twentieth-Century Obsession: From de Sade to The Termin

28 Rebellion Against `The One': From Job to Nineteen Eighty-Four

29 The Mystery

30 The Riddle of the Sphinx: Oedipus and Hamlet

Telling Us Who We Are: Ego versus Instinct

32 Into the Real World: The Ruling Consciousness

33 Of Gods and Men: Reconnecting with `The One'

34 The Age of Loki: The Dismantling of the Self

Epilogue: The Light and the Shadows on the Wall

Author's Personal Note

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Index of Stories Cited

General Index

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