The Ottawa Citizen published an article Tuesday on the miserable state of student housing and cited the closing of the Centre for Comparative Literature as symptomatic of the broader problem of underfunding:
Every university is short of cash: Even the comparatively wealthy University of Toronto expects to shut down the Centre for Comparative Literature founded by Northrop Frye — the most famous humanities scholar this country ever produced — to save money.
Emily in a portrait by her brother Branwell
Today is Emily Bronte‘s birthday (1818-1848). Earlier posts on Anne and Charlotte here and here.
Frye in “Four Forms of Prose Fiction”:
In novels that we think of as typical, like those of Jane Austen, plot and dialogue are closely linked to those of the comedy of manners. The conventions of Wuthering Heights are linked rather with the tale and the ballad. They seem to have more affinity with tragedy, and the tragic emotions of passion and fury, which would shatter the balance of tone in Jane Austen, can be safely accommodated here. So can the supernatural, or the suggestion of it, which is difficult to get into a novel. The shape of the plot is different: instead of maneuvering around a situation, as Jane Austen does, Emily Bronte tells her story with linear accents, and she seems to need the help of a narrator, who would be absurdly out of place in Jane Austen. Conventions so different justify us regarding Wuthering Heights as a different form of prose fiction from the novel, a form we shall here call romance. (CW 21, 79)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hvaeHllwtw
Under any other circumstances, it’d be cruel to post such a video. But now that the cavernously ignorant and aggressively semi-literate serial liar Sarah Palin is the de facto leader of the Republican Party, it’s not necessarily a laughing matter.
This is Basil Marceaux, Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee.
Website here.
Maclean’s article on the closing of the Centre for Contemporary Literature here.
An excerpt, including a quote from our own Jonathan Allan:
Students have organized a campaign called “Save Comparative Literature” that includes a petition with around 5,800 signatures, including Margaret Atwood’s. Online forums have seen an unfavourable acronym attached to the School of Languages and Literature at U of T, namely “SLLUT.”Some students see the plan as a breach of contract. “I think something that is going to be very difficult for us going on the job market is that we are the last classes for the [Centre] and that’s damaging to us,” fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Allan said. “We didn’t agree to come to the University of Toronto to become a part of some school of languages.”
Professors are similarly disappointed. Linda Hutcheon, who teaches at the Centre, although her home department is English, says that interdisciplinary studies, like comparative literature, are being threatened. “There’s no other Centre that brings people together, not only from other languages to work together, but from other disciplines, from history to sociology to the theatre,” she told Maclean’s. “Almost every school in the United States has a comparative literature department. That’s the joke.”
Today is de Tocqueville‘s birthday (1805-1859).
Frye in the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada“:
The coherence of the “American way of life” is often underestimated by Americans themselves, because the more thoughtful citizens of any country are likely to be more preoccupied with its anomalies. Hence outsiders, including Canadians, may find the consistency easier to see. De Tocqueville, who didn’t like much of what he saw in the United States, wrote his book [Democracy in America] very largely about that consistency, almost in spite of himself. (CW 12, 452-3)
In his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington”:
De Tocqueville, in his magesterial survey of democracy in America, says only one thing about Canada, but what he says bears on our present point. “In Canada,” he says, “the most enlightened, patriotic and human inhabitants make extraordinary effort to render the people dissatisfied . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere.” He is speaking mainly of French Canada, but the remark applies to the whole country. One reads between the lines the desperate frustrations of the earlier communicators, and the massive indifference of those they attempted to address. The silence of the eternal spaces remained at the bottom of the Canadian psyche for a long time, and in many respects is still there. (ibid., 647-8)
In a 1969 interview, “CRTC Guru”:
Chiasson: I’m considering some thoughts that Tocqueville, the French historian, had about the U.S. and indeed about Canada, which I think have something to do with the fundamentally classless situation of North America.
Frye: The thing is that when you don’t have a class structure you have to diversify society in some other way, otherwise you just get a mob; of course, the mob is what Tocqueville is worried about. This is why, I think, this breaking down of the Canadian population into separate groups is so important.
