Category Archives: Bob Denham

Frye and the Mythographers: Topics for Further Study

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Cross-posted in the Denham Library

 

1.       English Mythographers from the Middle Ages to the Late Nineteenth Century

The roots of Frye’s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked.  Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye’s debts to both.  Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi’s book on Frye and Vico, Glen Gill’s study of Frye and twentieth‑century mythographers (Eliade, Jung, and others), and Ford Russell’s account of the influence of Spengler, Frazer, and Cassirer on Frye.[1] But Frye was familiar with the work of a number of other mythographers, and their influence on his thinking warrants investigation.

Blake being a mythological poet, Frye had to school himself early on in myth.  The sources of his reading here are not wholly known but we do have a fairly complete list of the mythographers that he began to assimilate at the beginning of his career.  In The Critical Path Frye observed that “[s]tudents of mythology often acquire the primitive qualities of mythopoeic poets. I have read a good many of them, from medieval writers through Bacon and Henry Reynolds and Warburton and Jacob Bryant and Ruskin to our own time, and I have noted two things in particular.  First, a high proportion of them are cranks, even nuts, and, second, they often show a superstitious reverence for the ‘wisdom of the ancients’” (CW 27, 67).   In the 1960s Frye wrote a preface to a collection of essays in myth criticism, covering the period from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, that aim of which was “only to relate the study of mythology to the criticism of literature” (CW 25, 327).  The book was never published, and we do not have a table of contents, but from what Frye says in the preface and from his correspondence about the volume (see Frye’s letter to Richard Schoeck in Selected Letters, 82) we have a good sense of what he considered to be the principal documents in the use of mythology to study literature in the English tradition from Gower to Ruskin:

John Gower, Confessio amantis (ca. 1386–93)

William Camden, Britannia (1586; English ed. 1610)

The opening of Samuel Purchas, Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (1613)

Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World (1614)

Francis Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients (1619)

Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes (ca. 1630)

George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis (1632)

Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

Bishop William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses (1737–41)

Paul Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities (1770)

Jacob Bryant, A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774)

Edward Davies, Celtic Researches on the Origin, Traditions and Languages of the Ancient Britons (1804)

James Payn (1830–98)

John Ruskin, Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869)

Frye adds from the twentieth century:

J.F. Newton, The Builders (1914)

Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920)

G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985)[2]

The influence on Frye of these writers, mostly from the English tradition, has not been studied.  What is it about Mythomystes that leads Frye to say that Henry Reynolds in “the greatest critic before Johnson”? (CW 5, 236).  What is it about Bryant and Davies that causes Frye to call them “the Frazers of their time”? (CW 14, 176).  Frye says that the scholarship of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities influenced the eighteenth‑Century poets (CW 17, 36).  How did it influence him?  Why was Frye so intrigued by what Purchas said about Solomon’s temple?  What was it about Sandys’s translation of Ovid that caused Frye to see it as an allegorical handbook?  And so on.

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More Frye on Becket

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Becket’s shrine

Further to the earlier post on Thomas Becket, here’s Frye writing to Helen Kemp from London, 30 December 1936

On Boxing Day Elizabeth [Fraser] came down—she was getting a bit fed up in Oxford—and we went out to dinner and went to see Murder in the Cathedral but Elizabeth got sick, almost fainted and had to be brought home in a taxi and sent to bed with a hot water bottle. Sunday she was all right, but we didn’t do much except go to Soho for dinner, which I didn’t like much. . . . .Well, anyway, Tuesday we went to see Murder in the Cathedral again. It’s a wonderful play all right—read it sometime. It will probably come to Toronto anyway. The chorus of women was full of the loveliest poetry, and as a play it came off very well. I had reserved tickets for this performance, but through a very fortunate error (at least I assume it was an error) we got seats in the front row of the dress circle, where we were practically breathing down the actor’s necks. The female functionary who had fluttered around Elizabeth Saturday evening and offered her peppermint lozenges came up in the intermission and said “Are you feeling better now, dear?” Elizabeth left early to get the last train back to Oxford, which leaves at eleven and is called the “Fornicator” by the Oxford students.

