Teaching with Frye (1)

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perkin

With this post, I am inaugurating a series documenting a year of teaching English, in which I plan to highlight the part played by Northrop Frye’s ideas.  For me, Frye has always been more important for my teaching than for my scholarly research and critical writing.  I am beginning now, rather than in September, because I have already had to do some thinking about my courses for the next academic year, which were assigned late in 2009.  Entries for the department Handbook were due last week, and that means I had to decide on at least the main focus and the assigned textbooks for the courses that I will be teaching.  If I find I have enough to say, and the energy and commitment to keep it up, I will post in this series until the end of classes in April, 2011.  (Academic life certainly keeps you planning ahead!)

First, a few words of introduction.  Teachers often keep journals for personal use, and there have been numerous publications such as James Phelan’s Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor (1991), a detailed account of events both professional and personal in the life of a professor moving into the mid-career phase. More recently, many students, professors, deans and other administrators write blogs in which academic life is a major focus.  I was partly inspired to start this series by the example of Rohan Maitzen’s regular feature “This Week in My Classes” at her blog Novel Readings. I do not plan to write a detailed diary about my teaching, and I will not provide regular commentary on what goes on in the classroom.  The plan is to write about some of the decisions I make, especially about what texts I choose and how I teach them.  In so doing, I will consider in what ways and to what extent Frye is a vade mecum for my work as a university teacher of English.  I hope that these occasional journal entries will be of some interest and use to other teachers and to students in the discipline.

To set the scene, I teach at Saint Mary’s University, a former Jesuit college that is now a medium-sized public university.  (I once taught Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in a panelled classroom that had formerly been the Jesuits’ dining room).  We have an English department of 19 full-time members and offer a wide range of courses for a department of our size.  In 2010-2011, I am scheduled to teach a section of the first-year Introduction to Literature, the second-year survey course English Literary Traditions (6 hours), a third-year course on British literature from 1900-45, and an advanced course on the novels of the Brontë sisters.

In the survey course, along with the usual Norton anthology, I have decided to teach Measure for Measure, Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, and Hard Times.  These are all comfortable choices for me, and usually popular with the students.  The British course is a new one.  Thinking about my plans, I realize that they involve historical context and cultural studies to a fairly large extent, and also the dialectic between modernism and realism.  In spite of my love of at least some of the masterpieces of modernism, I have a fondness for the alternative poetic tradition that was championed by Philip Larkin, and for the English tradition of fictional realism that continued through the modernist period.  I will be teaching novels by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.  Frye’s discussion in the Anatomy of realism and symbolism as two opposing literary poles will be useful in mapping the literature of the first half of the twentieth century, along with David Lodge’s The Modes of Modern Writing.  The influence of Yeats and Eliot, and then of Auden, can also usefully be described in the terms set out by Harold Bloom in his books on poetic influence.  As for the Brontës, another new course – thank goodness I am on leave at the moment! – my entry for the Handbook does little more than list the books, noting that there were three sisters, not two, and that Charlotte wrote more than just Jane Eyre.  The psychological and the sociological will figure prominently in this course, I expect, as will a kind of comparative phenomenology of the sisters’ novels.  Of course, I will go back to Frye on romance, and I recall a number of entries on Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley in the notebooks.

That’s it for my first entry, and I imagine that I will add to this journal infrequently until late in the summer, when preparations for the academic year begin in earnest.

Archetype Spotting

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chickenroad6

Responding to Jonathan Allan and Clayton Chrusch

A footnote to “archetype spotting”: I think Frye refers to this procedure only once in his published writings––in his entry on “archetype” for the Harper Handbook to Literature. There he says,

Lycidas contains a reference to “that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe” [l. 106], the hyacinth, thought to have obtained red markings resembling the Greek word ai (“alas”), when Hyacinthus was accidentally killed by Apollo. Milton could of course just as easily have left out this line: the fact that he included it emphasizes the conventionalizing element in the poem, but criticism that takes account of archetypes is not mere “spotting” of such an image. The critical question concerns the context: what does such an image mean by being where it is? (CW 18, 361).

