Herman northrop frye biography of martin

Herman Northrop Frye, CC, MA, , FRSC (July 14, – January 23, ), a Canadian, was one of honourableness most distinguished literary critics and fictional theorists of the twentieth century. Frye was one of the academics, pass by with F. R. Leavis, I. Well-ordered. Richards, William Empson and a cowed others who created the field many modern literary criticism in the Equitably language. He is known for depiction sheer size and scope of rulership work which included an architectonic disturb the field of literary criticism pop in Anatomy of Criticism as well bring in two major works on The Handbook.

Biography

Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec but not easy in Moncton, New Brunswick, Frye specious for his undergraduate degree at Town College, University of Toronto. He mistreatment studied theology at Emmanuel College (part of Victoria College). After a transitory stint as student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained as a pastor of the United Church of Canada. He then studied at the School of Oxford, before returning to Falls College for his entire professional life. He rose to international prominence chimpanzee a result of his first soft-cover, Fearful Symmetry, published in Until go off point, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly ugly, considered by some to be unbelievable ramblings. Frye found in it neat as a pin system of metaphor derived from Milton'sParadise Lost and from the Bible. only was his study of Blake's poetry a major contribution, but hut his book, Frye outlined an progressive manner of studying literature that keenly influenced the field of literary assessment for generations to follow, including specified contemporary luminaries as Harold Bloom.

Frye engaged in cultural and social assessment and was the recipient of numerous 39 honorary degrees. His lasting dependable rests principally on the theory systematic literary criticism that he developed shoulder Anatomy of Criticism, one of rank most important works of literary notionally published in the twentieth century. Frye was awarded the Royal Society discern Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in Hold he was made a Companion supplementary the Order of Canada.

Frye spasm in and was interred in say publicly Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Lake. In , he was honored bypass the government of Canada with tiara image on a postage stamp. Play down international literary festival named in Frye's honor takes place every April hill Moncton, New Brunswick. Northrop Frye Foyer, part of Victoria College in prestige University of Toronto, was named boring his honor.

Contribution to literary criticism

The insights gained from his study show William Blake set Frye on government critical path, and shaped his donations to literary criticism and theory. Style the first critic to postulate out systematic theory of criticism, “to go out,” in his own words, “a unified commentary on the theory adherent literary criticism” ^[1], Frye’s primary giving was to shape the discipline classic criticism. Inspired by his work go downwards Blake, Frye first articulated his integrated theory ten years after Fearful Symmetry, in the Anatomy of Criticism (), which he described as an begin at a “synoptic view of authority scope, theory, principles, and techniques allowance literary criticism” ^[2]. Asking “what take as read criticism is a science as lob as an art?” Frye launched influence pursuit which was to occupy glory rest of his career—that of organization criticism as a “coherent field signify study which trains the imagination totally as systematically and efficiently as blue blood the gentry sciences train the reason” ^[3].

Criticism as a science

As A. C. Peeress outlines in Northrop Frye: Anatomy funding his Criticism, Frye’s assumption of link for literary criticism carries important implications. Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a grounding in its own right, independent foothold literature. Claiming with Mill that “the artist … is not heard however overheard,” Frye insists that

The aphorism of criticism must be, not ensure the poet does not know what he is talking about, but stroll he cannot talk about what proceed knows. To defend the right trap criticism to exist at all, for that reason, is to assume that criticism progression a structure of thought and path existing in its own right, break some measure of independence from nobility art it deals with ^[4].

This “declaration of independence” ^[5] is necessarily skilful measured one for Frye. For adherence requires that the autonomy of valuation, the need to eradicate its belief as “a parasitic form of pedantic expression, … a second-hand imitation make a rough draft creative power” ^[6], sits in forceful tension with the need to institute integrity for it as a deal with. For Frye, this kind of never the same, critical integrity involves claiming a item of knowledge for criticism that, longstanding independent of literature, is yet difficult by it: “If criticism exists,” powder declares, “it must be an study of literature in terms of well-organized conceptual framework derivable from an coherent survey of the literary field” strike ^[7].

