“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the uni­versity; there is always something of Mark Hopkins and the log. There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being car­ried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.” ––Northrop Frye

A great deal of imaginative and intellectual energy was generated by the two recent conferences on Frye, honoring the centenary of his birth––one in Budapest and the other in Toronto.  Our weblog, “The Educated Imagination,” allows us to continue the dialogues begun at those two gatherings.

The aims of the blog are

● to stimulate and foster interest in Frye’s work

● to facilitate the conversation about his criticism

● to provide useful research tools for all who want to study his writings

● to keep the bibliography of Frye studies up to date, becoming a steward of the history and tradition of such studies

● to testify to the ways that Frye’s thought has influenced our thinking, understanding, and teaching

● to explain things in Frye’s work that may be difficult, to analyze the various parts of his conceptual universe, and to evaluate and critique his theories

● to understand the sources of Frye’s thought and the influences that shaped it

● to see how Frye’s criticism interpenetrates with or otherwise relates to the conceptual universes of other systems of thought

● to study how Frye’s criticism has been applied practically, both in literary studies and in other disciplines

● to understand how Frye’s work fits into the history of criticism

● to examine Frye’s place in Canadian culture

● to pose questions about Frye’s work that others may be able to answer

● to develop the fledgling journal––go here

● to publicize and review books and articles about Frye

The blog, which, as you can see, is fully searchable, enables one to comment on earlier postings, and it has a “library” that has begun to accumulate materials, including articles on Frye’s work, several ebooks, pdf files of the Northrop Frye Newsletter, previously unpublished material, selected reviews of some of Frye’s books, student notes from Frye’s courses, and the like.

The purpose of this letter is to invite you and your friends and colleagues to become a part of the conversation.  You may want to respond to earlier postings by using the “comment” feature of the blog.  Beyond that, feel free to send Joe Adamson (adamsonj@mcmaster.ca) your articles, comments, queries, suggestions, and / or earlier things you’ve written about Frye.  By so doing you will circulate your ideas among the more than 11,000 visitors who log on to the blog each month.  If you would like to become a regular blogger, posting every week or even once a month, please let Joe know.  As Frye says, the techniques of the electronic media certainly have their down side.  But they can also help bring us together by engaging in dialogue about a common subject.

Joe Adamson and Bob Denham

Walden Pond

As the American presidential election campaign comes to a close, and the prospect of a president Romney is, grotesquely, a possible outcome we must brace for, I thought it might be worth quoting from an essay that Frye wrote in the late sixties, entitled “America: True or False?”  Roger Hyman, a Canadianist and a colleague of mine here at McMaster, drew the piece to my attention the other day as we were grumbling over lunch about the wretched state of the world and harkening back to the sixties and the very different, much more hopeful atmosphere then; he recalled, to my envy, the year at grad school when he was taking, all at the same time, courses from three giants, Frye, McLuhan, and Donald Creighton, the Red Tory historian of Canada.

The essay was written in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam war and the student movement, and originally published in Notes for a Native Land, A New Encounter with Canada (ed. Andy Wainwright, Oberon Press, 1969), a collection of essays by various Canadian writers and intellectuals. It was another time, another place, but the words, mutatis mutandis–and the necessary adjustments are remarkably few–still speak so clearly and lucidly. As Frye eloquently said of Canada in The Modern Century, the country we should be loyal to is not the country that exists, but the one we have failed to create:

. . . . As for the USA, there is a political separation from that country which a Canadian feels as soon as he goes outside Canada. Politically, Canada ought to be one of the small, observant countries in a new world of continental, powers, much as, say, Switzerland has been in Europe. A Canadian going to the United States to teach in a university there is often asked by his American students if he notices any difference. They expect the answer to be no, and nine-tenths of the time it is no, but the tenth time there is some point of discussion that suddenly makes him feel like a Finn in Russia or a Dane in Germany. His students have been conditioned from infancy to be citizens of a vast imperial power; he has been conditioned to watch, to take sides in decisions made elsewhere.

But what does political separation matter when economically and culturally there seems to be no difference at all? The great producing machine of North American capitalism knows nothing of an undefended border: it spews its consumer goods all over us, pollutes our air and water and earth, turns our landscapes into a strangling nightmare of highways, tears the guts out of our cities and strews them along “ribbon developments,” cuts down our forests and digs up our mines, bellows and mimes a mixture of advertising and propaganda into our eyes and ears all day long. In short, everything that happens in the United States happens in Canada too, except that most of it is crossing a border and invading another country. But is that any real exception? Canadians seem to be quite willing to go along with this process: no political leader dares resist it for fear of “lowering the standard of living.” If our identity is to consist only of a querulous and pointless anti-Americanism, it is hardly worth holding on to.