(In his 1963 essay “Literary Criticism” Frye does speak of theme spotting. [CW 27, 128])

But in his notebooks Frye refers to the practice of “archetype spotting on several occasions:

Some fallacies in the archetypal approach beside the historical one: the counting one (if there are a lot of archetypes it’s a good poem), the spotting one, & others. (CW 23, 111)

I need more theory to connect these examples: otherwise it’s just archetype-spotting. (CW 5, 129)

The primary area of communication is conscious: it isn’t a case of deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7]. If half the world uses an archetype & the other half doesn’t, it’s clear that it can mean something to that other half. The mystique of the unconscious has bedevilled myth critics. If you find fragments of a huge myth in primitive times, the process that put it all together is most likely to be in Shakespeare or Wagner or someone producing a waking dream for conscious minds [Plato, Sophist, 266c]. Such a writer would actualize what is potential in the archaic mythology. People resist this, because a poet’s consciousness may get self-conscious, turn coy or cute and go in for archetype-spotting. The poet (modern) is in the position of a medieval dog hitched to a mandrake root: it doesn’t matter so much if he goes mad, but the root he’s pulling is not just his own tail. (CW 5, 130)

The sense of unreality I feel about this book focused originally on the thinness of literary allusions: even things as deep in me as Shakespeare weren’t getting in. Then there was a sense of too much archetype-spotting, in contrast to real argument. That extended to too much kerygma spotting in 4. Finally I’m back to the Introduction, where I don’t even repeat my original confidence in the Bible as the only sacred book with a literary shape. Put that back in, you stupid bastard. [See WP, xviii, xx.] (CW 5, 369)

Many years ago young Woodberry [J.C. (Jack) Woodbury, a student at Toronto 1951–54], when a student of mine, spoke of the triviality of “archetype-spotting,” and I’ve always tried to recognize that. (CW 6, 564–5)

Every poem is “unique,” in the soft-headed phrase, and “archetype spotting” is a facile and futile procedure; but the traditions and conventions of poetry make a shape and a meaning. They move toward a future (emergence of primary concerns), and they expand into a wider present. (CW 6, 641)

The value of the book will be in this deductive expounding of the myth, not in spotting the archetypes around the compass. (CW 9, 263)

Here we see that Frye’s considers “archetype spotting” to be facile enterprise, and he warns against substituting it for argument. Having said this however, we need to remind ourselves that Frye did engage in a good bit of archetype spotting himself, especially when he was making notes on the texts he was reading. In Notebook 7, for example, he does engage in some rather extensive archetype spotting in Frobenius, Silberer, and Jung (CW 23, 8–15). The same is true of his Notes on Romance (in the weblog Library). Finally, the margins of the books in Frye’s personal library are filled with hundreds of notations about this or that archetype. A sample of these can be found in “Annotations in Frye’s Books,” also in the weblog Library. To speak about an archetype in a literary or any other work, you must of course first be able to spot it. Frye’s point is that if you do only this, then you’ve not made much of a contribution to critical understanding. It’s a procedure that can produce trivial observations, if they are not seen in some wider context of function, structure, and meaning.

Jean O’Grady: Re-Valuing Value

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ogrady

This is Jean O’Grady’s first post — and the first paper to be added to our new Frye Festival Archive in the Frye Journal.  Jean is the associate editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, published by University of Toronto Press.  She gave this paper at the Frye Festival in Moncton in 2007. An expanded version of it appears in Northrop Frye: New Directions From Old, published by University of Ottawa Press.

