Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Northrop Frye

The Future of Northrop Frye: Centennial Perspectives

University of Toronto Quarterly – 81:1, Winter 2012

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j4g43540w007/

Guest Editors: Germaine Warkentin and Linda Hutcheon

This special issue of the UTQ celebrates the centennial of the birth of Northrop Frye in 1912. It was here that the young Frye published his first academic article in 1942. Projecting forward, not back, these essays look to the future of his ideas in the critical climate of the twenty-first century. The publication of Frye’s Collected Works has brought about a serious reconsideration of his criticism and what it might have to say to the future—and not just that of literary studies. The essays explore the Frye canon afresh to reflect on what a critic of today finds challenging, provocative, and productive in the rich record of his criticism.

This special issue contains supplemental material including the watercolour portrait of Northrop Frye, painted by Canadian artist Jeffrey Sprang, a graduate of Victoria College and one of Frye's former students. The portrait depicts Frye at the blackboard in front of his lesson The Conspectus of Genres. http://www.utpjournals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/UTQ-81-1-Frye-issue-flyer.pdf

This issue is available in print and online at

UTQ Online - http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j4g43540w007/

UTQ Mobile - http://digital.utpjournals.com/i/55747

Project MUSE - http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/university_of_toronto_quarterly/toc/utq.81.1.html

Introduction: A ‘Permanent Appointment’?

Germaine Warkentin and Linda Hutcheon:

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t471311p6805047r/?p=13a15a1d16da4a08a63411db9e17b238&pi=1

‘Blazing with Artifice’: Light from the Northrop Frye Notebooks

Michael Dolzani

The notion that Frye's criticism has no historical dimension is commonest among those who know only Anatomy of Criticism. Frye is indeed a structural thinker, yet he is equally a theorist of historical process, and these twin sides of his imagination are Blakean contraries, without which is no progression. The historical side of Frye is minimized in Anatomy, but emerges from a huge mass of unpublished work now edited as part of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project. This previously unpublished material is capable of revolutionizing our view of Frye, who becomes a more interesting, possibly a more relevant, thinker once we see that his structural side is in creative tension with an equally important opposite. Of the many new paths in Frye studies opened up by access to the notebooks, student essays, diaries, letters, etc., the exploration of Frye's historical side seems most promising.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/hjx7793503w64450/?p=13a15a1d16da4a08a63411db9e17b238&pi=2

Northrop Frye and Theories of Human Nature

Merlin Donald

Northrop Frye sought out the laws governing the rise and fall of cultural ideas, bringing the attitude of a system-builder to his research. As he pointed out on many occasions, psychologists and anthropologists, such as Jung and Frazer, were addressing some of the same questions, albeit with a different set of tools. However, their ultimate goal – gaining a wider view of how cultures and creative minds intermeshed – was the same as his. I was greatly moved by Frye's grand vision, which influenced my choice of the word ‘mimesis’ as a label for the ancient cognitive adaptation that defined the underlying logic of the human mind. Mimesis established the cognitive foundation upon which the evolution of language and symbolic thought became possible. The analogue logic of mimetic representation is still the underlying currency of symbolic exchange, as it seamlessly connects gesture and ritual with everyday speech, narrative, and text.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/145600r7722q6t07/?p=13a15a1d16da4a08a63411db9e17b238&pi=3

Northrop Frye and the Book as Metaphor and Material Artifact

Travis Decook

Few strains of literary study seem further from Northrop Frye's critical project than the history of the book. In light of this distance, this essay is inspired by two primary objectives. The first is to cast light on Frye's treatment of the book as a material artefact, a theme that has received relatively little attention. The second is to draw attention to the important role of the material book as metaphor in Frye's writings, and consider its implications for the practice of book history. Working against prevailing stereotypes of both Frye's visionary humanism and book history, this essay attempts to bridge the two by considering how books as physical artefacts participate in the work of the imagination. I argue that Frye's attentiveness to the socially symbolic power of the book, and his various explorations of the metaphorical possibilities of this artefact, provide powerful instances of how cultural meanings of media of inscription signify alongside their verbal contents.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r342u8397272343n/?p=13a15a1d16da4a08a63411db9e17b238&pi=4

Paradox and Provocation in the Writing and Teaching of Northrop Frye

Ian Balfour

This article focuses on the place of paradox in Northrop Frye's writing and teaching, principally by way of several key examples. Paradox tends to counter, at least superficially, popular opinion and common sense, though in the interest of common enlightenment. The figure of paradox is linked by Frye to metaphor as a kind of logical contradiction that can nonetheless be a vehicle of truth, foremost in literature and religion. Such paradoxes are both a topic for Frye's elucidations of literary and scriptural texts but also a mode enlisted in the very performance of Frye's critical writing and teaching.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/h0257021244h6534/?p=13a15a1d16da4a08a63411db9e17b238&pi=5

Elephants Are Not Giraffes: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood, More or Less about Northrop Frye