The economic development of America has been intensely competitive, and so has developed in an oligarchic direction, taking advantage of everything that increases social inequality, like racism. Exclusiveness breeds hysteria, because of the constant fear of revolt from “below,” and the hysteria is increased by an economy that depends on advertising, and so tries to create a gullible and uncritical public. Advertising absorbs propaganda as the economic expansion goes beyond the limits of America and turns imperialist, and the two merge into the category of “public relations,” where one throws oneself into a dramatic role, and says, not what one means, but what the tactics of the situation are supposed to demand. In so insane a context the question of whether or not murdering a prominent figure or planting a bomb would be good publicity for one’s cause becomes almost a rational question. Hysteria breeds counter-hysteria, racism counter-racism, and American capitalism is now facing various opposed forces who may turn out to be stronger than it is, because they fight with the same weapons but believe in them more intensely. On both sides the social unit is the organized mob. An appalling crash in the near future seems to be at least a possibility for American society, and Canada could no more avoid such a conflict than Belgium could avoid a war between Germany and France. We look round for a third force, but the best organized one seems to be the criminals, who profit from both.

And yet everyone realizes: that there are two Americas, and that underneath this gigantic parasite on the American way of life there is quite a different America, tough, shrewd, humorous, deeply committed to a belief in democracy, with a genuine hatred of violence and unreason, anxious to reduce, even try to eliminate, poverty and social discrimination in its own country and to keep out of trouble with other nations. It may be sentimental and easily misled, but it is very far from being inarticulate or powerless. It is potentially in control of the political structure, which may often be,. in practice, the executive committee of the economic structure, but does not have to be: the Constitution which is its basis aims at democracy, not at oligarchy, and it is still a powerful revolutionary force.

I do not see how America can find its identity, much less avoid chaos, unless a massive citizens’ resistance develops which is opposed to exploitation and imperialism on the one hand, and to jack-booted radicalism on the other. It would not be a new movement, but simply the will of the people, the people as a genuine society strong enough to contain and dissolve all mobs. It would be based on a conception of freedom as the social expression of tolerance, and on the understanding that violence and lying cannot produce anything except more violence and more lies. It would be politically active, because democracy has to do with majority rule and not merely with enduring the tyranny of organized minorities. It would not be conservative or radical in its direction, but both at once.

What is true of American identity is a fortiori true of Canadian identity. Our political independence, such as it is, is the chance that enables us to make common cause with the genuine American that Thoreau and Jefferson and Mark Twain and even Ezra Pound were talking about. This all sounds very vague, but that doesn’t worry me: this is a statement of belief, not a program of action. It also sounds very unlikely, but hope is said to be a major virtue.

(CW 12: 403-405)

As many of you will know, a conference was held at the University of Toronto at the beginning of October in honour of Frye’s centenary, and on Thursday evening a bronze statue of Frye (modeled on the one originally unveiled in Moncton earlier this year) was unveiled in the quad of Victoria College. The statue is located just outside Northrop Frye Hall. For more on the unveiling, go here.

The conference itself was a great success, the level of the papers very high, and the considerable number of papers from the younger generation of scholars gave us much to hope for the future of Frye studies. The conference website, here, may be posting some of the papers.  Here is the conference program:

EDUCATING THE IMAGINATION:
A CONFERENCE IN HONOUR OF NORTHROP FRYE ON THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH

October 4th – 6th 2012,
Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Programme

THURSDAY OCTOBER 4TH, 2012

9.45 -10.00 Welcome by Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto)

10.00-11.15 am

Panel 1: Influences on Frye (Chair: Melissa Dalgleish, York University)

Joseph Adamson (McMaster University): “Frye and Edgar Allan Poe”

Craig Stephenson (IAAP): “Reading Frye Reading Jung”

Robert D. Denham (Roanoke College, Emeritus): “Frye and Colin Still”

11.30 am-12.45 pm

Panel 2: Frye: Structure and Change (Chair: Paul Downes, University of Toronto)

Duncan McFarlane (University of Ottawa): “Frye, Bloom, and the Problem of Satire”

Jan Gorak (University of Denver): “Frye and the Comedy of Humors”