Sir Edward Elgar, composer of sublime symphonies, concertos, and choral works, found it infuriating to be almost universally identified as the author of the Pomp and Circumstance marches. I suspect that Frye found it similarly irksome, after the publication of his Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, to be known, not for having mightily mapped the literary universe, but as the critic who said that critics shouldn’t make value judgments. Of course he had made it clear that he was talking about the academic critic, the theorist of literature, and not the reviewer in the local newspaper, but still his assertion had been found highly controversial. The polemical introduction to the Anatomy had actually made two points which kept coming back to haunt Frye: first, that criticism was, or should be, a science; and second, that the critic’s function was not to say whether a work of literature was good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, but to tell us what sort of work it was. The two points are in fact related, since Frye was trying to move away from the stereotype of the critic as a gifted amateur of exquisite discrimination who journeyed among the masterpieces, poking disdainfully at the second-rate with his gold cane. Instead, he proposed a survey of all the literature that has been written, highbrow or popular, in fashion or out of fashion, in order to map out its genres, types, and archetypes: this was a structure of knowledge that, just like the sciences and social sciences, could be taught and that each scholar could help to build up. As Frye said in The Well-Tempered Critic, “Without the possibility of criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture . . . would be forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and the resentful unrefined” (136).

I first read the Anatomy as a student, in 1962, and I can hardly tell you how exciting and liberating this notion was, along of course with the Anatomy‘s actual demonstration of archetypal patterns, of plot shapes that repeated themselves from Spenser to Harlequin romances, and of the unsuspected interrelations among works. Literature was so much richer and more fascinating when one could start to make connections rather than worrying about one’s possibly bad taste! The book opened up wide vistas of intellectual adventure in my chosen field, and made me feel like a participant in and contributor to a glorious endeavour.

The inclusiveness of the Anatomy, its openness to works of popular literature or of dubious morality, should surely endear Frye to the various types of postmodernist, feminist, or postcolonial critics, who complain that the dominant group or class has defined a “canon” that unfairly excludes some works or makes them marginal. Frye was precisely against singling out what he called a “selected tradition” of great works, which would inevitably turn out to have been written by dead white males. No narrow moral criteria apply in the Anatomy, which contends that “morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, . . . all are equally elements of a liberal education” (14). As Frye told Imre Salusinsky in an interview, “The real, genuine advance in criticism came when every work of literature, regardless of its merit, was seen to be a document of potential interest, or value, or insight into the culture of the age”.

Value, as Frye expressed it in this early stage, resides in literature as a whole. As we read, we absorb an imaginative pattern of apocalyptic or demonic imagery and of narratives that fall into the four basic types of comedy, tragedy, romance, or irony; each individual poem or work helps to fill in or reinforce the overall pattern. As Frye put it in The Educated Imagination, “Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time” (39). This total pattern, “the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell” (EI, 44), is what Frye calls “the revelation of man to man”. Such a verbal universe, built up equally by Biblical epics and the most run-of-the-mill adventure stories, provides a model or goal for humankind’s work, thus giving literature a vital role in the building up of civilization.

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Frye’s Valentines

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valentines_day

Here are some Valentine references culled from various sources.

[A verse to an unknown lover]

BE MY ♥

I will be your valentine.
Will you be my concubine?
On ambrosia let us dine,
With a glass of sparkling wine.
Let us now our limbs entwine.
I’ll be prone and you supine,
So our two hearts will align.
You’ll be mine, and I’ll be thine.
Cupid’s arrow is our sign
In our lover’s sacred shrine.
The world will never us malign:
Lover, you are all divine.

Just kidding.

– – –

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New Additions to the Denham Library

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chapel windows

Victoria College Chapel

Bob Denham has provided us with two new additions to the Denham Library.

The first is class notes for Frye’s course on Milton, 1953 – 1954.  This is the eighth set of class notes to be added to the Library.  Bob jokes that soon enough Frye scholars will in effect be able to attend Frye’s classes without registering or paying tuition.

The second is a previously unpublished set of notes on the Victoria College chapel windows, perhaps intended for a lecture or a sermon.  This is most definitely very rare Frygiana.  Take a look.

