{"id":30393,"date":"2012-09-04T11:34:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=30393"},"modified":"2012-09-04T11:34:34","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:34:34","slug":"new-book-on-frye-michael-sindings-body-of-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2012\/09\/04\/new-book-on-frye-michael-sindings-body-of-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"New Book on Frye: Michael Sinding’s Body of Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michael Sinding’s new book on Frye, <\/strong><\/em>Body of Vision: Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Mind<\/strong>, is forthcoming in January. Michael is Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Language and Communication at the Vrije Universteit Amsterdam; this fall he is presenting papers on Frye at conferences in Budapest and Toronto. Here is a blurb from the flyer for the book:<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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Body of Vision<\/em> (University of Toronto Press, 2013) reconsiders fundamentals of Northrop Frye\u2019s theories of meaning, literature, and culture in the light of related current approaches that have taken his insights in very different directions. It develops branches of Frye\u2019s thinking by proposing partial syntheses of them with cognitive poetics and with contextualist theories of cultural history and ideology, seeking to retain the best of all worlds. Case studies of texts and genres work out promising connections in detail.Three related aspects of Frye\u2019s work are explored: meaning and thought, culture and society, and literary history. Chapter 1 connects Frye\u2019s theory of meaning and poetic metaphor with those developed in cognitive linguistics and poetics by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner. Chapter 2 applies this synthesis to the metaphoric world of Dante\u2019s *Divine Comedy*. Chapter 3 links Frye\u2019s approach to the relations among literature, society, and ideology with that of cultural theorists Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall, and with Lakoff\u2019s cognitive account of metaphor and framing in political thought and discourse. It characterizes the contrasting conservative and liberal worldviews represented in Hobbes\u2019s Leviathan and Rousseau\u2019s Social Contract. Chapter 4 considers relations between general principles of literary cognition and particulars of texts and contexts in history. Frye\u2019s approach is compared with Patrick Colm Hogan\u2019s study ofemotional and literary universals, and with the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Adrian Montrose. The pastoral is examined as a genre that appears decidedly dated in many ways, yet is still capable of communicating powerfully.<\/div>\n
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Michael and the University of Toronto Press have kindly given us permission to post an excerpt. Here is the first chapter:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n


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\u00a0Cognition, Meaning and Culture <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSystems That Won\u2019t Quite Do\u201d: Schematic Structure in Literary Metaphor, Myth, and Models <\/strong><\/p>\n

Michael Sinding<\/p>\n

\u00a0I do not think of the Anatomy<\/em> as primarily systematic: I think of it rather as schematic. The reason it is schematic is that poetic thinking is schematic. The structure of images that C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image<\/em> calls \u201cthe Model\u201d was a projected schematic construct which provided the main organization for literature down to the Renaissance: it modulated into less projected forms after Newton\u2019s time, but it did not lose its central place in literature.<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye, \u201cReflections in a Mirror,\u201d 1966<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our first imaginary conversation proposes to reveal important parallels between Frye\u2019s literary and cultural theory, on the one hand, and cognitive literary studies, on the other, which make it worthwhile to look at these theories in each others\u2019 lights, so to speak. The most important parallels concern the relation of metaphors to one another and to the larger mental models giving structure to culture, literature, philosophy, science, and moral and political worldviews and ideology. Determining their points of agreement and divergence can indicate how they may be developed in concert, as supplementing, extending, and correcting one another\u2019s claims and arguments about common concerns. From this vantage, I see Frye as elaborating some of the broader cultural implications of the conceptual approach to meaning, and the conceptual party as able to support certain versions of Frye\u2019s theses about literature and culture by articulating the linguistic and conceptual details. (Putting them together, as I\u2019ve suggested, we get more of the forest and more of the trees than we could with either one alone.) After a brief overview of some common aims, principles, and background, this chapter turns to detailed discussions of the former, then the latter. The ultimate aim is to describe in detail the possible forms of coherence across metaphors and their imagistic structures. This will prepare the ground for a study of metaphoric coherence in what Frye calls \u201cliterary cosmologies\u201d, which are metaphoric storyworlds. To clarify, storyworlds, as David Herman defines them, are \u201cmental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate [. . .] as they work to comprehend a narrative\u201d (Story Logic<\/em> 5). Literary cosmologies are metaphoric storyworlds in that they are structured by compounds of metaphors (i.e. many aspects of the storyworld are metaphorical, and as they interact with one another, the metaphors combine). The next chapter will use this chapter\u2019s analysis to examine the metaphoric coherence of the cosmology of Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em>. The chapters following connect the cosmology to social mythology and to literary history.<\/p>\n

