“Ignoring the basics of reading literature qua literature came at a price to the humanities, which over recent decades has been reckoning with its own exhaustion. “ This is so true. Thanks for a wonderful article.
Bravo, Matthew. In my experience, many people struggle with what I take to be the cornerstone insight of all of Frye’s theorizing and criticism: namely, that there is a total order of words that is as real as is what we call the natural order. Indeed, after Blake, Frye imagined that the order of words and the imagination itself are interpenetrating forms of reality in which reality itself—reality with a big R—is created and continually recreated. All other expressions of reality find their form in the dialect or dialogue of the imagination and the Word.
Expressed as I have expressed it here, no wonder no one understands Frye’s first axiom, as it were. And yet, what I am getting at, the ontological primacy of verbal symbols and the imagination, is, if my understanding of Frye is vital, the insight on which all of his other insights ultimately depends and the consummate meaning to which they lead.
Thanks for this nice piece. As a Literature teacher, I always "use" Frye as a starting point for my students, with a question in mind: how do we make sense of fiction when we read fiction? Sadly, I still have to face lots of "literature" academics interested only in politics and sociology who look down upon Frye's texts.
Thanks for that. Can you say a little about how the four "levels" of the 1950 essay are acknowledged in the four parts of the Anatomy seven years later? (Does he use the same word, "levels," in the Anatomy of Criticism?) In what way were the earlier "levels of meaning" "points of entry" to the later schema?
Your essay reminds me of his very strange secularization of "anagogic" reading. It was also good to revisit the cultural distance between Frye and the present moment, where the biographical may not "expand" into the historical (because they rely on incompatible ideas of intentionality), and the historical would seldom be imagined as expanding again into the anthropological. Expanding, in recent literary theory, might be from "close" to "distant" (Moretti) with "surface reading" (Best and Marcus) in between.
I don't think we approach literature as literature. I think we necessarily start with assumptions. Everything else that's unaltered I agree with. I especially think the idea about any analysis having to be able to determine the book, in theme or whichever, as a floor for what counts as analysis. I think his point about value in literature leading in depth and breadth is ambiguous but I think something more concrete about that is a helpful minimum.
“Ignoring the basics of reading literature qua literature came at a price to the humanities, which over recent decades has been reckoning with its own exhaustion. “ This is so true. Thanks for a wonderful article.
Bravo, Matthew. In my experience, many people struggle with what I take to be the cornerstone insight of all of Frye’s theorizing and criticism: namely, that there is a total order of words that is as real as is what we call the natural order. Indeed, after Blake, Frye imagined that the order of words and the imagination itself are interpenetrating forms of reality in which reality itself—reality with a big R—is created and continually recreated. All other expressions of reality find their form in the dialect or dialogue of the imagination and the Word.
Expressed as I have expressed it here, no wonder no one understands Frye’s first axiom, as it were. And yet, what I am getting at, the ontological primacy of verbal symbols and the imagination, is, if my understanding of Frye is vital, the insight on which all of his other insights ultimately depends and the consummate meaning to which they lead.
great!
Thanks for this nice piece. As a Literature teacher, I always "use" Frye as a starting point for my students, with a question in mind: how do we make sense of fiction when we read fiction? Sadly, I still have to face lots of "literature" academics interested only in politics and sociology who look down upon Frye's texts.
Thanks for that. Can you say a little about how the four "levels" of the 1950 essay are acknowledged in the four parts of the Anatomy seven years later? (Does he use the same word, "levels," in the Anatomy of Criticism?) In what way were the earlier "levels of meaning" "points of entry" to the later schema?
Your essay reminds me of his very strange secularization of "anagogic" reading. It was also good to revisit the cultural distance between Frye and the present moment, where the biographical may not "expand" into the historical (because they rely on incompatible ideas of intentionality), and the historical would seldom be imagined as expanding again into the anthropological. Expanding, in recent literary theory, might be from "close" to "distant" (Moretti) with "surface reading" (Best and Marcus) in between.
I don't think we approach literature as literature. I think we necessarily start with assumptions. Everything else that's unaltered I agree with. I especially think the idea about any analysis having to be able to determine the book, in theme or whichever, as a floor for what counts as analysis. I think his point about value in literature leading in depth and breadth is ambiguous but I think something more concrete about that is a helpful minimum.
How do you define "literature?"