Frye on Hooch

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Here’s some seasonal cheer, one of a number of gifts we’re rolling out for the Holiday Season.  Today it’s Frye on scotch, whiskey and martinis.

 

I knew an old man once who settled for drinking straight Scotch, and he said, “I find it agrees with me.” I find the same thing. (“Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D.,” Chatelaine 55, no. 11 (November 1982), 43.

Claude Bissell had a few drinks ready for us afterwards before Clawson’s dinner.  Very typical of Clawson that his dinner should come on a day when congratulations were being showered on Blissett & me.  I drank Scotch very hard & fast & was quite high until I had my dinner.  (Diaries, 11 April 1950)

There’s getting to be too damn much God in my life.  After lunch I went over to hear Crane’s paper on the history of ideas, but instead of staying for the discussion after tea I went off and had three Martinis—Carpenter doesn’t drink and I decided against giving him the handicap of a slug of Scotch, so it was the first drink I’d had in three days.  (Diaries, 23 February 1952)

We had dinner at Jean’s hotel and I went along with the two girls to the theatre: they had tickets to Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra but I couldn’t get one, as it was the last performance.  I waited until the man said it was a waste of time to wait longer, then went home and had a couple of Scotches & went to bed early. (12 April 1952)

Felt very sleepy after Woodhouse’s whisky & didn’t make much out of Vaughan or Traherne.  The kids didn’t cooperate either: the final Huxley lecture was brilliant—Freudian slip again—I meant to write wasn’t brilliant.  (Diaries, 15 March 1950)

So I sneaked off to collect Helen from some women’s meeting at Wymilwood, and we went down to the Oxford Press to a cocktail, or rather a whisky, party, given for Geoffrey Cumberlege.  I couldn’t get much charge out of Cumberlege, but enjoyed the party.  (Diaries, 17 May 1950)

In the evening the Macleans [MacLeans] had a supper party for the Cranes, and a very good party it was.  (Very good of Ken too, as Crane wrote one of his typically slaughterous reviews of Ken’s book). The Grants, the Loves, the Ropers, and Ronald Williams (I suppose because of the Chicago connection) were there (I suppose Mrs. Williams is pregnant again).  Martinis to begin with, and whisky afterward, so what with a very late dinner I got sick again afterward.  My own damn fault.  I was well into my fifth drink before I realized that I’d had practically no lunch.  The party did a men-women split, unusual for the Macleans [MacLeans], and we gossiped about jobs and they about curtains.  We were, as I faintly remember, beginning to get slightly maudlin about Eliot and Auden just at the end.  Douglas Grant of course talked very well, and remained sober enough to drive us home.  I suppose a car, to say nothing of children and sitters and things, does make one very temperate.  Crane is a very charming man, but remains a most elusive one. (Diaries, 22 March 1952)

 

It is not hard to ridicule the fallacy of the distinctive essence, and to show that it is really a matter of looking for some trade mark in the content.  A satirical revue in Toronto some years ago known as Spring Thaw depicted a hero going in quest of a Canadian identity and emerging with a mounted policeman and a bottle of rye.  If he had been Australian, one realizes, he would have emerged with a kangaroo and a boomerang.  One needs to go deeper than ridicule, however, if one is to understand the subtlety of the self-deceptions involved. (“Criticism and Environment”)

It’s Sunday afternoon, and there is a bag-pipe parade in Queen’s Park.  A Scotchman blowing at a bag-pipe with great earnestness and concentration, and producing nothing but a dispirited sterile wailing squeal, like a hungry shoat or a sick banshee, seems to me the profoundest symbol of Scotland I know. All the red-faced humorless energy and superfluous wind that went into their forgotten and ferocious theologies, and no permanent result but their shrill squeaking poetry that sounds like a degenerate piccolo on top of the English orchestra. Now how much Scotch poetry have I read?  Burns, of course. All that dog-trot verse about whisky and whores and preachers and democracy and mice and lice and the devil. What’s the rest of Scotch poetry about?  Sheep, mostly, I think.  Bleat.  Baa.  (Frye‑Kemp Correspondence, 30 June 1935)