Margaret Atwood and Nick Mount

In the late 1950s, Margaret Atwood became a student of Northrop Frye at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. Although it's doubtful that anyone noticed at the time, Atwood's decision to attend Vic (and Frye's decision to stay there) put what would become two of Canada's most well-known public intellectuals at the geographic and historic start of the CanLit Boom of the 1960s, the largest single increase in literary publishing in Canadian history. This conversation explores Atwood's thoughts on her teacher and Canada's thinker: the ideas they shared (and didn't share), his influence on herself and others, his legacy today.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/h4mg386561800467/?p=de8049e3b71443eb8513fe7f05b66931&pi=6

The Chancellor’s Gold Medal

David Blostein

Nine Poets

A.F. Moritz, John Reibetanz, Lorna Crozier, Jan Zwicky, Serge Patrice Thibodeau, George Elliott Clark, Dennis Lee, Robert Bringhurst, Ward Mcburney

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r267087n6120055q/?p=de8049e3b71443eb8513fe7f05b66931&pi=7

Northrop Frye Votes for Wine

David Blostein

Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric

Northrop Frye

Edited by Robert D. Denham

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t84636x47674273t/?p=d7ea176776aa421287929f04aa87b375&pi=8

Remedial Metaphor: Pedagogical Frye

Jean Wilson

In his ongoing inquiry into the social value of literary study, Frye not only critiques perceptions of the humanities as ornamental rather than functional, but also complicates common notions of relevance and practicality. He resists, moreover, conventional distinctions between the arts and the sciences, and recognizes that a wide range of disciplines, from ‘philology’ to ‘physics,’ constitute the liberal arts. As he articulates it, what unites the scientist and the humanist is social, a matter of ‘the practical intelligence,’ which derives its authority from an informing vision of society. Frye's writings suggest that such capacity can be developed through pedagogical approaches that enable freedom from ready-made language and thought and access to ‘the real world of human constructive power.’ His literary and educational theory offers a perspective from which we might confront the challenges both of teaching literature in the twenty-first century and of fashioning forward-thinking liberal arts programs and interdisciplinary projects.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k839n717x088x000/?p=d7ea176776aa421287929f04aa87b375&pi=9

Northrop Frye’s Musical Dimensions

Yves Saint-Cyr

Northrop Frye felt that literary critics should envy music critics because the latter deal more in structures and relationships, which is what literary critics like Frye would like to do, rather than getting bogged down in style and content. To appreciate fully the inseparability of literature and music in Frye's life, one must start at the beginning – with the experiences that shaped his taste in and understanding of music, both as a listener and as a musician himself. The evolution of Frye's relationship with music, from his early childhood to his later career, describes an arc that passes through all of his major fields of study: from literature to religion, to visual arts and culture, to pedagogy and educational psychology.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/4721n17376617382/?p=9fd3572d181b401f9286f1a87f527f80&pi=10

Cosmopolitan and National Culture in Northrop Frye

Adam Carter

The essay explores a double trajectory in Frye's writings between a universalist, cosmopolitan, understanding of culture that transcends locality, and an understanding of culture that traces its connections to the specificities of geography and history and, to some extent, embraces the idea of national and regional cultures. I argue that the two concepts in Frye are joined by the common idea of culture as the achievement of a realm of freedom from nature. I defend this oscillating movement in Frye's thought by viewing it as a suggestively open-ended dialectic, one which does not seek to impose a static unity or synthesis upon its opposing terms. The dialectic between cosmos and locus allows Frye's thought to grapple productively with what Pheng Cheah has called ‘the aporias of given culture’ – the various material, natural, and social givens that constitute culture even as they trouble its promised freedom for humanity.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/l3m2371513683x41/?p=9fd3572d181b401f9286f1a87f527f80&pi=11

Visiting Theory: The Northrop Frye Visiting Professorship at the University of Toronto

Jonathan Allan

One of the most enduring testaments to the legacy of Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto is the program in Comparative Literature and more particularly its commitment to Literary Theory. This paper provides a history of the Northrop Frye Visiting Professorship in Literary Theory, which has allowed for some of the most important theorists of literature and culture to hold the chair and introduce their ideas to members of the Centre for Comparative Literature and the University as a whole.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/5671685237nk18ug/?p=9fd3572d181b401f9286f1a87f527f80&pi=12

The Social Vision of Frye’s Criticism: The Scandal of Undiscriminating Catholicity

Jonathan Arac

This essay explores Frye's highly debated views concerning the role of criticism. Frye does not grant value-judgement any place within criticism, rejects hierarchy, and states that negative criticism is futile. His works Anatomy of Criticism and The Critical Path illuminate his faith in the importance of positive literary theory, freedom from the shortcomings of class-bound conceptions, the conversion of pejorative critical terms into tools of analytical criticism, and ‘undiscriminating catholicity’ as openness to all products of human imagination. Critics from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach are examined in their relation to Frye's arguments. The article defends Frye's vision, specifically his theorization of historical, ethical, and archetypal criticism and the autonomy of literature, as well as his advocacy of an escape from negative evaluation as a way for criticism to achieve new capacities.

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/m474113113556717/?p=9fd3572d181b401f9286f1a87f527f80&pi=13

Afterword: Of Greatness in Criticism

Gordon Teskey

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/6u3k408311626t75/?p=9fd3572d181b401f9286f1a87f527f80&pi=14

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