Tag Archives: St. Thomas

Frye, St. Thomas and Basketball

The first Toronto Raptor home game yesterday to start the  new NBA season ( and no NHL games in sight) reminded me of Northrop Frye’s thoughts on the game:

At Princeton I bought four books to keep me up to date with the mid-50s. Maritain’s, Malraux’s Voices of Silence, Auerbach’s Mimesis, and Curtius on medieval literature and Latin. At that time Curtius was the only one I could read with any real profit: Mimesis was all very well but I was working out an anti-mimetic theory of literature; Malraux said a few excellent things but was full of bullshit; Maritain, as I said, kept busting his skull against this preposterous “Art and Scholasticism” thesis, insisting that critical theory just had to come out of St. Thomas, who cared as much about the arts as I do about basketball league playoffs.

           (CW: Late Notebooks 1982-1990)