{"id":13975,"date":"2010-07-17T08:41:14","date_gmt":"2010-07-17T12:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=13975"},"modified":"2010-07-17T08:41:14","modified_gmt":"2010-07-17T12:41:14","slug":"centre-for-comparative-literature-globe-mail-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/07\/17\/centre-for-comparative-literature-globe-mail-editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"Centre for Comparative Literature: Globe & Mail Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"gam_flag\"<\/a><\/h4>\n

Globe Editorial<\/h4>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s greatest gift: his books<\/h3>\n

Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term \u201ccomparative literature,\u201d and it would be a mistake to gather that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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N<\/span>orthrop Frye was not much attached to the term \u201ccomparative literature,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Rather, Professor Frye left us his books, especially three of them.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe Bible\u201d \u2013 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 \u201cthe Bible as literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 falsely \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 it does not compare one national literature with another, though examples are drawn from far and wide.<\/p>\n

Instead, Prof. Frye tried, as he put it, to \u201cpostulate a self-contained literary universe,\u201d 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 \u2013 such as Milton’s Areopagitica and the Gettysburg Address \u2013 went beyond any such independent realm, so that the literary cosmos \u201cexpanded into a verbal universe,\u201d in which literature is analogous to mathematics.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 more of a heritage than any centre or department.<\/p>\n

Link directly to this editorial here<\/a>.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Globe Editorial Northrop Frye\u2019s greatest gift: his books Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term \u201ccomparative literature,\u201d 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 \u201ccomparative literature,\u201d and it would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-centre-for-comparative-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nCentre for Comparative Literature: Globe & Mail Editorial - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/07\/17\/centre-for-comparative-literature-globe-mail-editorial\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Centre for Comparative Literature: Globe & Mail Editorial - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Globe Editorial Northrop Frye\u2019s greatest gift: his books Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term \u201ccomparative literature,\u201d and it would be a mistake to gather that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution. 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