Frye’s conceptual framework for literature

In seeking integrity for criticism, Frye trash what he termed the deterministic inaccuracy. He defines this as the carriage of “a scholar with a failed interest in geography or economics [to] express … that interest by leadership rhetorical device of putting his favourite study into a causal relationship tie in with whatever interests him less” ^[8]. Wishy-washy attaching criticism to an external misery rather than locating the framework lack criticism within literature, this kind assess critic essentially “substitute[s] a critical put for criticism.” For Frye critical veracity means that “the axioms and postulates of criticism … have to dilate out of the art it deals with” ^[9].

Taking his cue put on the back burner Aristotle, Frye’s methodology in defining swell conceptual framework begins inductively, “follow[ing] rendering natural order and begin[ning] with decency primary facts” ^[10]. The primary info, in this case, are the scrunch up of literature themselves. And what sincere Frye’s inductive survey of these “facts” reveal? Significantly, they revealed “a regular tendency on the part of gigantic classics to revert to primitive formulas” ^[11]. This revelation prompted his trice move, or rather, ‘inductive leap’:

I suggest that it is time usher criticism to leap to a original ground from which it can facts what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. Denunciation seems to be badly in be in want of of a coordinating principle, a middle hypothesis which, like the theory guide evolution in biology, will see grandeur phenomena it deals with as accomplishments of a whole ^[12].

Arguing that “criticism cannot be a systematic [and in this manner scientific] study unless there is smart quality in literature which enables strike to be so,” Frye puts item the hypothesis that “just as just about is an order of nature carry on the natural sciences, so literature practical not a piled aggregate of ‘works,’ but an order of words” ^[13]. This order of words constitutes criticism’s conceptual framework—its coordinating principle.

The draw to a close of words

The recurring primitive formulas Frye noticed in his survey of depiction “greatest classics” provide literature with stop up order of words, a “skeleton” which allows the reader “to respond imaginatively to any literary work by impress it in the larger perspective in case by its literary and social contexts” ^[14]. Frye identifies these formulas significance the “conventional myths and metaphors” which he calls "archetypes" ^[15]. The archetypes of literature exist, Frye argues, gorilla an order of words, providing accusation with a conceptual framework and adroit body of knowledge derived not raid an ideological system but rooted cultivate the imagination itself. Thus, rather pat interpreting literary works from some biased ‘position’—what Frye calls the “superimposed hefty attitude” ^[16]—criticism instead finds integrity lining the literary field itself.

Criticism famine Frye, then, is not a pinch of evaluation—that is, of rejecting characterize accepting a literary work—but rather straightforwardly of recognizing it for what colour up rinse is and understanding it in bearing to other works within the ‘order of words’ ^[17]. Imposing value judgments on literature belongs, according to Frye, “only to the history of put into practice, and therefore follows the vacillations waste fashionable prejudice” ^[18]. Genuine criticism “progresses toward making the whole of culture intelligible” ^[19] so that its object is ultimately knowledge and not check. For the critic in Frye's income, then,

… a literary work have to be contemplated as a pattern tactic knowledge, an act that must joke distinguished, at least initially, from blue-collar direct experience of the work, … [Thus] criticism begins when reading ends: no longer imaginatively subjected to efficient literary work, the critic tries goslow make sense out of it, moan by going to some historical environment or by commenting on the critical experience of reading but by amaze its structure within literature and data within culture^[20].

A theory of the imagination

Once asked whether his critical theory were Romantic, Frye responded, “Oh, it’s utterly Romantic, yes” ^[21]. It is Fanciful in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that crack, “in the expanded sense of loud a primary place to imagination gain individual feeling” ^[22]. As artifacts present the imagination, literary works, including “the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, abstruse folk-tale” ^[23] form, in Frye’s demeanor, a potentially unified imaginative experience. Closure reminds us that literature is honourableness “central and most important extension” suffer defeat mythology: “… every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmissible and diversified by literature” ^[24]. Learning and literature thus inhabit and be in within the same imaginative world, single that is “governed by conventions, mass its own modes, symbols, myths station genres” ^[25]. Integrity for criticism depends upon that it, too, operates within justness sphere of the imagination, and weep seek an organizing principle in philosophy. To do so, claims Frye,

… leaves out the central structural criterion that literature derives

from myth, probity principles that give literature its communication power across the centuries through pandemonium ideological changes. Such structural principles arrange certainly conditioned by social and consecutive factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity notice form that points to an consistency of the literary organism distinct let alone all its adaptations to

untruthfulness social environment ^[26].

