Adam Smith

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Adam Smith died on this date in 1790 (b. 1723).

Frye in “Varieties of Eighteenth Century Sensibility”:

We saw that Locke, like Descartes before him, based his philosophy on a philosophical man abstracted from his social context, in short, a theoretical primitive.  Also that Robinson Crusoe was an allegory of another abstract primitive, the economic man of capitalist theory, whose outlines are already fairly complete in Adam Smith.  These are the individual primitives at the core of Augustan culture.  But such primitives have voluntarily entered a social contract and a historical tradition.  For this attitude nothing in the area of culture can develop except on the other side of the social contract: literature and the other arts are rooted in a historical context in both time and space.  (CW 17, 33)

Northrop Frye Chair and the Centre for Comparative Literature

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Several years back, Paul Gooch, president of Victoria University presented a paper for discussion by the Academic Advisory Committee of the Victoria College Council (10 June 2008). It read in part, “Given Vic’s history, it is no accident that we have the Literary Studies undergraduate program here. Its students are first-rate, and many have gone on to graduate work in the area. Now that the graduate Centre for Comparative Literature is on the Vic campus, there can be fruitful collaboration between these two programs. To transform literary and comparative study, and to give leadership to the Northrop Frye Centre, the key is a senior joint appointment: a Northrop Frye Chair. It is a serious lack that Victoria does not have a chair in the name of Northrop Frye, and we will make this an important priority. The total cost is $3 million. Again, the Chair will be located in the Northrop Frye Centre.”

If Comparative Literature at the U of T is scuttled, it would appear that President Gooch’s vision for a Northrop Frye Chair, integrally related to the Centre for Comparative Literature, will have to be sacrificed, which would be another black eye for the U of T.

Nicholas Graham: Fruits and Legacy of the Centre for Comparative Literature

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In the 70s I took a course offered at the at the Centre under the direction of Prof. Graham Nicholson, entitled “Hermeneutics”.  We focused on Gadamer’s Truth and Method. It was that course that changed my life. I had come to Canada from Ireland where it was thought to be revolutionary to be reading the Canadian Lonergan and his book, Insight (1957). What the Centre allowed me to do was to explore the notion of “method” in Gadamer’s book and so expand the notion of “method”, which I had from Lonergan’s Method in Theology (1972)

This course offered by the Centre also inspired me to organize the York Literary Society and hold the international conference on “Hermeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons,” 1978,  at York University. The guest speakers included: Gadamer, Voegelin, Allan Bloom and Lonergan. The entire conference was video taped and is now available on DVD entiled, Voeglin at York ‘78 and is available from Amazon on line. Here you can see all the guest speakers in action, which is perfect for any classroom.

The Centre for Comparative Literature was also the inspiration and source for the founding of the York Literary Soeciety of which in those years I was president.  We made an appointment to visit Frye at his Massey College, office, to invite him to the conference. He asked to see our poster listing all the guests and speakers and after some time he said he regretted that he had to decline our invitation because of a schedule conflict, but added graciously that we had picked all the right guys.

So the course at the Centre  not only served as an excellent introduction to Gadamer, the founding of the York Literary Society,  but was also the catalyst for what my friends like to say was my “conversion” from Lonergan to a lifetime commitment to Frye and his writings and his legacy.

I am presently working on a book, Frye on Dante, with the chairman of the Italian Department at U of T, Domenico Pietropaulo, who was also a student of Prof. Graham Nicholson and a graduate of the Centre.

Quote of the Day

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“Derrida says that structuralism is wrong because you can’t get outside of a structure to examine it.  That’s a misleading metaphor: you enter a structure from the ‘inside’ & it becomes a part of you.  Only it doesn’t stop with an individual, but becomes a spiritual substance: it’s one’s infinite extension.”  (CW 5, 220)

Frye and Derrida

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As Bob Denham pointed out in his post the other day, Frye is sceptical of and occasionally hostile to post-structuralism generally and to Derrida specifically in the notebooks, but is more conciliatory in his published work and, as we saw yesterday, in interviews.  He even suggests the possibility of consensus from time to time.  In the introduction to Words with Power he observes that despite the variety of critical schools on the scene there is nevertheless “an underlying consensus of attitude” that could still “progress toward some unified comprehension” of literature (xviii).  What this underlying consensus of attitude might be is not entirely clear from anything Frye has to say about the matter, and it is of course easier to think of him and Derrida — who is obviously much on Frye’s mind in Words with Power — as irreconcilable.  The critical vocabulary each uses only heightens the sense of opposition: Frye considers metaphor a statement of identity, Derrida a relation of differences; Frye emphasizes presence, Derrida absence; and where Frye sees language leading to kerygma, or “proclamation,” Derrida sees aporia, or “impassable path.”