I suppose they must have a disease for lies, as they have kleptomania for stealing.  This chap had “spent years in the South Seas”: rubber plantations and trading vessels were at the top of the whisky bottle, waving palm-trees and pounding surf around the middle, and island paradises and brown-eyed mistresses near the bottom.  It bored me a bit, I must say, and after we’d finished the whisky and he started looking inscrutable over a lighted cigar butt I thought I was in for some pretty involved brooding.  (opening paragraph, “Face to Face”) [Frye’s Conrad‑imitation phase]

Marked a few essays & took Helen, who had just finished writing an article for the Star Weekly, out for a cocktail.  I had a sidecar, which, I’ve been told, works on the backfire principle: you swallow down one lemonade after another trying to get a faint alcoholic taste in your mouth, when suddenly there’s a dull boom in your stomach, a sudden ringing in the ears, crimson clouds before the eyes, & there you are as drunk as a coot.  I had only one, so I don’t know.  A businessmen’s dinner was in the dining room, and as I came out I heard the hostess say to the waiter, “How are they getting along with eleven bottles among twelve men?” (Diaries, 5 January 1949)

Ran into Ned [Pratt] & told him my woes.  He says Markowitz tells him that evening drinking is the best way to ward off heart disease.  He went to the liquor store with me & bought me a bottle of rye.  Promised him faithfully I would not have a heart attack in ten years.  (Diaries, 11 January 1949)

On the way back [from the library at Harvard] I stopped at a liquor store & asked if there were any formalities about purchasing liquor.  He said the formality consisted only in the possession of cash.  Even so I didn’t know what to buy, and Canadian rye is $5.75 a bottle—though I think a larger bottle than what we’re allowed to buy.  I got a cheaper rye for $3.75, a Corby’s.  I must investigate California wines.  We came home & had dinner in, after speculating about going out & deciding to renounce the gesture. (Diaries, 14 July 1950––Frye’s 38th birthday)

[Frye tells this story in several places]:  In the year of his retirement he [Ned Pratt] turned up unexpectedly at a meeting of the Graduate Department of English (he hated graduate teaching), and sat through three hours and a half of petitions and what not, and then, under “further business,” announced that this was undoubtedly his last meeting of the Graduate Department, and therefore–at which point he produced a bottle of rye. It was a typical gesture, but he was also reminding us of a certain sense of proportion. (“A Poet and a Legend”)

Frye and the Movies

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This article is cross-posted in the Denham Library here

“[T]he movie is capable of the greatest concentration of any art form in human history.  The possibilities of combining photographic, musical, and dramatic rhythms leave all preceding arts behind in their infinity” [Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, 99]

“The film is the one real major art-form of our time: it has, with its greatest directors, solved the problem of the balance of eye and ear. It has taught a whole generation of people to use visual symbols, to think with them sequentially instead of merely staring at one after the other, and to follow visual programming that is not on the simplest and most naïve levels of realism.  As such, it affords a model for television, which is still limping along on the old staring principle.” [Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 272]

 

Michael Happy asked me if I had a list of the movies Frye had either seen or referred to in his writings.  I said that I didn’t but that I could probably construct one.  What follows is such a list.  The movie titles are in italics, and untitled movies in Roman.  Following the list are the sources.

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Llar Eggub: “Is Northrop Frye a Sun-Myth?”

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This erudite article was found in the Frye Fonds at the Victoria University Library.  The identity of “LLAR EGGUB” is unknown.  Spelled backwards, it is “Bugger All.”  “Llareggub” is the small Welsh village in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.  (Cross-posted in the Denham Library here.)

Scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has this century turned its attention to the function of man as a myth-maker.  A great deal of scholarly energy and vast tracts of B.C. forest have been expended in explorations of the nature of man and his myths and rituals.

I see no absurdity in extending the critical principles of mythopoeia to examine individuals themselves.  Let’s start with Northrop Frye.  Is he a myth as well?

First, what evidence do we have that he really exists?  Eyewitness reports are highly suspect, even inadmissible.  Preppies who claim to have “experienced” his “lectures” are likely brainwashed.  It wouldn’t require much washing either.

Second, Frye is reputed to have a “tabernacle” at Massey College.  But who’s ever been in there?  Don’t even pretend you have, or will.