The approach to figurative language and thought pioneered by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark Turner caught imaginations across the world, and I think it\u2019s no exaggeration to call it revolutionary. At present it constitutes a flourishing research program that continues to invigorate many fields. It has roots in cognitive linguistics, which is also highly interdisciplinary, and claims a very broad scope, examining metaphor, figures, and narrative in many areas, including literature, philosophy, religion, anthropology, politics, mathematics, and particularly worldview and common sense. As with Frye, there is an impressive interdisciplinarity of sources and influences. Cognitive literary studies encompasses cognitive poetics, narratology, rhetoric, reader response, and more. Indeed, it may draw on any of the fields associated with cognitive science\u2014not only linguistics but cognitive psychology, anthropology, and various divisions of neuroscience.<\/p>\n

In fact, reception of the two theories is also comparable and can lead us into some of their common aims and assumptions. Early views of Frye tend toward hagiography or hatchet job, and the gamut remains narrow and polarized. In short, while many find Frye\u2019s ingenious analyses, analogies, synopses and pattern perception highly informative, others find them over-ingenious and over-idealized. Discounting genial praise, general abuse, and frequent misunderstanding, Hamilton sees in serious critiques of Frye chiefly a distrust of his systematicity, a concern that abstraction away from contextualized particulars can be flattening of textual complexity and literary experience, and rejection of his totalizing ambitions (Anatomy<\/em> 4-6). Dolzani notes the standard complaint of reductivism, and says that during the fifties and sixties Frye was attacked for being unscientific\u2014not proving his patterns empirically there\u2014and during the seventies and eighties for misinterpreting empirical findings\u2014we easily find patterns because we are conditioned to do so. In the nineties sociological critique asks who decides on and interprets universals, and on what authority? (\u201cWrestling\u201d 98). Cognitive critics are also oriented towards form and structure, general principles, and universals, and Lakoff and Turner and others have also been accused, in similar terms, of overstating their claims and simplifying their topics: reducing specifics to abstractions, flattening meaning and emotion, downplaying cultural and historical context, insufficiently distinguishing literal from figurative.<\/p>\n

Without going into great detail, we can fashion one response for both: reductionism need not follow. Neither theory purports to explain everything about particular texts. Both address a clear need for larger perspectives by creating frameworks capable of bringing together arrays of related phenomena. Fine-grained facts may be the most immediately evident to the senses, especially with art, which trains and rewards heightened sensitivity to nuance. But they are not the only facts, and they do not vitiate the need to address those of larger, coarser grain. Indeed, if Frye and the conceptual party are right about the importance of conceptual systematicity (or schematicity) in the creation of resonance<\/em> for myth and metaphor, then their theories offer an explanation for some of the most powerful, and most specifically artistic effects of literature\u2014an explanation of a kind that is unavailable to the scrutineer of surfaces. As Frye puts it, \u201cMany who consider the structure of my view of literature repellent find useful parenthetic insights in me, but the insights would not be there unless the structure were there too\u201d (\u201cReflections\u201d 145).<\/p>\n

The business I envision for this chapter, then, is using Frye\u2019s literary theory to conjoin two kinds of \u201ccognitive criticism\u201d deliberately oriented to explanations that make essential but not greedily reductive use of cognitive research. On the one hand there is the kind represented by Mark Turner (Reading<\/em>), David Bordwell (\u201cCase\u201d, \u201cContemporary\u201d) and No\u00ebl Carroll (\u201cProspects\u201d), who demur from both isolated textual \u201creadings\u201d and sweeping self-ratifying annexations of texts and theories by \u201cgrand theory\u201d, to focus on \u201cmiddle-level\u201d topics and problems specific to the arts. These critics aim to describe the commonplace background knowledge of readers and viewers, and explain how it underpins readers\u2019 experience and interpretation of texts and films. On the other hand, there is the kind represented by Reuven Tsur, who distinguishes cognitive poetics from cognitive linguistics by the former\u2019s focus on explaining specifically poetic \u201ceffects\u201d (\u201cAspects\u201d 279-81). Yeshayahu Shen (\u201cCognitive Constraints\u201d, \u201cMetaphor\u201d) makes a related distinction between approaches to the nature of poetic (especially figurative) structures. Against the various approaches that highlight the creativity and novelty of poetic discourse, his approach highlights the need of such discourse to conform to cognitive constraints, in order to be communicable. Poetic discourse must both conform to, and interfere with, cognitive processes (cf. Semino and Steen). Indeed, for Ray Gibbs Jr. the \u201cparadox of metaphor\u201d everywhere, not just in literature, is that it is \u201ccreative, novel, culturally sensitive, and allows us to transcend the mundane while also being rooted in pervasive patterns of bodily experience common to all people\u201d (\u201cMetaphor\u201d 5). As I hope to show, Frye\u2019s approach examines the special structures and processes specific to literature, but he does so by comparing and contrasting that literary cognition with non-literary cognition.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s work has a \u201cgrand theory\u201d way of evoking a vast horizon of implication. Such ambition has an honourable pedigree. In the early part of his career, a number of influential scholars, under the aegis of anthropology and comparative religion, were studying very large-scale symbolic cultural models, including cosmologies, that integrated myths, symbols, and rituals. Frye\u2019s particular focus was on \u201cthe identity of mythology and literature, and the way in which the structures of myth, along with those of folktale, legend and related genres, continue to form the structures of literature\u201d (WP xii). Frye\u2019s aim of describing what Jung called the \u201cgrammar of literary symbolism,\u201d ultimately deriving from Giambattista Vico, was shared by Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell and others, and influenced by Frazer, Spengler, and Cassirer. Such a grammar would be the basis of all artistic thought and expression. For some, it shaped culture more generally, including philosophy, science, and everyday life. Frye thought of this search for a \u201ccoordinating principle\u201d for criticism as seeking something analogous to the principle of evolution in biology, which, beginning with the \u201cassumption of total coherence\u201d in the subject could then treat wholes (species) as parts of individuals (humans \/ works) (Salusinszky, \u201cTowards\u201d 237). The totality that was first conceived as a \u201clanguage of poetry\u201d or \u201cgrammar\u201d of symbolism later developed into an \u201corder of words\u201d, then a verbal or literary universe (233).<\/p>\n

Frye struggled all his life to work out a \u201ctotal form\u201d of such a grammar (Dolzani, \u201cIntroduction\u201d xix). Total forms are in questionable taste at the moment. I will take a tangential approach to them, rather than arguing directly about them. Occupying a middle level, I will argue that cultural cognitive models exist that are larger, more plentiful and more coherent than has yet been recognized, that they are grounded in natural perceptual and conceptual structures, and that they have important roles in cultural thought and experience. The focus shifts to the principles behind specific total forms, as some of Frye\u2019s reflections do:<\/p>\n

All my critical career has been haunted by the possibility of working out a schematology, i.e., a grammar of poetic language. I don\u2019t mean here just the stuff in FS [Fearful Symmetry<\/em>] & AC [Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>] & elsewhere, but the kind of diagrammatic basis of poetry that haunts the occultists & others. Whenever I finish a big job I seem to return to this . . . In other words, once again I have a hope of reviving or making precise and detailed suggestions about\u2014let\u2019s say the diagrammatic basis of schematology. (NB12, 335, 1968-70, qtd. in Dolzani, \u201cBook of the Dead\u201d 23)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are analogies of Frye\u2019s analogies in statements of the aims and ambitions of cognitive linguistics. Lakoff, comparing metaphoric dreaming to speech, writes, \u201cour metaphor system might be seen as part of a \u2018grammar of the unconscious\u2019\u2014a set of fixed, general principles that permit an open-ended range of possible dreams that are constructed dynamically in accordance with fixed principles\u201d (\u201cHow Unconscious\u201d). Fauconnier and Turner compare their theory of thought as \u201cconceptual blending and integration\u201d with evolutionary theory, making a point of denying its reductiveness while arguing for its value in connecting presently disparate studies of universal human cognition and cultural particulars (e.g. qualitative social science with interpretive social science, in Turner, Cognitive Dimensions<\/em> 11-12, 56-59; cf. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think<\/em> 91). Moreover, while Frye discusses the relation of metaphor to mathematics (AC 350-54), today\u2019s cognitive theorists have also found a major role for metaphor and other imaginative operations in the history and understanding of mathematics (Lakoff and N\u00fa\u00f1ez, Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think<\/em>).<\/p>\n

To turn to somewhat more specific parallel aims and principles, the aim of describing and explaining meaning by describing and explaining \u201cstructure\u201d in language and literature is central to both Frye and the conceptual party, and it also has a long history of scholarly attention. Frye\u2019s structural-totality approach reacted against both an extreme documentary historicism that dissolved individual texts in a welter of \u201cobjective\u201d contextual detail, and the extreme ahistoricism of New Critical indifference to text-extrinsic details. His postulates are also idiosyncratic relative to the structuralist and post-structuralist tenets dominant through his later career, but I think this helped him avoid the excesses that contributed to their eclipses. Frye acknowledges an affinity with structuralism, the movement that came to analyze so many fields according to an idea of \u201ca kind of structural unconscious,\u201d distinct from subjectivity and intention, that governs semiological expressions of all kinds (Ricoeur, Rule<\/em> 319). He sympathized with the \u201cdirection\u201d of structuralism towards interrelating different subjects non-imperialistically (SM x), but did not follow its specific principles. He speaks of structures of narrative and imagery rather than of conceptual binary oppositions. As a result, he did not contract the problems that plagued structuralist linguistics and its posterity, and was unaffected by its eclipse under the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics.<\/p>\n