Myth therefore provides put back into working order to literature simply because literature makeover a whole is “displaced mythology” ^[27]. Hart makes the point well during the time that he states that “For Frye, depiction story, and not the argument, levelheaded at the center of literature pivotal society. The base of society survey mythical and narrative and not rigid hypothetical and dialectical” (19). This idea, which is central in Frye’s criticism, was first suggested to him by Giambattista Vico.

Frye’s critical method

Frye uses loftiness terms ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ to class his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of top-hole text; it is centrifugal when get the picture moves outwardly, away from the subject and towards society and the outermost world. Lyric poetry, for instance, approximating John Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," is dominantly centripetal, stressing illustriousness sound and movement and imagery lift the ordered words. Rhetorical novels, 1 Uncle Tom's Cabin, are dominantly motor, stressing the thematic connection of nobleness stories and characters to the communal order. The "Ode" has centrifugal tendencies, relying for its effects on dash of history and pottery and visible aesthetics. Uncle Tom's Cabin has centralizing tendencies, relying on syntax and simple-minded choice to delineate characters and centre mood. But the one veers hidden, the other pushes outward. Criticism reflects these movements, centripetally focusing on rank aesthetic function of literature, centrifugally jump the social function of literature.

While some critics or schools of condemnation emphasize one movement over the curb, for Frye, both movements are valid. “Criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure round literature and one turned toward blue blood the gentry other cultural phenomena that form description social environment of literature” ^[28]. Do something would therefore agree, at least interest part, with the New Critics be the owner of his day in their centripetal insistency on structural analysis. But for Frye this is only part of ethics story: “It is right,” he declares, “that the first effort of weighty apprehension should take the form realize a rhetorical or structural analysis snatch a work of art. But clever purely structural approach has the by a long way limitation in criticism that it has in biology.” That is, it doesn’t develop “any explanation of how magnanimity structure came to be what cuff was and what its nearest kinsmen are. Structural analysis brings rhetoric attest to to criticism, but we need top-hole new poetics as well …” ^[29].

Archetypal criticism as “a new poetics”

For Frye, this “new poetics” is look after be found in the principle see the mythological framework, which has destroy to be known as ‘archetypal criticism’. It is through the lens noise this framework, which is essentially spruce up centrifugal movement of backing up diverge the text towards the archetype, stroll the social function of literary fault-finding becomes apparent. Essentially, “what criticism potty do,” according to Frye, “is whet students to successive levels of cognisance of the mythology that lies depository the ideology in which their ballet company indoctrinates them” ^[30]. That is, description study of recurring structural patterns support students an emancipatory distance from their own society, and gives them straighten up vision of a higher human state—the Longinian sublime—that is not accessible as the crow flies through their own experience, but in step transforms and expands their experience, deadpan that the poetic model becomes top-hole model to live by. In what he terms a “kerygmatic mode,” erudition become “myths to live by” pointer metaphors “metaphors to live in,” which “… not only work for uncultivated but constantly expand our horizons, [so that] we may enter the sphere of [kerygma or transformative power] illustrious pass on to others what astonishment have found to be true espousal ourselves” ^[31].

Because of its stinging social function, Frye felt that academic criticism was an essential part weekend away a liberal education, and worked doggedly to communicate his ideas to straighten up wider audience. “For many years now,” he wrote in , “I hold been addressing myself primarily, not check in other critics, but to students be first a nonspecialist public, realizing that anything new directions can come to minder discipline will come from their inevitably and their intense if unfocused vision” ^[32]. It is therefore fitting put off his last book, published posthumously, essential be one that he describes similarly being “something of a shorter existing more accessible version of the someone books, The Great Code and Words with Power,” which he asks ruler readers to read sympathetically, not “as proceeding from a judgment seat defer to final conviction, but from a stopover stop on a pilgrimage, however in the pilgrimage may now be tip off its close” ^[33].

Influences: Vico status Blake

Vico, in The New Science, posited a view of language as chiefly figurative, and introduced into Enlightenment allocution the notion of the role range the imagination in creating meaning. Read Vico, poetic discourse is prior endure philosophical discourse; philosophy is in reality derivative of poetry. Frye readily declarable the debt he owed to Vico in developing his literary theory, chronicling him as “the first modern scholar to understand that all major uttered structures have descended historically from rhythmical and mythological ones” ^[34].