Let’s face it, there’s no use trying to extricate a “kerygma” from this myth.  There is no real evidence for the existence of an “historical Frye”.

But if we turn from biographical and empirical approaches to the mythopoeic, these pseudo-critical “problems” disappear.  Frye’s “reality” is irrelevant.  Evidence which is indisputable points conclusively to an understanding of Frye as a sun-god, “displaced” by “romantic” Vic “students” to the level of a “culture hero”––a figure of “enlightenment”!

We have only to turn to world mythologies for analogous processes.  For instance, in Polish mythology, the sun-god wears rimless glasses.  So does Frye, according to reliable sources.

As if that wasn’t enough, in Greek mythology, the sun does not sit in a chair.  And in the devotional icon of him in Pratt library, Frye does not sit in a chair either.

And in all primitive cultures (such as South House), the dazzling presence of the sun can provoke the sacred awe, the “religio,” as does the sun reflected from rimless glasses.  This was prevalent in Egypt, where until the Hashish dynasty rimless glasses were sacred and expensive.

Similarly, ancient Sumerian postcards often depict the deity Shamash-ole with a pet aardvark.  Frye’s liturgical connections with aardvarks are too well known to reproduce here.  Suffice it to say that in Swahili, “Frye” means “aardvark”.

Then, Frye, like the sun, is said to be extremely, if not perilously, “bright.”

The sun, in almost all mythologies, rises in the morning, showers, and traces his course across the heavens, to sink in the evening .  (The exception is in Irish mythology, where the sun is mistaken for a civilian every evening and blown up.)  In a startling parallel, Frye’s apostles admit that he, too, “rises” in the morning, brushes his teeth, writes a book, and traces his way to Vic.

In an even stronger parallel, apocryphal texts infer that Frye ate a baloney sandwich at midday.  This is surely a primitive recollection of solar flares.

And finally, Frye is said to trace a course westward in the evening.  He is said to enter the common flow of humanity at the subway, jump the turnstile, and ride the silver Ouroboros through the underworld to his mysterious “house” in the West.

The cult and influence of Frye is pervasive, with priests proselytizing everywhere, followers (“small-Fryes”) on the campus, and reviews in every second issue of Maclean’s.

“Frye-dolatry” is a vast religious movement, powerful, and feared by pagan professors everywhere.  Colonel Sanders has already received a franchise for a chicken “Myth-Bucket” (one “self-contained” piece) and a formula for removal of “Anagogic Acne” is near its “total form” of development.  Is it not time for the scholarly community to investigate beyond notions of a “literal” Frye?

LLAR EGGUB

Llar Eggub (signed)

Previously Unpublished Correspondence: Rewriting “Fearful Symmetry”

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The praise and international recognition that Fearful Symmetry brought Frye did not come easily. Frye told David Cayley that the book went through “five complete rewritings of which the third and fourth were half again as long as the published book” (CW 24, 924).  He reported the same thing in interviews with Art Cuthbert, Valerie Schatzker, and Andrew Kaufman (ibid. 413, 595, 671).  Then there was the major rewriting called for by Carlos Baker, one of the readers for Princeton University Press.  Part of Baker’s report on Frye’s 658‑page manuscript can be found in Ian Singer’s introduction to the Collected Works edition of Fearful Symmetry (CW 24, xxxv).  Other parts are recorded by John Ayre (Northrop Frye: A Biography (192–3), who has a full account of Baker’s judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of the book.  Frye’s response to Princeton was to undertake another rewriting.  Once he had completed this large task, Baker reread the report and sent the memorandum below to Datus C. Smith, Jr., the director of Princeton University Press.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Inter‑Office Correspondence

Department of English

To: Datus C. Smith, Jr.

From: Carlos Baker

Subject: MS. of Frye’s Book on Blake

September 10, 1945.

I have reread this MS. with particular interest and care in order to discover just how complete the revision was.  I find that he has done the job with great attention and thoroughness.

1)      The length is lessened by about 20% with, I should say, a 20% gain in intensity and interest.

