Category Archives: News

“Forensics of a Straw Man Pharmakos in Northrop Frye’s ‘Theory of Modes'”

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That’s the title of an article by Rickard Goranowski published in The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.

You can purchase it here.

The abstract:

Jacques Derrida in 1981, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ confronted the inveterate Northrop Frye over the 1971 Critical Path as a “pharmakos” or ‘rascal traducer’: Frye’s ‘straw man’ misprision of the Sidney-Peacock-Shelley controversy belittling Peacock and Shelley was obliquely identified by Derrida, in Pharmacy’s first paragraphs, prosecuting Frye’s undue influence on university publishing and tenure management.

Frye in Chinese

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Cross-posted in the Denham Library here.

Frye’s books continue to be translated into Chinese.  The most recent is a translation of The Secular Scripture (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2010).  Trans. Xiang-Chun Meng.  The other Chinese translations are:

 

Anatomy of Criticism

Piping de Pouxi.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren.  Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998.

Piping de Jiepou.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren; revised by Wu Chizhe and annotated by Wu Chizhe and Robert D. Denham.  Tianjin: Hundred-Flower Literary Press, 2000.

The Educated Imagination, Creation and Recreation, and The Well‑Tempered Critic

Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs]: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai (Trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. with a preface and annotations by Wu Chizhe.  Hoh‑Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003.

The Modern Century

Xian dai bai nian.  Trans. Sheng Ning.  Shenyang: Liaoning Educational Press; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The Critical Path

P’i ping chih lu: Lo-ssu-lo pu Fu-lai chu.  Trans. Wang Fengzhen and Min-li Chin.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

The Great Code

Wei da de dai ma: Shengjing yu wen xue. Trans. Hao Zhengyi, Fan Zhenguo, and He Chengzhou.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

Words with Power

Shenlide Yuyan: Shengjin yu Wenxue Yanjiu xubian.  Trans. Wu Chizhe.  Preface by Ye Shuxian. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House, 2004.

Selected Essays

Nuosiluopu Fulai Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays].  Ed. Wu Chizhe.  Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997.

Contents: “The Responsibilities of the Critic” / “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” / “The Search for Acceptable Words” / “Literature as Therapy” / “The Archetypes of Literature” / “Forming Fours” / “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” / “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” / “Expanding Eyes” / “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” / “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language” / “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” / “The Mythical Approach to Creation” / “Conclusion” to Literary History of  Canada” (1965), / “Criticism and Environment” / “The Cultural Development of Canada” / “The Stage Is All the World” / “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas” / “Blake after Two Centuries” / “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism”

Linda Hutcheon Scholarship

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University Professor and past president of the Modern Language Association of America, Linda Hutcheon, has just retired from the University of Toronto.  Professor Hutcheon is the most cited living Canadian scholar of literature, the only worthy successor to Northrop Frye. According to the citation index Publish or Perish, she has been cited 5,605 times in Google Books.  Her h-index, a formula based on how many books a scholar has produced as well as on citations, is 17, the same h-index as Marshall McLuhan or Salman Rushdie.

But, more than her publications, Linda has transformed the ethos of the academic units she works in by making all relations warmer and more human. The two words most associated with her professional presence among us are generosity and community. All her students can testify to her generosity. Since coming to U of T 1989 she has supervised 61 PhD theses!  She has served on another 61 thesis committees! Her example has taught all of us, her students and her colleagues alike, what the mentor-student relation can be.  Linda has also provided us with a wholly new model of what literary scholarship can be.  It does not have to be solitary. Research, publication, and teaching, she has taught us, are all collective enterprises.

Upon her retirement, in her honour the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto have established a scholarship in Linda’s name to be awarded to an incoming PhD student in English or Comparative Literature working in the areas of contemporary literature, theory, or interdisciplinary approaches to literature. If you would like to donate to the Linda Hutcheon Scholarship Fund, it is possible to make an online contribution by visiting either the Comparative Literature (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/) or English web-sites (http://www.english.utoronto.ca/Page4.aspx) and following the links.