Glen Robert Gill (Montclair State University): “The Dialectics of Myth: Northrop Frye’s Theory of Culture”

12.45-2.00 Lunch (on your own)

2.00-3.30

Plenary Lecture by Robert Bringhurst

“The Use and Abuse of Theory in Literature”

(Chair: Germaine Warkentin, University of Toronto)

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Missing Items in the Frye Corpus

Robert D. Denham

When I was compiling Frye’s bibliography Frye wrote to me, saying:

 I never know how exhaustive a bibliography should be, especially with the development of that snake in the grass the tape recorder.  With me, the difference between writing and speaking from notes is a chalk-and-cheese difference, and when I’m asked to speak I often make it a condition that I am not to produce a manuscript.  But of course when I turn up either a tape recorder is revolving somewhere or the CBC has gone into action, and they produce what purports to be a manuscript.  Thus there now exists a speech of mine printed in the Educational Courier, Nov.–Dec. 1968, Vol. xxxix, No. 2, (listed as) “The Social Importance of Literature,” pp. 19–23.  The same magazine printed a speech in another issue which I am sending you: use your own judgement.  Similarly with campus magazines.  I recently wrote out a speech for the local alumni called “The Quality of Life in the Seventies,” which was printed in the University of Toronto Graduate, Spring 1971, Vol. III, No. 5, pp. 38–48.  But to this was added a speech called “Education and the Rejection of Reality,” pp. 49–55, which, as the editor says, “consists of Dr. Frye’s words as they came off the tape.”  This is one I know about, but I quite often hear about recorded speeches of mine that I haven’t even seen, and didn’t until then know existed.  I think this is probably illegal, but the copyright law is in such a chaos that nobody really knows what is legal.

But sometimes the chalk and cheese turn out to be almost indistinguishable.  An example is a series of two lectures on “Reconsidering Levels of Meaning” Frye gave at Emory & Henry College in 1979.  He spoke only from two or three pages of notes he had scribbled on a writing pad.  I taped his lectures and later transcribed them.  They were published twenty‑five years later in Christianity and Literature and are now included in volume 25 of the Collected Works.  Although my transcription never received Frye’s imprimatur, we are doubtless the richer for having this variation on a theme that Frye was working on when writing The Great Code.

A number of talks Frye gave cannot be accounted for.  Either he spoke extemporaneously or from notes; or, if there were manuscripts, they have disappeared.  Perhaps some of them were taped.  What follows is a list of more than 140 talks Frye gave for which no known manuscripts exist.  Bloggers might know whether some of them were recorded and, if so, whether it might be possible to recover them.

A paper on Blake, at the Graduate English Club, 25 October 1934.

In 1936–37 and 1938–39 Frye wrote papers for his Oxford tutorials with Edmund Blunden on Wyatt, Fulke Greville, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, the Dark Ages, the character book, King Lear, the history of language.  He may have written papers on Sidney and Lyly as well.  At least some of these papers Frye sent to his Victoria College mentor, Pelham Edgar, who passed them on to Frye’s friend Roy Daniells.  What subsequently became of them is uncertain.  They are not among the Edgar Papers at Victoria University or the Daniells Papers at the University of British Columbia.

“A Short History of the Devil,” at Oxford to the members of the Bodley Club, 2 December 1938.

“The Search for Wisdom” and “The Search for the Word,” at the Victoria College retreat, 27 September 1942.

A talk on Frazer to the Liberal Arts Club, Toronto, October 1942.

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A List of the Volumes of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye with the Contents of Each, along with a Notation of the Books by Frye in which the Separate Items Originally Appeared and an Alphabetical Title Index

 Even those who are quite familiar with Frye’s work cannot always remember the general subject of a given volume in the Collected Works.  The present list, the need for which was suggested to me by Michael Dolzani, provides a ready reference to the contents of each volume, like the list of books and their contents that one finds at the back of each volume of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.  Twenty‑nine of the thirty volumes of Frye’s Collected Works are not available in paperback, which means that those who would like to have the complete published writings would have to lay out a large sum of money––more than $3300 if ordered from the University of Toronto Press.  Readers of Frye, however, may have some or perhaps all of Frye’s separately published books, so the present list, along with the index, can assist them in finding the CW volume that contains the item they are looking for, as well as the book in which the item originally appeared.  The present list consists of two parts.  The first part gives the contents of each volume in the Collected Works, and for those items that were published in one of Frye’s books, the book title is given after the title of the article.  For example, “Crime and Sin in the Bible” ● Myth and Metaphor, 255–69.  The second part is an index of all of Frye’s titles, followed by the CW volume in which they can be found.  For example, “Language as the Home of Human Life” ● CW 7: 577–90.  This second list is similar to what can be found in Jean O’Grady’s stellar index for the Collected Works (CW 30), though I have not separated lectures and speeches (O’Grady’s section II.1) from published or completed works (her section II.5).