2)      He has either eliminated or completely reworked all the allusions to other major poems than those of Blake about which I originally felt quarrelsome.  What is left seems to me right and just, and his method of handling these matters at the heads of chapters seems to me preferable to the method I suggested: viz. separating them off into one section of the book by themselves.

3)      He has been liberal and helpful in inserting signposts of the reader’s self‑orientation.  But nota bene: if you decide to print the book, you ought still to insist on a prefatory page where the Blakean canon is listed.  Or this could appear as a one‑page appendix.

4)      In short the book is now definitely publishable, is the best book of Blake that I know, and I should describe it as brilliant, sensitive, witty, and eminently original.  It should do much to make better known and more respected a poet who might have been more so at an earlier date but for a series of accidents of which he himself was one of the most conspicuous.

5)      With carefully chosen and strategically placed reproductions of Blake’s own pictures, it should make a handsome book.  Both because of the size of the Blake cult and the originality of these utterances, the book might create something of a stir, especially in Academia but also outside.

I find in the revision a crack not there before, anent Blake’s use of Rahab, the Apocalyptic Whore of Babylon.  Says Frye slyly: The Joyce of Finnegans Wake might have referred to her as The Last Strumpet or The Great Whorn.

Frye and Rhetoric

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Regarding Bob Ashley’s earlier comment on Frye and rhetoric

The first essay I ever published was a paper written for Wayne Booth’s course in “Rhetorical Criticism”:  “Northrop Frye and Rhetorical Criticism.”  Xavier University Studies 11, no. 1 (1972): 1–11.  Booth became my mentor and dear friend.  Everything I know comes from Booth and Frye.  Like Bob, I’m too far removed from the academy to know much of anything that’s going on in rhetorical studies.  I scanned the Frye bibliography of secondary materials for “rhetoric” and came up with the list below.  Most of these studies are only tangentially related to the issue Bob raises, though Hernadi, Gorak, and Kenny might prove useful.  I think if I were to study the issue I’d start with Frye’s Seattle epiphany on oracle and wit (see previous post here), and then try to relate this to his sense of an ending.  Frye’s endings are often oracular.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk.  American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.  Examines the poetic strategies of Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson and relates them to the four levels of symbolism in Frye’s Anatomy.

Dillon, George L.  “Rhetoric.”  The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.  Ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 616–17.  Summarizes Frye’s theory of rhetoric, along with the theories of I.A. Richards and Paul de Man.

Druff, James H., Jr. “Genre and Mode: The Formal Dynamics of Doubt.”  Genre 14 (Fall 1981): 295–307 [299–302].  Believes that Frye’s distinction between genre and mode is too clear-cut and that we can understand better some of the disharmony in the forms of modern fiction if we see the two concepts as related, genre having a historical dimension and mode a rhetorical one.

Gorak, Jan.  “Frye and the Legacy of Communication.”  In Lee and Denham, Legacy, 304–15.  Opposes Frye’s view of communication, derived from literature as a means of human liberation, to the coercive communication of contemporary media––rhetorical or dialectical communication.  In his late writings Frye is eager to explore the interactions between the two.

Hernadi, Paul. “Ratio Contained by Oratio: Northrop Frye on the Rhetoric of Nonliterary Prose.”  In Denham and Willard, Visionary Poetics, 137–53.  Argues that the ideas in the last section of the theory of genres in the Anatomy prefigure several current concerns in the study of texts, including the question whether literature can be distinguished from nonliterature.  Concludes that Frye’s answer to the question is ambiguous: ratio both contains and is contained by oratio.  In this respect Frye differs from both the formalists, who see clear distinctions between the literary and the nonliterary, and the poststructuralists (e.g., de Man and Eagleton), who do not.

Kenny, Robert Wade. “Truth as Metaphor: Imaginative Vision and the Ethos of Rhetoric.”  In The Ethos of Rhetoric.  Ed. Michael J. Hyde, et al.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 37–55.  On Frye’s view that imaginative vision is the fundamental feature of human experience for Blake and the significance of such vision for rhetorical theory and practice.  Also remarks on the teleological thrust of Frye’s criticism and his view of existential metaphor.

