{"id":2957,"date":"2009-09-23T10:22:02","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T14:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=2957"},"modified":"2009-09-23T10:22:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T14:22:02","slug":"diagrams-and-paraeducation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/23\/diagrams-and-paraeducation\/","title":{"rendered":"Trevor Losh-Johnson: Diagrams and Paraeducation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"375px-Brain\"<\/p>\n

Some days ago, I sent out letters requesting information on professors who take an active, scholastic interest in Northrop Frye.\u00a0 I have a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and am looking for English graduate programs where I may incorporate Frye\u2019s diagrammatic method into specific research.\u00a0 Professor Adamson has kindly invited me to post something here about how my interest in Frye arose in part through working as a teacher with orthopedically handicapped students.<\/p>\n

My experience with such students is a product of my work as a substitute teacher in the greater Los Angeles area.\u00a0 It is difficult to obtain consistent teaching assignments now, especially considering our certain governor\u2019s propensity for terminating education funds.\u00a0 I have therefore found more work with less orthodox students, which is something to which my father has devoted his entire teaching career.<\/p>\n

My work in one of these classes coincided with some cursory reading of [Roman] Jakobson<\/a>].\u00a0 I was taken with Jakobson\u2019s model of metaphor and metonymy<\/a>, based on his work with language acquisition and aphasia<\/a>.\u00a0 While my interaction with students was not nearly as systematic, it greatly reinforced my sense of the metonymic workings of language acquisition.\u00a0 When a child is learning to read, an unknown word is often sounded-out, and then replaced with a known word that rhymes with those sounds- sip becomes ship, cot cat.\u00a0 I can recall a student named Elijah who had had clustered brain tumors as an infant.\u00a0 He would tell stories structured only on a series of metonymy- What did the monkeys do next?\u00a0 They attacked the car.\u00a0 What did they say?\u00a0 They ate me!\u00a0 What happened then?\u00a0 I fed them pizza and chicken!\u00a0 This of course does not do justice to Elijah\u2019s stories.\u00a0 They were products of an outrageous and brilliant associative process that defied logic, space, and mortality.\u00a0 While the origins of many of the images (a TV show?\u00a0 The expected vandals in his neighborhood?) were private and beyond communication, many of them were contiguous images, constantly displaced into the unfolding narrative.<\/p>\n

While I am not an expert in cognitive science<\/a>, or in cognitive approaches to narrative, my experience with Elijah certainly made me very receptive to Frye\u2019s distinction between centrifugal and centripetal forms of criticism.\u00a0 In Elijah\u2019s stories, the etiological and centrifugal origins of the plot and characters were subordinated to the centripetal patterns of the narrative.\u00a0 It was in the telling of those patterns that he found extreme communicative joy and liberation of imagination.\u00a0 Near the penultimate page of the Anatomy<\/em>, Frye writes, \u201cThe link between rhetoric and logic is \u2018doodle\u2019 or associative diagram, the expression of the conceptual by the spatial\u201d [335, Princeton edition].\u00a0 The only way of decoding what in Elijah\u2019s stories made him laugh was to follow the logic of \u201cbabble,\u201d to trace the imaginative puns and metonymic displacements of imagery.<\/p>\n

What had initially brought me into Comparative Literature was my interest in the revelatory symbol, and how one may understand the processes and degrees of symbolization at work in such varied writers as Spenser and Joyce.\u00a0 I now find most useful those dialectical oppositions that do not act as privileged dichotomies, but rather as polar continuums, allowing for maximum modulation and movement.\u00a0 What seems uniquely powerful about Frye\u2019s schemata is his capacity to set such integral distinctions while displacing them into his modal diagrams.\u00a0 His passage in the Anatomy<\/em> on babble and doodle, the radicals of melos\/opsis [270-81], is one of the few examples I know of a critic assimilating the rudimentary and associative nature of linguistic development into a broader, synoptic view of literature.\u00a0 A critic, whom I cannot remember any more, wrote that one drawback to Frye is that he does not establish an etiological theory of linguistics.\u00a0 The lack of a theory of such a priori<\/em> things (which may have something to do with negative capability<\/a>) in no way diminishes his achievement of establishing schematic first principles to literature; first principles that may be modified as suits the subject.<\/p>\n

The conceptual by the spatial, so totalizing in Frye, is a pragmatic and teachable method of scholarship which I hope to pursue in my graduate studies, wherever those shall be.\u00a0 The above does not sum up my reasons for wishing to undertake a study of Frye and his applications to modes of symbolism,\u00a0 but it does note the more humane and fundamental values I perceive in him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days ago, I sent out letters requesting information on professors who take an active, scholastic interest in Northrop Frye.\u00a0 I have a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and am looking for English graduate programs where I may incorporate Frye\u2019s diagrammatic method into specific research.\u00a0 Professor Adamson has kindly invited me to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[75,80,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","category-imagination","category-metaphor"],"yoast_head":"\nTrevor Losh-Johnson: Diagrams and Paraeducation - 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