Many of Frye’s articles, reviews, and occasional pieces were never included in an edited collection.  They, of course, will not be followed by the title of a book in part 1.  I have not listed the titles of the one hundred eleven interviews in CW 24, Interviews with Northrop Frye.  The list, along with the index, if copied and printed, can serve as a handy guide to the CW, or it may be copied and stored as a searchable electronic file.  ––Robert Denham

 Volumes 1 and 2

The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939.  Ed. Robert D. Denham.  2 vols.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.  xxxii + ix + 979 pp.

 Volume 3

Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938.  Ed. Robert D. Denham.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.  xxix + 557 pp.

Contents:

“The Basis of Primitivism”

“Romanticism”

“Robert Browning: An Abstract Study”

“The Concept of Sacrifice”

“The Fertility Cults”

“The Jewish Background of the New Testament: An Essay in Historical Apocalyptic”

“The Age and Type of Christianity in the Epistle of James”

“Doctrine of Salvation in John, Paul, and James”

“St. Paul and Orphism”

“ The Augustinian Interpretation of History”

“The Life and Thought of Ramon Lull”

“Robert Cowton to Thomas Rondel, Lector at Balliol College, Oxford”

“Relative Importance of the Causes of the Reformation”

“Gains and Losses of the Reformation”

“A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church in England during the Nineteenth Century”

“The Relation of Religion to the Arts”

“The Relation of Religion to the Arts Forms of Music and Drama”

“An Inquiry into the Art Forms of Prose Fiction”

“The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy”

“T.S. Eliot and Other Observations”

“A Reconsideration of Chaucer”

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I have recently returned from a successful conference in Budapest honoring Frye in his centenary year.  In a discussion with the Hungarians I mentioned that on several occasions Frye referred to Ferenc Juhász’s The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries out at the Gate of Secrets (1955), a poem much admired by Auden and by Frye as well.  Back home, I’ve tracked down the references:

From Notebook 21 in CW 13: 163

Maybe revolution-rebirth is the telos of Four, in spite of what I’ve said, its 5 reversal being resurrection.  Maybe the universe contained in the mind, the apocalypse of that wonderful Juhasz poem, is reversed by interpenetration.  It’s the same principle of everywhere is here inside out.  Similarly, resurrection is rebirth’s “Behold, I make all things new,” inside out.  The consubstantial risen Christ? (CW 13: 163)

From “The Times of the Signs,” CW 27: 353.  Frye is quoting from The Plough and the Pen, Writings from Hungary 1930-1956, edited by Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi (1963).

At the same time that the Romantic movement had begun the final separation of mythology and science, the Industrial Revolution was making technology a central factor in society.  Both Marxism and the theory of progress in the democracies seized on industrial production as the central uniting force of society, and the realizing power of civilization.  Their conception of technology was much the same: they differed only on whether a capitalist or a socialist economy should control it.  The great advantage of having technology in such a role was that it seemed to develop automatically, with the minimum of reference to the nagging mythological question: is this really what man most wants and needs?  Marxist poets were urged to celebrate the glories of technology under socialism as their ancestors had celebrated gods and heroes.  A magnificent Hungarian poem by Ferenc Juhász, The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets, translated by the Canadian poet Kenneth McRobbie with Ilona Duczynska, thus describes the apotheosis of its transformed hero:

There he stood on the renewing crags of time,

stood on the ringed summit of the sublime

universe, there stood the lad at the gate of secrets,

his antler prongs were playing with the stars . . .

Mother, my mother, I cannot go back:

pure gold seethes in my hundred wounds . . .

each prong of my antlers is a dual-based pylon

each branch of my antlers a high-tension wire,

my eyes are ports for ocean-going merchantmen, my veins are tarry cables, these

teeth are iron bridges, and in my heart the surge of monster-infested seas,

each vertebra is a teeming metropolis, for a spleen I have a smoke-puffing barge

each of my cells is a factory, my atoms are solar systems

sun and moon swing in my testicles, the Milky Way is my bone marrow,

each point of space is one part of my body

my brain impulse is out in the curling galaxies.