Kristeva, Julia.  ‘The Importance of Frye.”  In Lee and Denham, Legacy, 335–7.  An homage to Frye, in which the Anatomy is said to have opened up “the field of literary criticism to an ambition which may appear excessive but which, only in this way, can ever hope to approach the extraordinary polysemy of literary art and take up the challenge it permanently poses.  The modalities of criticism, designated or hoped for by Frye . . . can be disputed; others can be added.  But it is undeniable that these types of critical approaches allow us, once they are linked, to decompartmentalize the technical enclosures in which contemporary literary theory habitually delights and to aspire to a capable interdisciplinarity.  The particular emphasis that Frye puts on the archetype as symbol which links one poem to another and allows us to unify and integrate our literary experience seems to me indeed an ethical requirement––not to lose sight of the content conveyed by rhetorical play, and to anchor this content in the Western metaphysical tradition.”

Kuchar, Gary.  “Typology and the Language of Concern in the Work of Northrop Frye.”  Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparée 27, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2000): 159–80.  Examines Frye’s view of typology as a mode of rhetoric and historical mode of thought and its relation to his understanding of metaphor and primary concerns.  Also outlines the relationships between Frye’s views and Patristic exegesis, Lacanian psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology.

Long, Douglas. “Northrop Frye: Liberal Humanism and the Critique of Ideology.”  Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études canadiennes 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 27–51.  Despite Frye’s wish to contribute to the discussion of fundamental socio-political issues, his reflections have received scant attention from social scientists.  Illustrates some of Frye’s political concerns and insights and discovers, especially in Words with Power, the basis for a critique of the modes of political discourse. Concentrates on the difference between the divisive rhetoric of ideology, expressive of the human urge of domination and advantage, and the inclusive and unifying language of myth, expressive of what Frye calls “primary concerns.”  See also Michael D. Behiels’s introduction to this issue, 9–14.

McCutcheon, Russell T.  Review of Marc Manganaro’s Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell. University of Toronto Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Winter 1996–97): 359–63.  On, among other things, Manganaro’s analysis of the rhetoric of Frye’s comparative method in The Critical Path.

Manganaro, Marc.  “Northrop Frye: Ritual, Science, and ‘Literary Anthropology.’”  Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, & Campbell. New Haven: Yale UP. 1992, pp. 111–50.  On the relations between Frye’s criticism and the comparative method of anthropology.  Argues that Frye’s view of the way science uses facts and theory is similar to Frazer’s.  Frye’s authority derives from his “invoking what cannot be imagined: the perfect, ultimate originary unity of things.”  The rhetoric Frye uses to map out his views of literature is found also in his social and educational theories: it reveals Frye’s commitment to structure, continuity, and essentialism, as well as his mystification of the “historically contingent” and ideology.

Sutton, Jane.  “The Death of Rhetoric and Its Rebirth in Philosophy.”  Rhetorica 4, no. 3 (1986): 203–26.  Examines the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the methods of Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Hayden White.

Thomas, Brook.  “The New Historicism and the Privileging of Literature.”  Annals of Scholarship 4 (Summer 1987): 23–48.  Draws on Frye’s discussion of the distinctions between literary and nonliterary discourse in the Anatomy, pointing out that although Frye claims all discourse is rhetorical and therefore literary, “this does not mean that there is no such thing as literature.”  Looks at the critique of Frye by Terry Eagleton, maintaining that Eagleton’s view is a caricature and observing that both critics advocate the transforming power of literature.  Finds Fredric Jameson’s “reading through Frye” to be a much better way of transforming Frye’s ethical view of literature into a politically sensitive criticism.

Wuthnow, Robert.  Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspective on Religion.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1992.  Chapter 3, “Religious Discourse as Public Rhetoric,” uses Northrop Frye and Susan Rubin Suleiman as complementary visions on how persons from different perspectives can begin to understand one another.

Picture of the Day: Frye’s Clown Nose

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This is the elusive photo of Frye wearing a clown nose at a party for Morley Callaghan.  That’s Morley’s son Barry Callaghan standing next to him.  The photo (along with Frye’s blurb) appears on the back cover of Barry’s Fifteen Years in Exile, his memoir about his years at the Exile Quarterly. The very pleasant circumstances in which the photo was taken are described in this post from last year.