Frye and Derrida do, however, have at least one very important thing in common: both reveal the radically metaphorical condition of language.  Frye identifies metaphor and myth as two aspects of the same elementary phenomenon, myth being metaphor as narrative (mythos), and metaphor being myth as a pattern of verbal elements (dianoia).  In The Great Code he says that myth is “implicit metaphor” because it is made up of the juxtaposition of metaphors (59).  Derrida, for his part, in “White Mythology” observes that the “whole philosophical delimitation of metaphor is already constructed and worked upon by ‘metaphors’ … All the concepts which have played a part in the delimitation of metaphor always have an origin and a force which are themselves ‘metaphorical.'” (New Literary History 6, 174)

Why is it then that Derrida’s readings move in the direction of aporia and Frye’s in the direction of kerygma?  The main reason seems to be that Derrida, as suggested by the quote above, is a philosopher offering a critique on the “transcendental signifieds” of the “metaphysics of presence” that make up the assertions of truth which dominate the Western philosophical tradition.  Frye, by contrast, is a literary scholar whose critical principles arise from the inductive survey of literature as an imaginative verbal structure existing for its own sake.  The issue for Frye is not so much an obscure metaphysics of presence as it is the conspicuous presence of metaphor.  Where Derrida sees language reaching for an illusory transcendental signified, Frye perceives the principle of immanent signification which expresses archetypal human concerns whose “reality” is that they are recognizably human.  This distinction between a philosophical and a literary conception of language may provide a useful perspective on the direction literary criticism has taken since Derrida’s appearance on the North American scene in the late 1960s.  Relentlessly changing critical fashion has apparently consigned both Frye and Derrida to the sidelines for the time being, but these two figures nevertheless represent a great divide in literary criticism that was fully apparent about twenty-five years ago and left critical theory and practice the poorer for it.

Deconstruction may have been superseded as a go-to critical tool, but its legacy endures in the Derridian notions of absence, difference, marginality, privileging and totalization, which are hallmarks of the criticisms of gender, class, race and culture that steadily rose to prominence during the 1990s.  The result is that we’ve effectively returned to the state of affairs Frye complained about more than fifty years ago in the Polemical Introduction of Anatomy of Criticism: we are surrounded on all sides by what claims to be literary criticism but which nevertheless regards literature as an allegorical expression of ideological conceptions outside of it.  Literary Darwinism, anyone?  This situation is especially puzzling because we might have expected that Derrida’s influence would only encourage the continued deconstruction of ideology-based criticism.  But criticism, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and (about as reliably as Frye predicted) deconstruction quickly exhausted its potential and we are once again scrambling to figure out just what literature is really “about.”

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Centre for Comparative Literature Update

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Events seem to be moving quickly at this point, and we’ll keep you apprised as best we can.  Here, therefore, are the posts that have gone up so far on this issue:

Jonathan Allen discusses the proposal when it first became public two weeks ago here.

Globe & Mail story here.

Bob Denham’s letter to U of T President Naylor here.

Jonathan Allen describes the unique work the Centre does and provides futher links in support of it here.

Natalie Pendergast discusses the closure of the centre in the context of Canada’s wider “cultural famine” here.

Alvin Lee’s letter to the editor of the Globe & Mail here.

Michael Dolzani’s letter to President Naylor here.

Frye Sculpture: Vote Early, Vote Often!