[Quoted from The Plough and the Pen, Writings from Hungary 1930-1956, edited by Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi (1963). [NF]]

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I’m writing to let you know about our Centennial Campaign: ‘Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature’. This web based series, if successfully financed, recovers, augments, and enhances 24 Frye lectures from Frye’s Religious Knowledge course given in 1981/82, the only video in existence of Frye behind the lectern in a classroom.

Take a moment to check it out on Indiegogo and also share it with your friends. All the tools are there. Get perks, make a contribution, or simply follow updates. If enough of us get behind it, we can make ‘Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature’ happen.

Full information on the project is available here.

Bob Rodgers

Northrop Frye 100: A Danubian Perspective

 To honor Northrop Frye on the centenary of his birth, this conference was held in Budapest, 7–8 September 2012.  It was sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, and the School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University.  Participants heard papers by some thirty speakers, representing eight countries.  In addition Milorad Krstić gave a video presentation of his extraordinary Das Anatomische Theater.  Below are the English abstracts of the papers and the brief biographies of the participants.  Only the names and titles are given for the papers and abstracts in Hungarian.

 1.  Bácskai-Atkári, Júlia
Frye Reading Byron

In his influential essay Archetypal Criticism, Northrop Frye interprets Byron’s Don Juan as a clear instance of satire, belonging to the “mythos of winter” (Frye 1957).  As he points out, satire in Don Juan is to a large extent achieved by a strong self-parodying tendency and by constant digressions — both leading to the partial marginalization of the hero (Frye 1963). I will show that Frye’s analysis can be extended to the genre of the verse novel as such: first, it captures the chief differences from the mock epic, which is satire fundamentally lacking the two features in question. Second, the parody of other genres — which typically recall Frye’s “mythos of summer” — and self-mocking tone are present on a higher level too: the verse novel is a form which is by definition a literary response. As such, it is also self-responsive: verse novels after Byron tend not only to be self-reflexive as texts but they emphatically reflect on the genre itself, either by distancing themselves from (certain aspects of) previous verse novels, as did many Hungarian examples in the second half of the 19th century, or even by parodying previous ones, as does Térey’s Paulus with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. With the appearance of contemporary instances of the genre (e.g. Byrne by Burgess), Frye’s analysis is very much of a current issue.

JÚLIA BÁCSKAI-ATKÁRI graduated from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest with an MA (hons) in English Language and Literature and in Hungarian Language and Literature. Currently, she is junior research fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (PhD programmes in Romanticism and in English Linguistics). Her main research area is the narration of the 19^th‑century novel in verse and of the postmodern development of the genre in Hungarian and English literature, with particular interest in Byron’s oeuvre and reception.

 2.  Bánki, Evá

A költészet születése—Samuel I. könyve alapján

[Paper, abstract, and bio in Hungarian]

3.  Dancáková, Mária

Northrop Frye on the Metaphorical Language of the Bible

The paper focuses on Frye’s reading of the Biblical language which he defined, using Bultmann’s term, as kerygma, or proclamation, based on myth and metaphor, and showing affinities with the language of poetry and rhetoric.  However, Frye never seemed to be satisfied with the definition and he struggled to find the exact wording for the biblical language and its literal meaning.  Certain for him was its basis in myth and metaphor, as he believed that only such a language can detach people from the world of facts and logical propositions, and which has the power to transform their lives.  Metaphor, as he explained, is the controlling mode of thought in the Bible and not only an ornament; its use is extended to the identification of a reader with what he reads in the Bible, arising especially from the centripetal relations among its words.  Myth is the cornerstone of the biblical structure, and is not to be perceived as “not really true,” as the form of the biblical stories is more important than their historicity. The intention of the biblical writers was to tell a story, not to provide the readers with the accurate description of the era, or to tell them what they might have missed.

MÁRIA DANCÁKOVÁ (born on August 25, 1989 in Trebišov) currently lives in Presov. She attended the University of Presov in Presov, Faculty of Arts, in the study programme British and American Studies. In 2010 she obtained her bachelor’s degree and is currently in the last year of her master’s degree programme. The topic of her diploma thesis was Northrop Frye on the Metaphorical Language of the Bible. In the winter semester 2011, she spent four months at the University of Bolton, United Kingdom, as an Erasmus student.

