Anatomy Of Criticism Research Articles

The Genre Function

Uhe past fifteen years have witnessed a dramatic reconceptualization of genre and its role in the production and interpretation of texts and culture. Led in large part by scholars in functional and applied linguistics (Bhatia; Halliday; Kress; Swales), communication studies (Campbell; Jamieson; Yates), education (Christie; Dias; Medway), and, most recently, rhetoric and composition studies (Bazerman; Berkenkotter; Coe; Devitt; Freedman; Miller; and Russell), this movement has helped transform genre study from a descriptive to an explanatory activity, one that investigates not only text-types and classification systems, but also the linguistic, sociological, and psychological assumptions underlying and shaping these text-types. No longer structuring and classifying a mainly literary textual universe, as Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) and others in literary studies have traditionally suggested, genres have come to be defined as typified rhetorical ways communicants come to recognize and act in all kinds of situations, literary and nonliterary. As such, genres do not simply help us define and organize kinds of texts; they also help us define and organize kinds of social actions, social actions that these texts rhetorically make possible. It is this notion of genre that I wish to explore in this study in order to investigate the role that genre plays in the constitution not only of texts but of their contexts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them.

From Fathers to Sun: Northrop Frye and the History of English-Canadian Poetry

When John Ayre's biography of Northrop Frye was published in 1989, its dustjacket suggested that Frye ought to be considered foremost figure in Canadian intellectual history. He authored, it proclaimed, of most influential books of literary criticism of all time--Fearful Symmetry (1947), Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and The Great Code (1982). Their influence, it implied, has also made Frye into something more than a literary critic. He has become the fourth most cited twentieth-century thinker, behind only Freud, Lenin, and Roland Barthes. In short, dustjacket asserted that because no critic in any time has produced so impressive a body of Frye is now familiar to generations of writers, intellectuals, and students everywhere. For students of Canada, however, significance of Frye's achievement is both more elusive and more consequential is not just a function of his having achieved international renown so heralded on his biography's dustjacket. Because Frye paid considerable attention to Canadian literature and culture throughout his career, he involved himself in a tradition of specifically national discourse. He thus established lines of relation from himself to influential predecessors and successors. His lasting national significance will ultimately be determined by these complex lines of relation, rather than proven by citation statistics. Still, nature of Frye's elusive Canadian significance is also suggested on Ayre's dustjacket, which metaphorically casts Frye in a central and illuminating role. The metaphor appears in a 1978 quotation from Marshall McLuhan: Norrie is not struggling for his place in He is sun. Though context in which McLuhan was then centering Frye remains unclear, Frye's history of English-Canadian poetry now places him, like sun, at center of a Canadian critical solar system.(1) He attained this position by recreating, and thereby displacing, history that A. J. M. Smith and John Sutherland fashioned together.(2) Contextual Background During 1940s--and largely through agency of such publications as Canadian Forum and University of Toronto Quarterly--critical attention turned in a higher degree to definition of a Canadian tradition in writing. Smith and Sutherland edited anthologies of Canadian poetry, while E. K. Brown published his early critical overview On Canadian Poetry (1943) and, almost immediately, revised it in response to Smith's reaction to what he had written, bringing out a new version in 1944. Reviewing anthologies that Smith and Sutherland edited during decade, Frye initially validated many aspects of their work, in which they depict a unified poetry of present reconciling and surpassing its divided past. But when he turned his attention to English-Canadian poetry of 1950s, Frye saw those same past divisions being more preserved than resolved in his two predecessors' anthologies and criticism. He then adopted a position similar to that which Smith and Sutherland occupied before him, one from which English-Canadian poetry appears to be prematurely split. Like them, he too sought to exorcise division. And three decades later, Frye also supplied terms that implicitly characterize his relation to Smith and Sutherland. In an essay entitled Literary History (1981), he wrote: It seems to me that central conception involved in historical sequence of literary works is conception of recreation. A reader recreates everything he reads more or less in his own image.... In all recreation there is a son/father relationship which has a double aspect: an Oedipus relation where son kills and a Christian relation where son identifies with father (225). These terms suggest that Frye, too, re-created in his own image history that Smith and Sutherland constructed for English-Canadian poetry. In son/father aspect of his recreation, Oedipal Frye metaphorically killed his fathers by asserting that a mature literary tradition was established neither by poets that Smith promoted, nor by those that Sutherland upheld, but rather by their successors in 1950s. …

An Anatomy of Anatomy

A new take on Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism celebrating hybridity, montage, and a recontextualized, rewritten, reconceived notion of the “classics.”