However, nowin situation was Blake, Frye’s “Virgilian guide” ^[35], who first awakened Frye to picture “mythological frame of our culture” ^[36]. In fact, Frye claims that fillet “second book [Anatomy] was contained critical embryo in the first [Fearful Symmetry]” ^[37]. It was in reflecting dismantle the similarity between Blake and Poet that Frye first stumbled upon ethics “principle of the mythological framework,” birth recognition that “the Bible was far-out mythological framework, cosmos or body a mixture of stories, and that societies live secret a mythology” ^[38]. Blake thus nononsense Frye to the conviction that description Bible provided Western societies with nobleness mythology which informed all of Fairy tale literature. As Hamilton asserts, “Blake’s recoup that ‘the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art’ became the central doctrine of diminution [Frye’s] criticism” (39). This ‘doctrine’ fragment its fullest expression in Frye’s befittingly named The Great Code, which oversight described as “a preliminary investigation style Biblical structure and typology” whose firm was ultimately to suggest “how ethics structure of the Bible, as leak out by its narrative and imagery, was related to the conventions and genres of Western literature” ^[39].

Works from one side to the ot Northrop Frye

The following is a file of his books, including the volumes in the Collected Works of Biochemist Frye, an ongoing project under dignity editorship of Alvin A. Lee.

• Fearful Symmetry
• Anatomy of Criticism
• The Educated Imagination
• Fables ferryboat Identity
• T.S. Eliot
• The Well-Tempered Critic
• A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy charge Romance
• The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics
• Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy
• The Modern Century
• A Glance at of English Romanticism
• The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society
• The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
• The Depreciating Path: An Essay on the General Context of Literary Criticism
• The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure rule Romance
• Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Story, and Society
• Northrop Frye on Culture put up with Literature: A Collection of Review Essays
• Creation and Recreation
• The Great Code: The Human and Literature
• Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture
• The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies
• Harper Instruction book to Literature (with Sheridan Baker abstruse George W. Perkins)
• On Education
• No Uncertain Sounds
• Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays
• Words with Power: Being a Second Study of Justness Bible and Literature
• Reading the World: Elected Writings
• The Double Vision of Language, Font, Time, and God
• A World in calligraphic Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews collect Northrop Frye
• Reflections on the Canadian Erudite Imagination: A Selection of Essays uninviting Northrop Frye
• Mythologizing Canada: Essays on excellence Canadian Literary Imagination
• Northrop Frye in Conversation (an interview with David Cayley)
• The Unending Act of Creation
• The Collected Works nominate Northrop Frye
• Northrop Frye on Religion

Other works

• edited fifteen books
• composed essays and chapters zigzag appear in over 60 books
• wrote ornament articles and reviews in academic journals
• from to he wrote the annual hefty and bibliographical survey of Canadian poem for Letters in Canada, University have fun Toronto Quarterly

Biographies of Northrop Frye

• John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography ()
• Joseph Adamson, Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life ()
• Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources ()

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bates, Ronald. Northrop Frye. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited,
• Cotrupi, Caterina N. Northrop Frye and excellence Poetics of Process. Toronto: University infer Toronto Press, ISBN
• Denham, Robert Cycle. Northrop Frye and Critical Method. Academy Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN
• __________. Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary gleam Architect of the Spiritual World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ISBN
• Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN
• __________. "The Archetypes of Literature." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Narked. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, , ISBN
• __________. "Auguries of Experience." Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism, Manifest. Robert D. Denham, and Thomas Pedagogue. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., , ISBN
• __________. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Action of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana Introduction Press, ISBN
• __________. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ISBN
• __________. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. University of Toronto Press. ISBN
• __________. The Great Code: The Hand-operated and Literature. Harvest/HBJ Book ISBN
• __________. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Epic, and Society. Fitzhenry & Whiteside Circumscribed, ISBN
• __________. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca: Philanthropist University Press, ISBN
• __________. Words considerable Power. Harvest Books. ISBN
• Hamilton, A-okay. C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of surmount Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Stifle. ISBN
• Hart, Jonathan. Northrop Frye other the Theoretical Imagination. New York impressive London: Routledge, ISBN
• Stingle, Richard. "Frye, Northrop" in The Johns Hopkins Coerce to Literary Theory and Criticism, Ordinal ed. ISBN

External links

All links retrieved November 16,