4. Dávidházi, Péter

A Tribute to The Great Code: Voltaire’s Lisbon Poem, Mikes and the Book of Job

Being a tribute to Northrop Frye’s work on the Bible, the paper is meant to demonstrate how a present-day scholar may benefit from applying Frye’s insights and methods to a comparative analysis of two literary works with a common, if latent, biblical subtext. Both Voltaire’s “Poëme sur le désastre de Lisbonne ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien” and Kelemen Mikes’s letter CXCVIII in his Letters from Turkey were prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, both responded to the problems of theodicy, and both alluded to the book of Job.  In constant dialogue with Frye’s ideas, the paper reveals these similarities, but only to highlight (and celebrate) some characteristic differences that are incompatible with the usual classification of Mikes’s work as a typical representative of early Enlightenment literature.

PÉTER DÁVIDHÁZI.  Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is head of the Department of 19th-century Hungarian Literature at the Research Centre for the Humanities, and he is Professor of English Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.  As a visiting professor he taught at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Published in Hungary, England and the US, his books include The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1998).  His latest book is Menj, vándor. Swift sírfelirata és a hagyományrétegzödes [Go, Traveller. Swift’s Epitaph and the Strata of a Tradition] (Pecs: Pro Pannonia, 2009).  His recent work focuses on the uses of biblical allusions in modern English and Hungarian Poetry.

5. Denham, Robert. D.

The “Two Fryes”: The Aristotelian and the Longinian

This paper examines the question of whether or not there are two essential thrusts to Frye’s critical vision that are more or less incommensurate with each other and that therefore are not subject to Frye’s usual tendency of bringing together oppositions, such as Aristotle versus Longinus, by way of their interpenetration or their being subjected to the Hegelian Aufhebung.  The question is approached by way of Frye’s commitment to both Aristotelian and Longinian perspectives. Denham concludes that Frye finally privileges Longinus over Aristotle.

ROBERT D. DENHAM is the Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, Roanoke College, Salem, VA.  He was formerly Director of English Programs for the Modern Language Association.  He has written and edited 26 volumes by or about Northrop Frye, including eleven volumes of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  His most recent book is The Northrop Frye Handbook.  This past summer he donated his extensive Frye collection to the Public Library in Moncton, New Brunswick, Frye’s hometown. The collection included books, articles, and other printed matter, amounting to 43 feet of shelf space; 38 videotapes and 65 audiotapes, Frye’s writing desk and chair, a bronze bust of Frye, oil paintings, several dozen original drawings and caricatures, 114 translations of Frye’s books into 25 languages, and numerous other Frygiana.

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In honour of the centenary, Nella Cotrupi, author of Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process, will be giving a series of lectures on Frye and the concept of the “secular scripture.”  I certainly intend to catch as many of the talks as I can. Not to be missed if you are a Frye devotee and live in the area. Here is the blurb from the flyer:

Northrop Frye and the Secular Scripture
With Nella Cotrupi

Tuesdays, October 2, 9, 23 & 30, 2012
7:00- 9:00 pm at Emmanuel College

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Northrop Frye and many special events have been organized to mark this centenary and honour a graduate of Emmanuel College who is widely acknowledged to have been one of Canada’s  brightest intellectual lights. In honour of this occasion, Dr. Nella Cotrupi will deliver a series of four talks with discussion on a concept that is central to Frye’s life work, the “Secular Scripture.” What did Professor Frye comprehend by this expression, and why did he privilege it so prominently in his literary criticism? In order to answer these questions, we will delve into the very core of his spiritual beliefs and ethical commitments.

Nella Cotrupi has taught and published widely on Northrop Frye. Her book-length study, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process, was published by University of Toronto Press.

For registration details go here.

These  two alerts are courtesy of Bob Denham, our roving reporter who always has a sharp eye out for matters Frygian:

You can follow this link to the website of one of Frye’s former students, Margaret Kell Virany, who supplied Bob with so many of the notes for Frye’s courses. We owe her a great debt. The notes are published in our library, under “Class Notes and Exams”. I might take the opportunity here to thank Clayton Chrusch for his help in uploading them into the library.

This link will take you to a lovely piece by Sylva Ficová, freelance translator and editor, translator of Anatomy of Criticism and co-0translator of The Great Code:  Velký kód [Bible a literatura].  Trans. Sylva  Ficová  and Alena Přibáňová.  Brno: Host, 2000.