Chapter 5 - Curtius and Jung

Summary

Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages remains a monumental achievement of postwar scholarship, whose vast scope – spanning a continent and more than a millennium – has kept it continuously relevant. However, its strangely atemporal view of literature, its treatment of medieval Latin as a medium (rather than a creative literature in its own right), and its peculiar structure have likewise been criticized since its publication. This essay argues that ELLMA’s virtues and faults are intertwined, and that both are inseparable from Curtius’s use of the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Adapting Jung’s theories of archetypes and the stratified collective unconscious to literary study, Curtius reimagined medieval Latin as the collective unconscious of modern European literature. This boldly creative decision allowed him to achieve his goal: a reparative vision of a Europe forever unified through classical education.