{"id":18365,"date":"2010-11-08T11:17:08","date_gmt":"2010-11-08T16:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=18365"},"modified":"2010-11-08T11:17:08","modified_gmt":"2010-11-08T16:17:08","slug":"teaching-with-the-secular-scripture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/11\/08\/teaching-with-the-secular-scripture\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching with &#8220;The Secular Scripture&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/11\/secscript.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-18367\" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/11\/secscript.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"173\" height=\"254\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many readers of Frye have admitted they have a \u201cpreferred\u201d book, or one that influenced them more than any other.\u00a0 If I recall correctly, Michael Dolzani was most influenced by <em>Fearful Symmetry<\/em>; Bob Denham by <em>Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>; Michael Happy by <em>The Educated Imagination<\/em>; Joe Adamson by <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em>; and Eva Kushner by <em>The Critical Path<\/em>.\u00a0 Indeed, we all appear to have that one moment in reading Frye when suddenly it all made sense.\u00a0 In my own case, I had always thought it was <em>Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, but recently I have been thinking more and more about <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Over this past term I have had the great pleasure of teaching with Frye\u2019s <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em>, and my students have, for the most part I think, enjoyed engaging with it.\u00a0 However, we have also taken Frye out of his comfort zone.\u00a0 The course I teach considers \u201cRace and Ethnicity in Latin American Narrative\u201d (this is the official course title).\u00a0 But I tailored the course to address one of my own preferred area of study, romance novels. \u00a0Frye, not surprisingly, seems most comfortable when dealing with romance in its European context, but Latin American romance novels appear to be beyond his purview.<\/p>\n<p>When I began to speak about romance, I went for the obvious question: How many of you have read <em>Twilight<\/em> or Harlequin romances? &#8212; which, of course, many of them had.\u00a0 I then got them to read theoretical writings on the romance, particularly <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em>, which became our guide to romance.\u00a0 They also read articles or chapters by other theorists writing on romance, including writing on Latin America: Pamela Regis, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Doris Sommer, Jean Franco, and others (all of whom, interestingly enough, engage with Frye).<\/p>\n<p>Doris Sommer, for instance, remarked in her book <em>Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America<\/em>, that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Latin American elite wanted to modernize and to prosper, yes; but it wanted at the same time to retain the practically feudal privilege it had inherited from colonial times. Logically, a functioning aristocracy by any name might prefer to represent itself in the incorruptibly ideal terms that Northrop Frye finds characteristic of romance, \u2018the structural core of all fiction.\u2019 In Latin America\u2019s newly won bourgeois excess, Frye\u2019s heroic heroes, villainous villains, and beautiful heroines of romance are dislodged, unfixed. They cross class, gender, and racial stereotypes in ways unspeakable for European romance. Yet Frye\u2019s observations about masculine and feminine ideals here are to the point; they point backward to medieval quest-romances where victory meant restored fertility, the union of male and female heroes. (48-49)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I will admit here that I spent many pages of a now-discarded dissertation arguing against Doris Sommer\u2019s understanding of Frye.\u00a0 It is my belief that we can still work with Frye\u2019s theories of romance, and this is precisely what I have endeavoured to show in the course I am teaching.\u00a0 Frye did not read Latin American romances, but his theory if applicable to the study of world literature should translate to any given context.<\/p>\n<p>My students and I will have worked through four novels in our course when we conclude at the end of the month.\u00a0 We have found that Frye\u2019s archetypes do fit well into the study of romance in its canonical and popular senses.\u00a0 Could Frye have predicted some of the specifics of Latin American romance?\u00a0 No, he couldn\u2019t, not any more than he could address the latest manifestations of the genre in the twenty-first century.\u00a0 But, his model still holds true for the bulk of these romances.<\/p>\n<p>Frye\u2019s <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em> is, as with most of his books, very teachable and very user-friendly to the student of genre.\u00a0 My students are now preparing to write term papers, which must attend to <em>The Secular Scripture<\/em>, and I eagarly wait to read their ideas and their approaches to the Latin American Romance with the assistance of Frye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many readers of Frye have admitted they have a \u201cpreferred\u201d book, or one that influenced them more than any other.\u00a0 If I recall correctly, Michael Dolzani was most influenced by Fearful Symmetry; Bob Denham by Anatomy of Criticism; Michael Happy by The Educated Imagination; Joe Adamson by The Secular Scripture; and Eva Kushner by The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"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":[144,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-secular-society","category-symbol"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - 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