Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory and the Centre for Comparative Literature

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The Centre for Comparative Literature has for three decades invited a professor of international reputation to come to the Centre and deliver a series of lectures, a seminar course, a pro-seminar, and so on, as the Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory.  The professorship is a visiting position and in recent years, at least since I started at the Centre, those obligations require at least a week long commitment.

During my time at the Centre, I’ve had the chance to talk to scholars about my research, and they have often made interesting suggestions or asked provocative questions.  I think here particularly of Emily Apter, who was instrumental in getting me to think deeper about the relationship between Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye.  Or, more recently, David Damrosch, who lectured on the virtues of World Literature.  For those who do not know, the study of World Literature — and what precisely is meant by it — is a current debate in Comparative Literature Studies.  Simon Fraser University recently initiated a “World Literature Program.”  And yet the University of Toronto now suggests that it is time to shut down its famous Centre for Comparative Literature just as other universities are beginning to re-conceive and re-imagine the possibilities of comparative literature.

Over the years, some of the most important books in literary theory were written, in part, at the Centre for Comparative Literature: Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative; The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson (the first Frye Professor); Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said.  The full list of scholars who have been Frye Professors is impressive.  And, I should point out, many Frygians have also held the post, such as Alvin Lee and Jonathan Hart.

In 2011, the Centre will welcome Carol Mavor as the Northrop Frye Professor.  She will be at the Centre for about two weeks and her visit will conclude with the annual graduate student conference, which has become, in many respects, one of the (if not the) most important comparative literature conferences in Canada.  This year, the theme of the conference will be “Iconoclasm: the Breaking and Making of Images“.  The theme of iconicity could not be more relevant than right now, especially after the image of Northrop Frye this past week appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail.  Indeed, even David Naylor recognised this in his response to my letter on behalf of the conference committee.

In the coming years, the Centre has already confirmed that Franco Moretti will teach a seminar in the 2011-2012 academic session; and in the 2012-2013 session, we will welcome Judith Butler as Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory.  As you can see, I hope, the Centre has, through the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory, managed to invite some of the most exciting theorists of literature who constantly challenge, in Dean Gertler’s words, “what was revolutionary or radical in the 60s.”

The proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature puts the position of Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory in significant doubt.  Many of those who have accepted the invitation have explicitly done so because of the name attached to it.  Piero Boitani, for instance, writes in his letter to President Naylor: “I have the honour of having been Northrop Frye Professor at the Centre in 2006 (and of having met Northrop Frye during a conference devoted to him at this University), and must confess my astonishment at this announcement.”  Likewise, James Phelan in his letter says: “I am writing as a former Northrop Frye Visiting Professor at UT’s Centre for Comparative Literature to urge you to reconsider the plan to close the Centre in 2011. […] The Centre for Comparative Literature has long been a jewel in the lustrous crown of UT, because of the quality and diversity of both its faculty and its students. The reputation of the Centre—and its connection to Northrop Frye, a giant in the field of literary studies—made me feel deeply honored by the invitation to serve as a Visiting Professor.”

The loss of the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory is significant, and for Dean Gertler not to take this into consideration is distressing if not irresponsible.  Thanks to this Professorship, students at the University of Toronto have had the opportunity to meet, work with, and learn from some of the most significant figures in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and Literary Theory.  This is yet another loss that the Dean of Arts and Sciences has failed to consider in his plan to “disestablish” Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature.

CompLit Centre / Frye Sculpture Reminders

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Your daily reminder about the two issues we’re really pushing these days.

If you have not already signed the Save Complit Centre petition, you may do so here: http://www.petitiononline.com/complit/petition.html

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Edgar Degas

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“Ballet Dancers on the Stage”

Today is Edgar Degas‘ birthday (1834-1917).

Frye in notebook 31:

Aesthetics seems, as I say, to rest on the fallacy of idealized forms.  We idealize a slender, youthful naked woman’s body & call that beautiful, so when Degas claims for “beauty” a study of haggard ironing women or thick-arsed middle-aged matrons washing their hairy privates, we get horrified.  One of the functions of satire is to break down these external theories of beauty, which at bottom are always theories of property & decorum.  (CW 15, 91)

Frye in The Modern Century, “Improved Binoculars”:

Impressionism portrays, not a separated objective world that man contemplates, but a world of power and force and movement which is in man also, and emerges in the consciousness of the painter.  Monet painting Rouen cathedral in every aspect of light and shade, Renoir making the shapes in nature explode into vibrations of colour, Degas recording the poses of a ballet, are working in a world where objects have become events, and where time is a dimension of sense experience. (CW 11, 32-3)

