Our collection of papers in the journal continues to grow. We have just added Johanne Aitken’s “Making Human Sense: The Changing Influence of Northrop Frye’s Literary Theory Upon the Literary Experience of Children”. We have also added to the library a lecture by Bob Denham delivered at Western Washington University in 2003, “Frye and Practical Criticism: Against the Grain”.
Great paper, Bob. And nice job on poor Catherine Belsey. She takes the cake. She was a visiting scholar at McMaster when I was just starting out twenty-five years ago and theory was beginning to boom. I remember someone telling me at the time that in her next book she was thinking of not using any author’s names but only titles of the works she was referring to. Authors of course–even ones still writing–had been dead for some time, at least from the reports we were getting from France, so, as it was explained to me, she had decided not to give any further comfort to the enemy by pretending any longer that authors–those empty sites for the intersection of material textual practices–had the right to exist. Curiously, she showed no reluctance at all in using the names of as many literary theorists as she could, and seemed serenely unfazed by the fact that Foucault and others appeared to be very happy signing their names like crazy to their own books and royalty contracts. Maybe they were signing their names in quotation marks.