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Just a reminder, folks, to vote daily for the Frye sculpture proposal here: http://www.refresheverything.ca/fryefestival

A reminder also that, as Dawn Arnold pointed out yesterday, YOU MUST BE SIGNED IN FIRST IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR VOTE REGISTER.  The site as it’s designed might fool you.  You can hit the vote button before signing in, but that is not actually a vote, it is just a cue to sign in.  So once you have signed in, hit the vote button a second time.  You’ll know you’ve successfully entered your vote because the vote button will then disappear till the next day, at which point you can vote again.

Remember also that Dawn and her colleagues at the Frye Festival are setting up a “voting team” for those who, because they’re at the cottage for a month or vacationing away, may not have access to the internet and therefore cannot vote.  If you would like to have the voting team vote on your behalf, you can contact Dawn at dawn@frye.ca

Finally, some tangible proof that your votes count.  Over the last 24 hours the Frye proposal has moved from 6th to 4th place.  That matters, because only the first and second place finishers will receive the $25,000 prize.  We’re moving tantalizing close to being one of those top two contenders.

Centre for Comparative Literature: Letter to President Naylor

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Here is my letter to University of Toronto president Naylor regarding the Centre for Comparative Literature

Dear President Naylor,

I write this on the 98th birthday of Canada’s most famous literary scholar, Northrop Frye.  It turns out, unfortunately, not to be a very happy birthday.  I have just learned, with considerable shock, of the plan to abolish the Centre for Comparative Literature, founded by Frye back in 1969.  I am writing, as an alumnus of the University of Toronto, as Frye’s former research assistant, and as one of the editors of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project published by the University of Toronto Press, to ask the University to reconsider its decision.

I will always be grateful to the University for taking a chance in 1978 and admitting a student from an unknown small college in Ohio.  Although my experience in English was completely positive, I was sometimes told by other graduate students that Comparative Literature was where the really exciting stuff was going on.  From everything that I have read, that Centre is as vigorous and important now as it was then, yet that has not been a factor in the decision. Yes, it is good that people are not going to lose their jobs, but there will be another kind of loss, for the kind of scholarship enabled by Comparative Literature will become impossible.

To non-academics, “comparative literature” may seem just one more arcane, narrow specialization.  If people do not even know what comparative literature is, it is understandable if they are not motivated to fund it.  Comp Lit is a centrifugal approach to literary studies that reverses the centripetal approach of a traditional English department.  What I mean is that, if you have a degree in English, your program restricts you to the literature of one language, and usually one country and historical period.  When you go on the job market, you peddle yourself as, say, “eighteenth-century British.”  The centripetal approach originated in the nineteenth century and remains valid; my own degree is in English.  However, it is next to impossible within such a framework to study English centrifugally, in terms of its connections with other languages, literatures, and cultures.  Yet those connections are crucial on three levels, linguistic, literary, and social.  As Frye pointed out in an address to the Canadian Comparative Literature Association in 1974, “In English literature, the major influences have been Latin, French, and Italian:  the influence of Old English on later developments has been minimal, as has that of medieval English apart from Chaucer.  The most familiar schemata of English poetry, rhyme and meter, were taken over from French.  And underlying a great deal of its fiction is a solid basis of popular literature, in folktale and ballad, which has travelled around the world without regard to linguistic barriers.”  To this we may add that when literary theory came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, there was great difficulty accommodating it in traditional English departments, because theory by definition asks general rather than specialized questions.  Frye’s own wide-ranging work was an influential example here.  In a world that is becoming more and more interconnected, and more and more obsessed by its own interconnectedness, it seems incomprehensible that the University would seek to abolish a discipline that studies exactly those connections.

I know that there are financial considerations involved.  Fifty-five million dollars is from one point of view a lot of money.  From another point of view, it is the bonuses of perhaps six CEOs.  The question is what our values are.  The University’s financial crisis has been largely created from outside itself.  We owe the global financial meltdown to people who did not study the humanities, and who consequently made foolish and destructive decisions out of blindness.  No, the study of literature does not necessarily lead to wisdom and sensitivity—but it is one of the few things that can enlarge our being if we are open to it.  That was Frye’s faith.  I truly hope the University may reverse its decision and find other ways to close the budget gap.

Respectfully,

Michael Dolzani

Professor of English

Chair, English Department, Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio