{"id":4083,"date":"2009-10-16T12:10:38","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T16:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2009-10-16T12:10:38","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T16:10:38","slug":"re-big-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/16\/re-big-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"Re: Big Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"poser\"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Responding to Michael Sinding<\/a>:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Your points are well taken, Michael. \u00a0And it is true that in the comparatively small Frye community,\u00a0it is\u00a0easy enough to find a\u00a0measure of\u00a0regret\u00a0about how things have spun out over the last 30 years or so.\u00a0 Speaking for myself, I was an undergrad when the revolution was\u00a0fully under way, and I watched as it swept everything out of its path in very short order by\u00a0appealing to\u00a0the worst in the academic character, especially the sense of superiority and entitlement.\u00a0 When I returned years later as a grad student, it was easy to see what had been lost and at what cost.\u00a0 In your post you describe what sound like small gains — the return of a measure of sanity here and there in an intellectual\u00a0landscape that has been otherwise ravaged (as you put it at one point, by people who were “brilliant” but “wrong”).\u00a0\u00a0The result is\u00a0that it’s\u00a0almost like we\u00a0are called upon\u00a0to rediscover fire and reinvent the wheel.\u00a0 It’s not that there are no good ideas out there,\u00a0it’s that they do not\u00a0really compensate for the bad ones that have\u00a0caused\u00a0a whole generation of scholars to\u00a0behave as though, if\u00a0not actually believe that, literature has no value in\u00a0itself.\u00a0 That’s always what set Frye apart:\u00a0his sure understanding that\u00a0literature is autonomous and possesses its own unique authority\u00a0— and, yeah, that authority is “timeless” in the sense that it is constant, even as\u00a0the literary imagination omnivorously reprocesses whatever cultural, sociological, ideological and historical phenomena\u00a0that confront it.\u00a0 I can’t think of anyone else who comes close to asserting as much so consistently, let alone expressing it comprehensively in\u00a0an\u00a0extended body of work.<\/p>\n

One last point: Frye was not merely superseded during the post-structuralist realignment, he was pushed aside with what can only\u00a0be taken as shows of\u00a0bad faith\u00a0through misreading and misrepresentation.\u00a0 Russell Perkin’s citation yesterday<\/a> of Frye’s note to Bob Denham on the enumerative bibliography illustrates the point\u00a0nicely.\u00a0 Frye, of course,\u00a0saw what was going on and often seemed baffled by it, as though he believed that at any moment people would regain their senses.\u00a0 In one of the late notebooks, he wonders with uncharacteristic despair, “Why am I so revered but so ignored?”\u00a0 Why indeed?\u00a0 Frye was a\u00a0much more revolutionary literary theorist\u00a0than any\u00a0who succeeded him because, unlike them,\u00a0he drew upon the authority of literature itself, knowing that the literary is primary and other verbal structures are secondary derivations.\u00a0 Like the derivative “instruments”\u00a0that almost collapsed the financial system last year, the\u00a0derivative “discourse” of the last generation has denied\u00a0the\u00a0public its birthright: the responsible management of an imaginative heritage that not only confronts social injustice in unmistakable terms\u00a0but empowers us to overcome it.\u00a0 We need only accept the invitation\u00a0our shared\u00a0heritage extends, and to do that we have to recognize the nature of the invitation being offered.\u00a0 Frye was able to do\u00a0this — and able to express it in a way that inspires others, as Bob’s post of student testimonials <\/a>today suggests.\u00a0 As it turned out, not many other theorists\u00a0could do the same, and what they couldn’t do became the basis of what literary scholarship was subsequently\u00a0obliged to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Responding to Michael Sinding: Your points are well taken, Michael. \u00a0And it is true that in the comparatively small Frye community,\u00a0it is\u00a0easy enough to find a\u00a0measure of\u00a0regret\u00a0about how things have spun out over the last 30 years or so.\u00a0 Speaking for myself, I was an undergrad when the revolution was\u00a0fully under way, and I watched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"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":[92,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism","category-post-modernism"],"yoast_head":"\nRe: Big Picture - 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