In a related way, Fauconnier and Turner see the twenty-first century as the \u201cage of the triumph of form\u201d in \u201cmathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences\u201d, in which knowledge reduces to \u201ca matter of essential formal structures and their transformations\u201d (The Way We Think<\/em> 3). But form is not substance, and they seek \u201cthe human power to construct meaning\u201d that lies behind form, in the conceptual processes that constitute identity, integration, and imagination (6). Some cognitive critics make efforts to recuperate in a cognitive vein the insights of earlier critics who examined the role of literary structure and form in relation to knowledge and experience. For example, both Spolsky (\u201cCognitive Literary\u201d) and Steen and Gavins admire Culler\u2019s efforts to characterize \u201cliterary competence\u201d in structuralist terms, and the latter allude to precedents in Czech Structuralism, Russian Formalism, and semiotics (5-8). Indeed, while Culler\u2019s notion of \u201cliterary competence\u201d in Structuralist Poetics<\/em> is based on an analogy with Chomsky\u2019s approach to \u201clinguistic competence\u201d\u2014i.e. the ability to understand an unlimited number of grammatically correct sentences (any number of literary texts, on Culler\u2019s analogy)\u2014his account of that competence as consisting in knowledge of literary conventions, and his characterization of those conventions, are strongly influenced by Frye. We might recall as well that Frye\u2019s original title for the Anatomy<\/em> was Structural Poetics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Going farther back, both Frygean and cognitive poetics have significant family resemblances to Aristotle\u2019s Rhetoric<\/em> and his Poetics<\/em>, with their analytical focus on the relation of the structure of narrative plots to audience knowledge and response. Speaking of the cognitive study of art, language, and literature in relation to rhetoric, Turner declares that \u201cif Aristotle were alive today he would be studying this research and revising his work accordingly\u201d (\u201cCognitive Study\u201d 10). Ellen Spolsky places Frye, along with other major scholars of structure, in this tradition:<\/p>\n

The claim that the ultimate goal of literary theory is to tell a story about the human mind can be traced back to Aristotle and, in modern criticism, to Northrop Frye. In his Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> (1957), Frye claimed that the generic forms of literary works have a psychological reality that is separable from what he dismissed as \u2018\u2018the history of taste.\u2019\u2019 Literature, he assumed, displays the structure of the mind, the same claim Claude Levi-Strauss had made for the material culture of Brazilian peoples in Tristes Tropiques <\/em>(1955) and that Noam Chomsky was making for syntax in Syntactic Structures<\/em> (1957). Whatever empirical data are studied, syntax or poems, face painting or pottery, the goal is ideologically humanist: the proper study of humankind is the human mind. (\u201cDarwin and Derrida\u201d 47)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Accordingly, the present study also moves along these lines, participating in such efforts at recuperation in a cognitive key of critics with formalist-structuralist leanings. This offers something against the charge that cognitive approaches downplay their historical roots and affiliations (Richardson and Steen accept this critique from Adler and Gross) by noting possible common sources for ideas about spatial structure in metaphor and its bodily basis. And it will help bring into focus consensus, contention, and yet-uncharted regions of contact between Frye and cognitive poeticians.<\/p>\n

As for post-structuralism, Hamilton perhaps overstates in saying that \u201cPost-structuralism seems inevitably post-Frye: he appears to belong to an earlier tradition, the assumptions, premises, and values of which have become alien\u201d (Anatomy<\/em> 7). It is true that Frye has been rebuked for sitting out the apotheosis of Theory. Leroy Searle supplies a glaring instance. He says, bizarrely, that \u201cthe way that theory [Frye\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>] was put together, while it now seems parochial, relied almost exclusively on work done in departments of literature\u201d (\u201cAfterword\u201d 856). And then:<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s recommendation of \u201cna\u00efve induction,\u201d to try to find in literature alone an account of literary meaning, now appears not only na\u00efve but precritical. One simply cannot proceed in ignorance of logic and philosophy, innocent of linguistics, isolated from intellectual history and anthropological learning and reflection, just as one cannot presume to be immune to practical and political considerations in reading and writing of any form. (858)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Searle may not be accusing Frye of ignorance of philosophy, linguistics, intellectual history, and anthropology (it is hard to imagine how anyone who has read Frye could lay this charge), but only arguing that readers (presumably only professional readers) need these things to analyze literary meaning. In any case, there is considerable irony in the fact that, in sticking with his simple categories of myth and metaphor, Frye has turned out to be more prescient about meaning than those who pushed the assumptions of Saussurean structuralism into all the post-structuralist paradoxes of sliding and disintegrating signification. (We will examine the connections and contrasts among a spectrum of these views of thought and meaning in more detail in later chapters.)<\/p>\n

