The Frye Festival’s Dawn Arnold has been appointed to the Order of New Brunswick. The story here and here.
Congratulations, Dawn.
Dawn Arnold, Order of New Brunswick
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Monthly Archives: August 2010
Branko Gorjup’s “Northrop Frye and his Canadian Critics”
We are very pleased to announce that Branko Gorjup’s paper, “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,” presented at the 2001 Frye Festival in Moncton, has been posted in our journal’s Festival Archive here.
This Week in Climate Change Denial
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmv3NAO9sRc
Climate Change and National Security, Part 2. Part 1 here.
Sign and Vote
P. D. James
Today is P. D. James‘s 90th birthday.
Thanks to Bob Denham’s wonderful compendium, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, we have at our fingertips what Frye had to say in his notebooks about the detective novel. Here’s a selection:
Why am I obsessed with detective stories?. . . I’ve completely forgotten the Freudian explanation I came across recently. In my own terms (which wouldn’t of course exclude Freud) a really top-flight detective story has two levels of meaning throughout. Every sentence, every fact given, may be potentially a “clue”: it has its surface meaning in the narrative, and its teleological meaning as part of what you “see” in the final cognitio. Also, of course, the descent of the police as a Last Judgment symbol, reaching for the guilt that’s in everyone, and the scapegoat as the primal anxiety symbol. (Unbottoned, 66)
The detective story is written backwards, & belong to creative & dream time, not to the ordinary beginning-to-end, cause-and-effect time. It’s written in the way one composes a dream after having the alarm go off. This event-to-cause order is the mythical as distinct from the historical order. . . . I think my dream life demands these stories. (ibid.)
There are some Freudian reasons (except that I’ve forgotten what they are) for the appeal of detective stories: Freudianism itself owes much of its popularity to the same kind of appeal, Freudian therapy of neurosis being essentially a search for who done it in childhood. Or what done it. (ibid.)
I have often wondered why I’m so hooked on detective stories. . . . One thing that occurs to me is double meaning: a casual remark or incidental episode suddenly becomes relevant in that second world where the murderer is identified. Miniature apocalypse with Satan cast out and all the other details moving together in identity. (ibid.)
You can watch a complete television adaptation of James’s Shroud for a Nightingale by linking here.
“Civic Holiday”
That’s how calendars and daytimers blandly render this day in Canada — “Civic Holiday” — because each part of the country has its own designation for it (Frye’s Canadian “anarchism” at work, er, play). In New Brunswick, Ed Lemond of Moncton’s Frye Festival advises me, it’s New Brunswick Day because New Brunswick evidently lives in a New Brunswick-centric universe. (Good for you, New Brunswick.) In Ontario, it’s Simcoe Day — as in John Graves Simcoe, who only abolished slavery in Upper and Lower Canada in 1793, so I guess there’s no reason he should have a national holiday dedicated to him.
How else do we know it’s a holiday in Canada? Well, for one thing, for the first time ever that I’m aware of, we had way more visitors from the U.S. than from Canada. In fact, our traffic today was business as usual from all around the world. But today Canadians were chillin’ it.
Our Readership
We’re coming up on our first anniversary, and we are doing pretty well: more than 900 posts and counting.
Our readership has settled comfortably between about 8000 and 10,000 visits per month, which of course means about 100,000 per year. Our page views are about quadruple that, which means that, on average, our visitors are reading four pages per visit. We hope to do even better in our second year. We have received visits from about 100 countries from every continent (excepting Antarctica, although we remain cautiously optimistic). On any given day, we’ll get visits from about 30 countries, and it’s clear we’ve got regular readers all around the world who check in with us every day, sometimes multiple times a day. We are still learning how to use our new Facebook page to extend our reach further and to bring different elements of the Frye community together.
As always, we invite you to submit posts of your own. We can’t have too many Guest Bloggers and, you may have noticed, we are drawing more of those from more communities of readers.
Reminder
“Beyond Anatomy: Frye’s Liberatory Dimension in The Educated Imagination”
We are pleased to post W. S. Moore’s paper, “Beyond Anatomy: Frye’s Liberatory Dimension in The Educated Imagination” in our journal. You can read it here.
Warren is associate professor of English at Newberry College, South Carolina.
Alexander Graham Bell
Plaque commemorating the first telephone exchange in the British Empire in the old Exchange Building at 8 Main Street East in Hamilton, Ontario
On this date in 1922 Alexander Graham Bell died.
Frye in his “Convocation Address, University of Bologna” (April 24, 1989):
In Canada, with its sparse population, immense area, and physical obstacles separating each part of the country, communication has always been a major preoccupation. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison both lived a good deal in Canada; the building of railways and bridges and canals have formed much of Canadian history, and a fair number of Canadian intellectuals have been philosophers of communication theory. (CW 10, 343)