Frye and Comparative Literature

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norrie

An editorial in the Globe and Mail for 17 July begins by claiming that “Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term ‘comparative literature,’ and it would be a mistake to gather, from a controversy at the University of Toronto about the merger into a larger entity of that university’s Centre for Comparative Literature, which he founded, that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution.”  I am not aware of anything Frye wrote that would affirm his attachment to the phrase, and whether he harbored some secret dislike of the phrase, we can never know.  But in the thirty volumes of his Collected Works there is never a hint that he was not attached to the term.  Far from it: his writings are replete with all manner of references to comparative literature, comparative morphology, comparative religion, comparative mythology, the morphology of comparative symbolism and other forms of comparative study.  To be sure, Frye’s presence is too large to be confined to any institution, such as the Centre for Comparative Literature.  But this does not gainsay his support of the institutions of comparative literature––its journals and yearbooks, its conferences and colloquia, and its professional organizations.  Frye published in the journal Comparative Literature and the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.  In 1958 he attended the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, where he delivered a paper.  He also presented papers at the eleventh and fifteenth triennial congresses of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (1969, Islamabad; 1981, Phoenix, AZ).  In 1974 he delivered a paper at the Comparative Literature Colloquium at the University of Toronto.  In 1978 he gave a lecture on “Comparative Literature: What Gets Compared?” at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  Frye may not have been attached to the term “comparative literature,” but he was clearly supportive of its institutions, including a number outside of the University of Toronto.

Aristotle says that the ability to discover likenesses in the mark of genius, and Frye, who was an analogical thinker of the first order, was forever discovering comparable conventions in mythology, literature, and religion.  “[E]very problem in literary criticism,” he wrote, “is a problem in comparative literature” (“Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas”).  In his Diaries he says that “an exhaustive comparative study of symbolism” is part of the job he must complete.

The editorial writer for the Globe and Mail says that what we should pay attention to are Frye’s books rather than to such institutions as the Centre for Comparative Literature.  One of those books, Fearful Symmentry, concludes with this appeal: “Blake’s doctrine of a single original language and religion implies that the similarities in ritual, myth and doctrine among all religions are more significant than their differences. It implies that a study of comparative religion, a morphology of myths, rituals and theologies, will lead us to a single visionary conception which the mind of man is trying to express, a vision of a created and fallen world which has been redeemed by a divine sacrifice and is proceeding to regeneration. In our day psychology and anthropology have worked great changes in our study of literature strongly suggestive of a development in this direction, and many of the symbols studied in the subconscious, the primitive and the hieratic minds are expanding into patterns of great comprehensiveness, the relevance of which to literary symbolism is not open to question.”  What better way to understand these symbolic patterns than in an program devoted to comparative study.  Frye then adds, “myths and dreams are crude art‑forms, blurred and dim visions, rough drafts of the more accurate work of the artist.  In time the communal myth precedes the individual one, but the latter focuses and clarifies the former, and when a work of art deals with a primitive myth, the essential meaning of that myth is not disguised, or sublimated, or refined, but revealed. A comparative study of dreams and rituals can lead us only to a vague and intuitive sense of the unity of the human mind; a comparative study of works of art should demonstrate it beyond conjecture.”  This is not the voice of one who wants to detach himself from comparative study.

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Jane Austen

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austen

On this date Jane Austen died (1775-1817).

Frye in notebook 27:

I’ve often noticed that great novelists, from Jane Austen to Henry James, are conventional to the point of prissiness.  There are many reasons for this: one is that novelists deal with people under ideology.  The ideology is usually shaped by both the author and the public.  Authors who are aware of another perspective (myth) are rare: Dickens is one.  (CW , 95)  LN

In “Framework and Assumption”:

At present there is a widespread impression that flexible conventions are a mark of serious writing.  The days are gone when Jane Austen could protest against the snob phrase “only a novel,” and point out that a “novel” could be on the same level of seriousness as any book of sermons.  But of course she had her conventions: there are no writers who are unconventional or beyond convention.  Sometimes a writer may seem unconventional because his readers are accustomed to different conventions and do not realize it, or else assume that what they are used to is the normal form of writing.  Such reactions to convention may vary from Samuel Johnson’s dictum, “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last,” to the claim of a twentieth-century formalist critic that Tristram Shandy was the most typical novel ever written.  (CW 18, 424-5)

In “The Context of Romance” in The Secular Scripture:

The sketches Jane Austen produced in her teens are nearly all burlesques of popular romantic formulas.  And yet, if we read Pride and Prejudice or Emma and ask the first question about it, which is What is Jane Austen doing? What is it that drives her pen from one corner of the page to the other? the answer is of course that she is telling a story.  The story is the soul of her writing, to use Aristotle’s metaphor [Poetics chap. 6], the end for which all the words are put down.  But if we concentrate on the shape of her stories, we are studying something that brings her much closer to her romantic colleagues, even to the writers of the horrid mysteries she parodied.  Her characters are believable, yet every so often we become aware of the tension between them and the outlines of the story into which they are obliged to fit.  This is particularly true of the endings, where the right men get married to the right women, although the inherent unlikelihood of these unions has been the main theme of the story.  All the adjustments are made with great skill, but the very skill shows that form and content are not quite the same thing: they are two things that have to be unified.  (ibid., 28)

“The Circus”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J53feA5e5SM

The Circus (1928) seems to be regarded as Chaplin’s “little-seen masterpiece,” so let’s see it.

