Abstract
This chapter examines how a critical thinker considers the role of poetry or literature. Las Casas and Northrop Frye raise some religious issues that are sometimes displaced in texts. It is on the muthos (mythos) in its secular and social displacements that this chapter will concentrate and will focus on Northrop Frye, who, like Aristotle, is interested in genre in literature and the role of imitation. Frye saw literary works as begetting literary works. Texts imitate and are imitated. Frye, then, is an especially apt example in the past 70 years of someone who considered the ins and outs of representation or mimesis. The chapter discusses Frye and those who interpret him. Like earlier chapters, this one relates text to context and examines imitation or representation. Another aspect is a comparative perspective.
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Notes
In this chapter I have concentrated on issues raised by Lee’s and Denham’s collection. See Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, eds. The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). To see the extent of changes in the theoretical climate and Frye’s relation to those differences, compare this collection with Krieger’s volume in 1966 that Cook and others brought out in 1983.
See Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966)
and Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, eds. Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983).
For Northrop Frye’s contributions to poetics, mythology and ideology, education, Canadian studies, and biblical studies, see his “The Resurgent,” Canadian Forum 19 (1940): 357–59; “Music and Poetry.” University of Toronto Quarterly 11(1942), 167–79; Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); The Educated Imagination (Toronto: CBC, 1963); The Modern Century (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967); The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1982); Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (San Diego: Harcourt, 1990); The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). My thanks to the journal Christianity and Literature and its managing editor, Jordan Hardman, for permission to reprint here, in a revised form, “Poetics and Culture: Unity, Difference, and the Case of Northrop Frye,” Christianity and Literature 46 (1996), 61–79. I would also like to remember Northrop Frye here and to thank Christopher Norris for inviting work on Frye, which meant a shift, at that time, from writing a book on Foucault for him to giving him one on Frye, who happened to be one of my teachers. There are a number of more recent re-evaluations of Frye’s work.
See, for instance, János Kenyeres, “An Investigation into T. S. Eliot’s ‘Impossibly Fertile Paternity’: Northrop Frye,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 6.2 (Fall 2000);
Adam Carter, “Kingdom of Ends: Nation, Post Nation and National Character in Northrop Frye,” English Studies in Canada 29.3–4 (Sept-Dec. 2003): 90–115;
Jonathan Allan, “Anatomies of Influence, Anxieties of Criticism: Northrop Frye & Harold Bloom,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 36.2 (2009): 137–54;
Jonathan Hart, “Introduction,” City of the End of Things: Lectures on Civilization and Empire, ed. Jonathan Hart (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–34;
Brian Russell Graham, The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); University of Toronto Quarterly 81.3 (Winter 2012), The Future of Northrop Frye: Centennial Perspectives, guest editors, Germaine Warkentin and Linda Hutcheon.
The extent of Frye’s knowledge of feminist theory is uncertain, as an extensive engagement of this work does not occur in his later books. For a fine series of interviews where Frye discusses himself in social, literary, and critical context, see David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1992).
Here I draw on Northrop Frye, “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language,” Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988, ed. Robert D. Denham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 3–18, esp. 3–7.
On Frye’s creative writing see Hart, Northrop Frye, 266–95 and Jonathan Hart, “The Road Not Taken: The Fictions of Northrop Frye,” The British Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (1994), 216–37.
See Jonathan Hart, “The Mystical-Visionary Criticism of Northrop Frye.” Christianity and Literature 41 (1992), 277–98.
On Frye’s vision see A. C. Hamilton, “Northrop Frye: The Visionary Critic,” CEA Critic 42 (1979), 2–6;
Geoffrey Keynes, “The Poetic Vision,” Rev. of Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, by Northrop Frye, Time and Tide 28 (1947), 1394;
Gerald Graff, “;Northrop Frye and the Visionary Imagination,” Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 73–78;
and L. Speirs, “The Myths and Visions of Northrop Frye,” rev. of The Myth of Deliverance, by Northrop Frye. English Studies 64 (1983), 518–23.
For the relation between Frye’s notion of dialectic and of education, see W. T. Jewkes, “Mental Flight: Northrop Frye and the Teaching of Literature,” Journal of General Education 27 (1976), 281–98.
Two helpful and extensive treatments are Denham’s and Hamilton’s. See Robert Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1978)
and A. C. Hamilton, Northrop Frye: The Anatomy of His Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
For such a critique of Frye’s view of history, see Frank Lentricchia, “The Historicity of Frye’s Anatomy,” Salmagundi 40 (1978): 97–121.
In an important work on the theory of poetics, Cave discusses Frye in relation to anagnorisis and cognitio. See Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. 190–99.
Linda Hutcheon in Legacy, 106–07; see Ian Balfour, Northrop Frye (Boston: Twayne, 1988).
In Legacy, Linda Hutcheon’s “Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions” (105–21) describes “postmodern eruptions” in Frye’s work while I have spoken more about his prolepsis of, and affinities with, postmodernism and also of the eruption of the premodern in the postmodern. What distinguishes Hutcheon’s argument is that she maintains it is no accident the postmodern eruptions occur most frequently in his writing on Canadian topics. For a discussion of Frye in the Canadian context, see Eli Mandel, “Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,” in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 284–97.
Craig Stewart Walker in Legacy, 40–58. For discussions of Frye and religion, see those cited in note 7 as well as D. Wiebe, “The ‘Centripetal Theology’ of The Great Code,” Toronto Journal of Theology 1 (1985), 122–27.
See Deanne Bogdan, Re-educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement (Portsmouth: Boynton-Cook/ Heinemann, 1992).
See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980)
and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
Angus Fletcher in Legacy, 276–85. It is interesting to compare Fletcher’s contribution to his earlier essay in Krieger’s collection. See Angus Fletcher, “Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism,” Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 31–73.
James Reaney and John Beckworth in Legacy, 262. Frye was gifted in music and in his youth placed second in a national typing competition. On Frye as a champion typist, see John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random, 1989), 50–53. In Legacy, Reaney and Beckworth are playing with sounds, a kind of elegiac paronomasia, a sound and fury signifying a possible and comic music derived from the noise of creation. Frye created harmony from noise, the form of typological comedy from the linear inexorability of time.
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© 2013 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Poetics and Culture. In: Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137301352_4
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