There may then be a further irony in an attempt to relate those simple categories to a movement in cognitive science and linguistics, especially given the cautions issued earlier about the pitfalls of connecting disciplines. But cognitive science has repeatedly found that what is simple for humans in their everyday lives can turn out, at lower levels of analysis, to be enormously complex. Speaking is easy for us; language is very complex. Seeing things is easy for us; vision is very complex. Moving across a room is easy for us, but such movement is very complex. As long as we are careful about how we connect myth and metaphor with the sciences of mind, the simple with the complex, we may be rewarded with clarification of both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The cognitive critics I will be considering in this chapter share still more specific similarities of aims, assumptions, and principles with Frye. Like Frye, the conceptual party generally seeks to disclose how conventional metaphors and models underlie thought, language, and literature. The conceptual theory of metaphor was born in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson\u2019s book Metaphors We Live By<\/em> (1980). It soon developed rapidly in several directions. Johnson\u2019s The Body in the Mind<\/em> (1987) developed in detail the implications of the concept of \u201cimage schemas\u201d, the central conceptual structure underlying metaphor that the earlier book had discovered. In the same year, Lakoff\u2019s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things<\/em> worked out an extensive theory of thought (categories and concepts in particular) in terms of \u201cidealized cognitive models\u201d which are often metaphorical and image-schematic. Turner\u2019s Death is the Mother of Beauty<\/em> (1987) deals more directly with literature, examining poetic metaphor in terms of models deriving from conceptual metaphors using source domains of generation and kinship. Lakoff and Turner\u2019s More Than Cool Reason<\/em> (1989) is probably the most important and influential book on cognitive approaches to poetic metaphor. It analyzes how generic schemas behind metaphor enter into metaphoric elaboration, composition and coherence (chapter 2); how a text conveys a global effect as a whole statement that builds on local metaphors (chapter 3); and how large cognitive and cultural models such as the chain of being frame metaphors, establishing hierarchical and analogical relations among their elements (chapter 4). Turner\u2019s Reading Minds<\/em> (1991), subtitled \u201cThe Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science,\u201d focuses on the conventional unconscious conceptual patterns embedded in everyday language as the grounding of all special use of language and concepts in literary art.<\/p>\n

Lakoff and Johnson and others have persisted in this general strategy of inferring relatively stable cognitive models underlying language, while expanding it by connecting it with other fields and topics. Frye also seeks larger patterns, or larger applications of patterns, often observing structural analogies across multiple specific models, which Lakoff and Johnson do not generally concern themselves with. And Words With Power<\/em> does describe a vast composite metaphor: literary cosmology is understood specifically as the metaphorical structuring of the target domain of consciousness by a variety of scalar source domains (151)\u2014thus the title of Part Two, \u201cVariations on a Theme\u201d. Also unlike Lakoff and Johnson, Frye discusses what Talmy (\u201cFictive Motion\u201d) calls simultaneous \u201cdiscrepant representations\u201d of fictional and literal \u201cception\u201d: \u201cJust as myth says both \u2018This happened\u2019 and \u2018This can hardly have happened in precisely this way,\u2019 so metaphor with the \u2018is\u2019 predicate says explicitly \u2018A is B\u2019 (e.g. \u2018Joseph is a fruitful bough,\u2019 Genesis 49:22), and conveys implicitly the sense \u2018A is quite obviously not B, and nobody but a fool would imagine that Joseph really was,\u2019 etc.\u201d (72). [. . .]<\/p>\n

We now turn (to use the rhetorical figure that Frye dubs the \u201ctopotropism\u201d [AC 336]) to a more detailed comparison and integration of the theories of metaphor and thought of the two parties.<\/p>\n

1.1. Agenda of Comparison and Integration <\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>I find seven principal points of agreement on thought and meaning in language and literature between Frye and conceptual metaphor theorists Lakoff, Johnson and Turner. It is these with which we shall be concerned:<\/p>\n