Frye in “The Eternal Tramp” (1947):

Chaplin’s tramp is an American dramatic type, and Rip Van Winkle and Huck Finn are among his ancestors.  The tramp is a social misfit, not only because he is too small and awkward to engage in a muscular extroverted scramble, but because he does see the point of what society is doing or to what purpose it is it is expending all that energy.  He is not a parasite for he possesses some occult secret of inner freedom, and he is not a bum, for he will work hard enough, and still harder if a suitable motive turns up.  Such a motive occurs when he discovers someone still weaker than himself, an abandoned baby or a blind girl (students of Jung will recognize the “anima” in Chaplin), and then his tenderness drives him to extraordinary spasms of breadwinning.  But even his normal operations are grotesque enough, for in the very earnestness with which he tries so hard to play society’s game it is clear that he has got it all wrong, and when he is spurred to further efforts the grotesqueness reaches a kind of perverse inspiration.  The political overtones of this are purely anarchist — I have never understood the connecting of Communism with Chaplin — the anarchism of Jefferson and Thoreau which sees society as a community of personal relationships and not as a mechanical abstraction called a “state.”  But even so the tramp is isolated by his own capacity for freedom, and he has nothing to do with the typical “little guy” that every fool in the country has been slobbering over since Pearl Harbor.  (CW 11, 117)

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Centre for Comparative Literature Update

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Thanks to everyone; please be sure that you sign the petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/complit/petition.html

We are working very hard to ensure that the Centre for Comparative Literature stays at the University of Toronto and that this aspect of Frye’s many achievements is maintained.  If you have further thoughts and ideas, please share them with us: www.savecomplit.ca.

Please send a letter to the President of U of T, cc’ing the Provost, Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Chair of Comparative Literature, and the Save Comparative Literature Campaign (contact information: http://www.savecomplit.ca/Protest.html).  Stories like the one provided yesterday by Nicholas Graham are exactly what the University needs to be made aware of and, the Frye blog is doing an excellent job of publishing these.  Meanwhile, I am preparing a post on the History of the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory.

These links are cross-posted on our Facebook page under the Discussions tab.

Centre for Comparative Literature: Globe & Mail Editorial

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Globe Editorial

Northrop Frye’s greatest gift: his books

Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term “comparative literature,” and it would be a mistake to gather that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution.

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term “comparative literature,” and it would be a mistake to gather, from a controversy at the University of Toronto about the merger into a larger entity of that university’s Centre for Comparative Literature, which he founded, that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution.

Rather, Professor Frye left us his books, especially three of them.

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) is a strange book for a scholar starting out in his career; as has often been said, it is hard to tell whether one is reading views that Prof. Frye attributes to Blake, or Prof. Frye’s own; the reserved intellectual seems to have become fused with the prophetic poet.

The Great Code (1982) may have gone as far as anyone could in wrestling with the relationship between literature and the collection of Jewish and Christian writings often called “the Bible” – but the fact that its second part, Words with Power, took eight more years to appear (almost his last book) may have disclosed the unwieldiness of the premise of “the Bible as literature.”

Paradoxically, it is a book with an even more ambitious scope that is his best work. Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is a comprehensive account of literature as a whole. It might be accused – falsely – of being an arid, rigid classification system, but an English critic, Frank Kermode, was right when he wrote that this work of literary criticism had turned into literature.

That was an understatement. The intense shape that rules Anatomy of Criticism makes it a work of art, one with an overstrained hypothesis that is compelling and fruitful, a book of vision – it does not compare one national literature with another, though examples are drawn from far and wide.

Instead, Prof. Frye tried, as he put it, to “postulate a self-contained literary universe,” but toward the end of the Anatomy he took a new turn, finding that some prose writings which were intended to persuade, but were somehow literary – such as Milton’s Areopagitica and the Gettysburg Address – went beyond any such independent realm, so that the literary cosmos “expanded into a verbal universe,” in which literature is analogous to mathematics.

These are daring conceptions. Someone who has read Anatomy of Criticism cannot read any literary book in quite the same way thereafter. It is a great Canadian book – more of a heritage than any centre or department.

Link directly to this editorial here.