The Relevance of Northrop Frye's "Specific Continuous Forms"

Abstract

Thirty-two after its initial publication and its enthusiastic reception, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism has little of power it once commanded in critical circles. Its almost cosmic designs, even when developed and extended by such later works as Fables of Identity (1963), The Secular Scripture (1976), and The Great Code (1982), stand relatively unused, swept aside by later paradigms and vocabularies of semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. William Righter well be correct in his assessment that Anatomy of Criticism may pose self-destructive standard, and be seen as one of curiosities of what 'the age demanded,' remarkable if eccentric episode in literary history (342). One essay, though, continues be discussed by narratologists with some frequency, but often in form of attacks. This is be regretted, because Specific Continuous Forms (Prose Fiction), in many ways centerpiece of Frye's Theory of Genre chapter, has been seriously misrepresented narratologists by such theorists as Paul Hernadi, Tzvetan Todorov, and Robert Scholes, both because they failed visualize accurately three-dimensional geometry of Frye's paradigm and because they failed perceive of Frye's system of coordinates.' Philip Stevick once called essay the single most significant and influential event in criticism of prose fiction in last twenty years (153), and even in disuse it still merits much of this praise, if for no other reason than its focused assault on concept of novel-centered vision of fiction which paved way for much later narratological theory. In Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification, Paul Hernadi approaches Frye's work through an impressive discussion of four kinds of concepts (expressive, pragmatic, structural, and mimetic) and of sixty-seven critic/theorists, in an attempt to fill that curious gap in literary self-awareness of our time (vii). Hernadi finds Anatomy of Criticism a most ambitious theory of genre (131), enjoying breadth and depth of insights (131) and filled with impressively largescale speculations concerning plot structure (132) which often articulate difference between two basic types of literature [mythos and