We are pleased to announce that Ed Lemond will be joining us as a byline correspondent. Ed is on the Board of Directors of the Northrop Frye Festival in Moncton. (We maintain a permanent live link to the Festival site in our Menu column to the right.) Ed is also the editor of Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye, published by the Elbow Press.
Eleanor Cook, wishing us a happy new year, draws our attention to the online biography of Frye she recently published in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography / Dictionnaire biographique du Canada. It is available in both English and French.
We are very pleased to announce that Glenna Sloan is joining us as a byline correspondent. Glenna teaches at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of (among other works) The Child as Critic: Developing Literacy Through Literature, K-8. Check out her website here. You can read her paper, “Northrop Frye in the Elementary Classroom,” here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuSeyLjI5Y
If you’re following events in Iran, you know that what may soon be referred to as the Ashura Revolution is underway throughout the country and particularly in Tehran, with crowds of protesters out in the streets daily in numbers that haven’t been seen since June and July. Young people especially continue to be targeted for beatings, rape and murder by regime thugs, the basij militia. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is now openly reviled. There is talk of a general strike, beginning as early as Monday. This illegitimate regime may finally be losing its grip. One telling sign is that the fraudulent “president” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be seen and is not mentioned even in state media.
The video above features a nightly phenomenon: people at their windows or on their rooftops shouting “Allah akbar” en masse. Andrew Sullivan calls it the “cry of freedom,” and it is, as Frye would say, as primary as it is primal. Sullivan’s site is easily the best raw news source anywhere at the moment — his Iranian contacts are pouring in reports hourly, and he’s blogging around the clock on developments. If you want to know what’s happening in Iran in real time, then Sullivan’s Daily Dish is the place to go. Be warned, some of the video he posts is disturbing. As Sullivan himself has put it, this revolution may not be televised, but it will be YouTubed. Welcome to the new world of New Media. It’s why CNN is withering on the vine and newspapers are hemorrhaging readers.
Russell Perkin has posted an article in our brand spankin’ new journal: “Northrop Frye on the Meaning of Christmas”. To see it, simply hit the live link in the Journal widget at the top right of our menu column.
The Robert D. Denham Library, under construction
Just in time for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, we are pleased to announce, at long last, the launch of our journal dedicated to Northrop Frye.
We are even more pleased to announce that the journal will not be a separate entity, as we initially planned, but will be incorporated into the blog site.
If you look to the top of our Widgets menu to the right, you’ll see the Journal. Gaining access to it as simple as hitting the links. We are retaining our original plan, which is to publish both “Articles of Interest” and “Peer Reviewed Scholarship.” We’ve posted a sample article just so that you can see how it’ll work. But the journal is now officially open for business, so send your submissions to fryeblog@gmail.com
We are also very pleased to announce the opening of the The Robert D. Denham Library, the first fully public virtual Northrop Frye library collection in the world. I think you’ll all agree that it is only fitting that Bob’s name be attached to it. It too has its own Widget link in the upper right of our site menu. It will soon be filled with goodies, and, as of today it is the permanent home for Bob’s Northrop Frye Newsletter, the first issue of which is now posted, so please feel free to go in and browse. We’ll update regularly about new acquisitions and additions to our collection, which will expand quickly in the new year.
I want to assure everyone that we’re still here. Joe Adamson and I of course are both working our way through the end-of-semester trials of grading and exams, so that’s kept us pretty much pre-occupied. Moreover, the gods have determined that this is an especially good time for my home computer to crash. (It’s still not clear whether or not I’ve lost everything on it.) I am buying another today and hope to be up and more or less fully functioning very shortly.
For the last four years I have been preparing for eventual publication a large-scale compilation that has the working title “The Northrop Frye Quote Book.” It will consist of some 4,000 alphabetically arranged quotations, the texts of which are taken from the Collected Works.
I would like to correspond with FOF (Friends of Frye) who wish to draw my attention to remarks that should appear in this collection. Included will be aphoristic expressions but also passages of two or three sentences in length that, while far from being aphoristic, make strikingly odd though often obvious points. Already I have some 3,500 such remarks in place, but the man is so quotable I may have missed your favourite formulations. I would love to know about them.
I am currently an Associate of the NF Centre at Victoria College. My website is www. colombo – plus. ca and my email address is jrc @ ca . inter. net.
With the kind indulgence of Michael Happy, and the pretext of continuing the discussion of the Bible and the nineteenth-century novel, I am pleased to announce the recent publication of my book Theology and the Victorian Novel (McGill-Queen’s University Press). In it, I discuss the theological dimension of a series of mostly very well-known Victorian novels by Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Augusta Ward, and Walter Pater. The book isn’t exactly a contribution to Frye scholarship, as the primary approach is that of intellectual and cultural history. However, it is concerned throughout with the relationship between literature and spiritual vision, and a recurrent theme is the way that the Victorians looked to literature for a supplement to or a substitute for the authority of sacred scripture, and for a sacramental revelation of the divine.
In terms of visible traces, Frye’s influence can be seen mainly in the context of genre theory, but I am sure it is more pervasive than the index and notes might suggest. I first read extensively in Frye’s work while I was in the early stages of working on the book. Previously I was only familiar with the Anatomy and one or two other short pieces, and I had written a review of The Double Vision when it first came out. The combination of a sabbatical leave and the need to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the Bible and literature resulted in a prolonged immersion in Frye’s work. It will be no surprise to those who have read any of my recent posts to learn that Frye’s influence on my book coexists with the influences of Robert Alter, historical scholars such as Stephen Prickett, and postmodern theology. I have tried to put these together to say something about the relationship between literature and theology not only in the Victorian period, but, implicitly at least, at the present time.
Novels, as I note at the beginning of my Introduction, conventionally are not thought to have much to do with theology. For example, Milan Kundera begins The Art of the Novel (1986) with the image of Don Quixote riding out into a world marked by the disappearance of God, “the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men.” But Henry James observes, in a passage I use as one of my epigraphs, “The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch anywhere – it will take in absolutely anything.” My basic argument is that the Victorians stretched the novel form to include theology, which was an important part of the cultural discourse of the time.
Bob Denham has made a remarkable discovery: a full set of notes of Frye’s undergraduate course on Religious Knowledge. Bob describes them as follows:
Course notes for twenty‑four lectures (September 1947 to March 1948) compiled by Margaret Gayfer from her class notes, incorporating some notes by Richard Stingle. They also include some of Frye’s answers to questions, and his review of the previous week’s lecture.
Margaret Gayfer and Richard Stingle were members of what Frye said was the “most brilliant” class he ever taught (1947–48). Gayfer became an editor for the International Council for Adult Education. She is the author of The Multi-grade Classroom––Myth and Reality: A Canadian Study (1991), An Overview of Canadian Education (1991), and numerous other publications on adult education. Richard Stingle, who did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, taught English at the University of Western Ontario.
We don’t have to belabor how exciting a find this is. We will start posting them over the weekend, one lecture per day over the next three weeks.