Category Archives: News

Our First Renovation: A New Calendar Widget

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As we said yesterday, we are off to work on our infrastructure, primarily in the Denham Library whose remarkable collection needs some serious attention, including new acquisitions and standardization of format, not to mention preparation for what will eventually prove to be a massive audio/video collection, some of them genuine rarities not widely seen or heard before.  You’ll be thrilled, once we’ve pulled it all together.  A first batch may appear in the next couple of weeks, as soon as we get them digitized.  You’ll see a second truly overwhelming addition to the collection by summer.

In the meantime, we have added a new Widget to the Menu Column to the right: A calendar for each month we’ve been publishing with all the days of the month live linked to the posts of that particular day.  Hit the link for the day in question and the posts will come up in the reverse order they appeared.  Add to this our Search function at very top of our Menu Column and the Categories function at the very bottom, and you should be able to find yourself targeting posts by any topic, key word, or designated category that catches you interest, as well as their various threads via live links.

Given that we’ve put up more than 400 posts at this point, this may be a good opportunity for many of you new and even regular readers to explore our offerings in any way that makes most sense to you.

So be sure to check out that new Calendar Widget just to your right.

Stepping Back a Little…

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We’ve been around just a little over five months and have put up well over 400 posts.

However, most of that effort has fallen to just a handful of people, and, given the particularly heavy demands this semester upon the daily administrators, this may be a good time to step back a little to let our new byline correspondents and our guest bloggers take the lead.

Since starting out last August, we’ve put up posts at the average rate of about three a day.  We’ve also added (besides Joe Adamson and me) 10 byline correspondents, as well as another handful of regular guest bloggers — not to mention an online Frye journal and the truly remarkable (and always expanding) Denham Library.  We’re pleased to say that the comments we’ve received slightly outpace the posts we’ve put up so far. We’re therefore curious to know what the blog might look like if we let our occasional contributors become the main source of new material.

In the meantime, we’re working very hard behind the scenes to add an extensive audio/visual Frye collection to the library, which will take some time pull together and convert into digital format.  In fact, the project as a whole will probably stretch out into the summer.  But, once this remarkable material is available, it will provide a new dimension to the resources already available.  Beyond that, we are also planning to organize study and resource material for students and teachers alike.  In other words, there’s still much more we intend to do.

We’re here.  We’re for real.  So while you may not see original posts from us on quite so regular a basis, we are hoping to see more of them from you.

“Reasons Literature Alone Can Satisfy”

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Readers of The Educated Imagination may be interested in this post on Rohan Maitzen’s blog Novel Readings.  Responding to a review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, Professor Maitzen provides a cogent reflection on the dangers of emphasizing the practical benefits of literary study, at the expense of the actual subject matter of the discipline.  She argues that “We need to justify the study of literature for reasons literature alone can satisfy.”

Robert B. Parker, 1932 – 2010

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Another sad death to report is that of Robert B. Parker, creator of the Boston private detective Spenser (whose first name was never given, but who said that his last name was spelled with an ’s’, “like the poet.”) It’s appropriate to pay tribute to Parker on this blog, both because Frye liked reading detective stories, and because Parker had a PhD in English from Northeastern. Several of his novels feature academic satire. He died at his desk, a writer to the last moment.

Steven Axelrod’s tribute at Salon.com (”How the crime novelist taught me to stand up for myself and taught my son about the carnal pleasures of reading”) can be found  here.  Axelrod’s piece is noteworthy for the way it suggests the liberating possibilities inherent in popular fiction.

Ed Lemond: Report from the Frye Festival

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The Frye Festival takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick, where Frye lived for the greater part of his youth, from 1919 to 1929, when he left to study at the University of Toronto.  He was born in Sherbrooke, and Moncton, especially for his mother, was hard exile, as John Ayre’s biography makes clear.  But Moncton is where he grew up and Moncton shaped him in crucial ways.  In a talk he gave at the 2003 festival, titled “Moncton, Did You Know?”  Bob Denham looked at Frye’s years in Moncton and asked the question, What happened to Frye in Moncton that set him, at age 17, firmly on the path that he was to follow.  A copy of this talk can be found on the festival website, www.frye.ca, and in the book Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye, a collection of festival talks I edited in 2005.

The first festival took place in April, 2000, with about 50 authors – poets, novelists, playwrights – in attendance.  And we invited David Staines to talk about Northrop Frye.  Thus began a splendid series of talks by scholars and others with intimate knowledge of Frye, including Branko Gorjup, Nella Cotrupi, Bob Denham (who has given 3 talks over the years), Naïm Kattan, John Ayre, Michael Dolzani, B.W. Powe, Alvin Lee, Jean O’Grady, Glenna Sloan, and Germaine Warkentin.  As well, each year we’ve organized, as part of the same ‘Frye Symposium’, at least one roundtable in which these same speakers and others, including Glenn Gill, Jeffrey Donaldson, Joe Velaidum, Peter Singer, and Jean Wilson.