We are also very pleased to tell you that our new administrator, Clayton Chrusch, is slowly but surely making his way through the Denham Library collection to correct minor formatting problems that arise when translating from one text software to another.

Frye and Heidegger: A Response to Nicholas Graham

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Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

In response to Nicholas Graham’s posts here and here

Aligning Frye’ conception of culture with such anti-humanistic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic thinkers as Strauss, Voeglin, Lonergan, and Heidegger, is highly questionable and requires further elaboration to be credible. Frye’s conception of the function of literature and criticism in society is antithetical to the conservative and reactionary views of any of these thinkers, all of whom argued for a transcendental norm against which any merely human creative or imaginative power is to be invidiously measured. They are all anxious defenders of an authoritarian and anti-democratic myth of concern against the myth of freedom–proponents of the great butter-slide theory of Western culture, in which it all runs downhill after Plato or Aquinas.

Frye believed strongly that the function of literature lay in its social vision, the idea of a free society, even if that idea “can never be formulated, much less established as a society.” Frye adopted and gave added strength throughout his writings to Arnold’s

axiom that ‘culture seeks to do away with classes.’ The ethical purpose of a liberal educaton is to liberate, which con only mean to make one capable of conceiving of society as free, classless, and urbane . . . No discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the pariticpation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of complete and classless civilization (348).

It is true that Frye makes use of a number of concepts or formulations of Heidegger’s (poetry as dwelling, language uses man), but the use is selective and limited and the idea in question invariably undergoes a transmutation that emancipates the idea from Heidegger’s philosophy and makes it Frye’s. He does the same with some of Derrida’s terms, and with countless other thinkers and writers with whom he otherwise shares very little. In his social and political views, the one thinker he does share a good deal with is the great John Stuart Mill. For Frye, literature and imaginative culture as a whole accomplish what Mill envisioned as necessary in the progress to a fully mature society: they liberalize, democratize, individualize. This is about as far away from Heidegger as one can get. For Heidegger, human beings are simply the historical medium of consciousness through which Being reveals or conceals itself. It was Heidgger’s contempt for modernity and for democratic and liberal views that led him to the delusion–if it were not simple opportunism–that the Nazis were Germany’s, and das Sein‘s, salvation from the horrors of liberal democracy. For a good discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the Nazis, see the Wikipedia article “Heidegger and Nazism.”

Archetype vs Convention

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archetype

Responding to Jonathan Allan

Thank you so much for your post, Jonathan.

This may be tangential to your intent, but this post revealed to me why I am wrong to insist so strongly on the word convention instead of archetype. Literature and the verbal imagination develop not in a single society but in many relatively or absolutely separate societies at once. Conventions are rooted in their culture of origin and thus bound to their society and to connecting societies, but archetypes are rooted in the nature of human beings and the human verbal imagination, and therefore are not restricted by social boundaries. Archetypes certainly become conventions, but they clearly have roots that are deeper than the particularity of the society they manifest in.

I suppose the same could be said for many kinds of conventions, not just literary. It is certainly possible to have purely arbitrary conventions (like weights and measures), but human nature often plays a role in forming conventions. And so it is not just that archetypes often become literary conventions, but that even non-literary conventions are, in a sense, archetypal.

Is it possible that the claim that literature is archetypal boils down to the claim that the conventions of literature are rooted in human nature? I suppose Frye would complain that such a formulation reduces literature to something non-literary. Perhaps what you need to add is the recognition that human nature is not static but actually develops and grows in contact with civilization and culture, so that there is a symbiotic relationship that develops between human nature and the verbal imagination, both growing together. And so the archetypal nature of literature is really its permanent bilateral relationship with human nature.

In any case, I think we should actually encourage archetype spotting. Obviously such projects can’t be the end of criticism, but they are a quantum leap ahead of archetype ignoring.