Adam Gopnik at Frye Festival Community Read

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From Moncton’s Times & Transcript

Adam Gopnik to make appearance on Oct. 29 at city hall

A New York Times bestselling author will appear in Moncton later this month during the Frye Festival’s Fall Community Read.

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Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, will appear in the lobby of Moncton City Hall on Friday, Oct. 29 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The event will be followed by a reception with refreshments.

Born in Philadelphia but raised in Montreal, Gopnik left the familiarities of New York City in 1995 for the charm of Paris. His wife and their infant son went along, and for five years they tried to catch on to the quirks of French culture. Gopnik recorded his experiences, frustrations and delights in his “Paris Journal” for The New Yorker, which won him awards.

A collection of the Paris Journals was published in 2000 by Random House as “Paris to the Moon.”

“We encourage everyone to come discover this bestselling and award-winning author,” says Frye Festival executive director Danielle LeBlanc. “The way Gopnik relates the meeting of two cultures in Paris to the Moon fittingly reflects the realities of our daily lives here in Moncton.”

Those who want to read some of Gopnik’s work before the event can go to www.frye.ca.

A reading guide with information on the author and chapter summaries is also available on the website.

Admission to the event is “pay what you can,” with donations requested.

The Frye Festival’s Community Read series presents bilingual authors whose books are available in translation. The aim is to encourage dialogue between the linguistic communities by rallying them around one author and one book.

Calling all Romantic Frygians

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Eric Murphy Selinger of DePaul University is organizing a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting to take place in Vancouver in the spring.  The panel deals with romance in its widest sense.  To his credit, I have never heard a lecture by Selinger in which he doesn’t cite Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture or Anatomy of Criticism.  So, if you are working on romance, please consider submitting an abstract.  Instructions for submitting an abstract are available at http://www.acla.org/acla2011/

Foreign Affairs: Romance at the Boundaries

•  Seminar Organizer: Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul U

The 2011 ACLA conference theme invokes “the freshness, excitement, and, yes, fear of experiencing the ‘foreign.’”  In the experience of love, that mix of emotions is also on display, not least when the “foreign” other turns out to be ourselves, “shattered” (in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms) by the impact of desire.  This seminar will explore how literary and popular texts represent the transformative encounter of self and other, mind and body, old self and new, in romantic love.

How do texts enact encounter aesthetically, through contrapuntal discourses, genres, allusions, or traditions?  From Ottoman lyric to Harlequin novel, the literature of love is often highly conventionalized.  How have such texts incorporated the freshness of the “foreign,” renewed within—or slipping past—the boundaries of genre?

What are the politics of xenophilia, within or outside of texts? What ethics (and erotics) shape our acknowledgement, violation, or fetishizing of alterity? How does power shift when texts and tropes of love move from language to language, medium to medium, period to period, audience to audience?

Is scholarship also a “foreign affair”? What pleasures and shames shape academic encounters with popular romance, the abjected Other of “literature”? What happens when men study (and write) texts commonly construed to be “by women, for women,” or when women study (and write) male romance? As queer readers study heteronormative texts, and straight readers, queer ones—when East meets West, and South, North—might love of the “foreign” be read as a critical practice, or criticism, a practice of love?

Mass Extinction Event

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Recently the hard drive on my primary computer seized up.  While most of my important files were backed up, my email was not, and so I lost everything, including email addresses.  So, if you know me and are seeing this message, drop me a line at my home email address.

14,000 Visits in September

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That number surpasses our previous high of 10,000 visits in a single month, which we’ve hit a couple of times.  Those 14,000 visits, by the way, include almost 50,000 page views. We are of course delighted and have no reason to think that we are anywhere near topping out.

This therefore is an opportune time to solicit posts for our daily blog, contributions to the Denham Library, and articles for our journal.  I think at this point we have a right to guarantee that all contributions will be widely read.