In April, 2006 the festival inaugurated a second series of talks, which we call the Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, featuring a well-known writer/thinker with no necessary connection to Frye.  Neil Bissoondath spoke in 2006, followed by David Adams Richards in 2007, Alberto Manguel in 2008, and Monique LaRue in 2009.  Paul Curtis at the Université de Moncton, a member of the Frye Board of Directors, has been the driving force behind these talks.  Goose Lane Editions of Fredericton has published each talk in a handsome, bilingual, paperback format.

In April, 2010, our invited speaker for the Frye Symposium lecture is Craig Stevenson, who will give a talk on Jung and Frye.  Our invited speaker for the Maillet-Frye lecture is Noah Richler.  The tentative title for Noah’s talk is “The Unknown Soldier” and it will be a polemic on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.  I don’t know if he will have anything to say about Frye.  I take it as a sign of growth on our part that we’ve invited Noah, and a token of Noah’s sense of adventure that he would gladly accept an invitation to a festival named for Northrop Frye.  In his book This Is My Country: What’s Yours? Noah takes Frye to task on several fronts.  He finds the phrase ‘garrison mentality’ especially objectionable.  With this phrase “he was expressing (a) Eurocentric judgment and planted a stigma on the Canadian literary psyche for a good few decades afterwards.”  Much of Noah’s book is an exploration and celebration of the aboriginal contribution to Canadian culture and literature and so for him “the bush is not empty but occupied.  And if it was occupied, then it was therefore habitable and safe – and the towns were not ‘garrisons.’  Recognizing, in particular, that aboriginal peoples were living in spaces that Northrop Frye and others of his generation had previously considered wild, dangerous, and empty of culture if not of people, was the spur of a creed of ethnic and cultural sensitivity that was learned in the bush and then transferred to the cities.”

Branko Gorjup, in his talk at the April, 2001 festival, entitled “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,” recounts some of the previous negative reaction to Frye’s ‘Canadian’ criticism.  The common theme of these negative assessments seems to be that Frye’s ideas about Canadian literature are based on “imported theories and values.”  Perhaps this is all a misreading of Frye.  Frye, in conversation with David Cayley, says, “The phrase ‘garrison mentality’ has a certain historical context, and the phrase has got overexposed.”  This is a very gentle way of saying that it’s usually not a good idea to take things out of historical context.  Branko ends his essay, however, by asking: “Was Frye really ‘misread’ or was it simply that his work required multiple readings?”  And he quotes Eli Mandel, as conceding that “the real influence of Frye is to have shown the precise points where local creation becomes part of the civilized discourse he speaks of as criticism and creativity, the world of wonder, the universe of words.”

The Bush Garden, where so much of the damage was done, if I can put it that way, was first published in 1971, and I have in my possession, a precious fruit from my years as a bookseller, Timothy Findley’s signed copy of the first paperback edition.  It’s interesting that the first words he underlines, on page 213, are these: “And Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers (Canadians themselves might argue about one or two, but in the perspective of the world at large the statement is true).”  I like to picture Timothy Findley at Stone Orchard reading these words and saying to himself, By God, just you wait.  (In 1977 he published The Wars.)  Of course, Frye did wait, for it all to happen, as he knew it would.  Findley also underlines, and gives two long slashes in the margin, to this from page 222: “Again, Canadian culture, and literature in particular, has felt the force of what might be called Emerson’s law.  Emerson remarks in his journals that in a provincial society it is extremely easy to reach the highest level of cultivation, extremely difficult to take one step beyond that.  In surveying Canadian poetry and fiction, we feel constantly that all the energy has been absorbed in meeting a standard, a self-defeating enterprise because real standards can only be established, not met.”  Whether he agreed or disagreed with Frye’s historical perspective, Findley was intent on lifting himself above and beyond the force of Emerson’s law.  That he succeeded, as did so many others of his generation, is something we can all celebrate.

Welcoming Clayton Chrusch

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Joe and I were fortunate enough to have dinner tonight with Clayton Chrusch and his husband, Mike.  We were even more fortunate to be able to convince Clayton — who has been a regular contributer here almost from the first day — to become our latest byline correspondent.  However, there was just one condition.  So, here, as promised, Clayton, are the fireworks.  Almost ten minutes worth.  Enjoy!

Welcoming Jan Gorak

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We are very pleased to announce that Jan Gorak of the University of Denver will be joining us as our latest byline correspondent.  If you’re keeping score at home, Glenna Sloan, Ed Lemond, Michael Dolzani and Jonathan Allan have all joined us since Christmas, and we’ve still got a few more prospects in the works.

If any of you out there are interested in doing the same, please drop us a line.  We’re delighted to have you.