Chiasson: And something to be encouraged?
Frye: Well, it takes place anyway. (CW 24, 101)
Below is a post today at BlogTO:
News Flash
Amalgamation causes unrest at University of Toronto
Posted by Robyn Urback / July 27, 2010
Get this–uproar at a university that actually has something to do with the university!
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto has proposed sweeping changes to U of T’s largest faculty, which will see six humanities programs consolidated into one school.
The new School of Languages and Literatures is being considered as a way to offset the faculty’s $55 million of debt. The new school, or SLLUT (School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, as to it is so affectionately referred on dissenting online forums), will merge the existing Italian, German, East Asian Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Slavic languages departments, as well as the Centre for Comparative Literature, which was founded by Northrop Frye.
Many students, as well as faculty at the University of Toronto, are opposed to the amalgamation, anticipating an intellectual “step backwards.”
“U of T used to have a reputation for being very conservative, and it’s about to have that reputation again,” said Linda Hucheon, professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature. “We will try to make a case for not getting rid of a major discipline within the university. “We’re not going down without a bit of a fight.”
Students have set up petitions, websites, and a Facebook group opposing the changes. Final approval for the new school will be sought in the fall.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnyXgcoQl-A
From the Matthaeus Passion
On this date J.S. Bach died (1685-1750).
Frye on the Matthaeus Passion:
In the twenty years I’ve been listening to the Passion, I’ve changed my mind about it. I used to feel that the narration was something to sit through, & one waited for the arias and the choruses. Now I feel that the work is primarily narration, as the arias & choruses, with greater familiarity, fall into the background as commentaries. This, of course, brings out its real tragic structure, as it’s like Greek tragedy, not only in its use of chorus, but in its reporting of events. Even Christ, even though he does his own singing, is contained within the narration. (Cited in Robert Denham, Frye Unbuttoned, 18-19)
Professor Mondo gives a shout-out to the Centre for Comparative Literature all the way from the USA here.
Sylvia Maultash Warsh is the author of the recently published The Queen of Unforgetting.
When I was at the University of Toronto years ago, like many young undergrads, I didn’t know my own mind and somehow ended up in Psychology instead of English. So though I was a student at U of T, I never had Northrop Frye for a professor. It wasn’t until I had to research the venerable critic for my new novel, The Queen of Unforgetting, that I realized just how much I had missed.
I had good reasons for making Frye a character in my story. I like to set my books in Toronto—my first three are historical mysteries that take place on and around Beverley Street, near the university. For this book (not a mystery) I needed an academic superstar, and Frye was the obvious choice. My protagonist, a grad student more ambitious than most, needs a supervisor for her thesis. But not just any supervisor. She knows that a Frye protégé will have a good chance at an academic placement when the time comes. To this end, she chooses a thesis topic that will interest him: E.J. Pratt’s epic poem, Brébeuf and His Brethren. Pratt was Frye’s mentor and he is pulled in. For my research, I pored over many of Frye’s books and journals; I watched videotaped interviews in which he sits before the camera and gives dazzling little lectures in his famous deadpan.
He doesn’t look the part, but he was a mythic figure in his own time. Sometimes referred to as The Buddha, the shy brilliant scholar had assimilated vast quantities of literature, philosophy, art, and religion. It was this storehouse of knowledge that let him connect disparate ideas and themes into meaningful patterns. His omnivorous reading made it possible for him to cross borders and draw comparisons between cultures, and particularly their literatures.
Our world has shrunk almost beyond imagination since 1969 when Frye founded the Centre for Comparative Literature at U of T. Today’s global realities require, more than ever, broader understanding of the world around us. Through literature we recognize the similarity in the other, the stranger who looks nothing like us but who lives, loves and dies just the same, only defined by a different set of symbols. A centre dedicated to looking outward toward the other is in a unique position to forge cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ties. A university that doesn’t recognize the value of such an enterprise is in the wrong business.
Sign the petition in support of the Centre for Comparative Literature here.