Three Plays by Moreto and Their Adaptation in France (review)

774BCom, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Summer 1997) Rissel, Hilda. Three Plays by Moreto and Their Adaptation in France. Iberica, 11. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 164 pp. Agustín Moreto (1618-1669) was in many ways the most "modern" of the Golden Age dramatists. He did not espouse any particular national or religious ideology, he was reluctant to deviate from the established comic techniques, he fashioned characters who adhered to a normalized code of conduct, and he made sure that his audiences were entertained by the nonviolent , non-intellectual, non-political, non-religious vicissitudes ofcontemporary urban dwellers. In these kinds ofplays, the honor code is clearly ridiculed , the intense passions ofjealousy, hate, desire, fear, and remorse are mocked or denounced, and those who practice the elegant Gallic social values of mesure, justesse, bienséance, and bon goût win their appropriate spouse, to then live happily ever after. It is these aspects ofMoreto's theater that Hilda Rissel considers the reason for the dramatist's popularity in France, where Aristocratic culture—of which Arnold Hauser's chapter "The Baroque of the Catholic Courts" in The Social History ofArt still remains one ofthe best succinct descriptions—gained its firmest hold. Rissel's study dedicates a chapter each to the transposition ofEl desdén con el desdén (Molière's La princesse d'Elide), Defuera vendrá quien de casa nos echará (Thomas Corneille's Le baron d'Albikrac) and Lo que puede la aprehensión (T. Corneille's Le charme de la voix). Drawing on the scholarship ofJ. A. Castañeda, F. Casa, and R. L. Kennedy, Rissel portrays Moreto as a dramatist naturally inclined to the Neoclassical (i.e., Aristocratic Classical Baroque) values ofthe three unities, symmetrical constructions, and normative views of class, status, family, love, and marriage. Moreto's characters thus function dependently on established, predetermined notions of truth, beauty, goodness, and wisdom. They do not grow nor do they change in any way; they merely discover in the course oftheir dramatic existence who they are, their role or appropriate place in Spanish society (a formidable task in itself). Their lives are so formalized, in fact, that mistresses or masters can change façades and masquerade as servants, and vice versa, without incurring any psychological changes to their character nor affecting in any way the caste system ofdesignated roles. Moreto is thus the consummate accommodative artist, plying a comedie vision that is—while sensitive to the varied class and gender structures in his society—aristocratic and paternalistic. "Moreto," Rissel observes, "though sympathetic to some feminine claims, is in basic agreement with the inferior position accorded them. ... By ending his plays with his female characters' acceptance of male dominance and marriage, Moreto restored the traditional order of Reviews115 society and thus did not alienate his audience" (134-35). Nevertheless, Rissel insists correctly that it is Moreto's exceptionally passionate and lifelike presentations of the female protagonist which most appealed to the French dramatists, indicated by their changing the titles of Moreto's plays to highlight the female role rather than the male's dramatic ruse to win her. Where Rissel stumbles is in the persistent use ofthe terms ofcourtly love and Neoplatonism to describe the romantic entanglements constructed by Moreto. Neither vogue has anything at all to do with the mutual sexual attraction of two similarly disposed young people who have no intention to grow socially or intellectually, which is the typical New Comedy structure described so well by Northrop Frye forty years ago in The Anatomy of Criticism and A Natural Perspective, and which Moreto accommodates to the social strictures ofaristocratic comportment. Despite some minor errata in editing and an uneven bibliographic style, Rissel's book has valuable observations on both Moreto and his French adapters that extend the comparative analysis ofthe two initiated in the last century by A. de Puibusque and E. Martinenche, but that recent scholars inexplicably neglected. David H Darst Florida State University Enriquez Gómez, Antonio. The Perfect King/El rey másperfecto. Introduction , edition, and translation by Michael McGaha. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1991. Paper, lxiv + 163 pp. In a 1957 article Charles Aubrun suggested that the prolific but long-neglected converso author...

History and Utopian Desire: Fredric Jameson's Dialectical Tribute to Northrop Frye

he majestic critical system set out in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism appears to be pulled in two self-consciously inconsistent directions. On the one hand, the archetypal critical project announced in the Anatomy raises literary creation and criticism to the level of symbolic meditation on human community whole. Archetypal criticism is, Frye declares, primarily concerned with literature social fact and mode of communication (99). Poetry has the social function of expressing a vision of the goal of work and the forms of (106). From this view, criticism is supposed to chart certain relationship between literary phenomena and historical life. On the other hand, the historical perspective the Anatomy promises is reprivatized in the anagogic moment. The collective content of utopian desire is ultimately internalized and individualized in an ecstatic celebration of unconditioned libidinal freedom. The anagogic view of criticism conceives of literature as existing in its own universe, no longer commentary on life or reality, but containing life or reality in system of verbal relationships (122). This is the moment when history appears to

Auerbach in Exile

FEW WORKS of modern literary criticism have been so widely admired as Erich Auerbach's masterwork Mimesis, and yet Auerbach has found surprisingly few followers. Though Mimesis is one of a handful of works that defined comparative literature in postwar era, scholars who continue to cite and to study book show little interest in doing anything of kind themselves. The book lives on, in effect, only in fragments; while people will dispute or refine an argument in one or another of Auerbach's chapters, book as a whole has not inspired further work of comparable range or synoptic ambition. The case of Mimesis is part of a more general question: why have students of such generalists as Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer confined themselves to far narrower fields of study? Auerbach's exile in Istanbul seems, in retrospect, to have been neither so prolonged nor so complete as his book's later exile here in America. Why is this so? We may observe that, as early as publication of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, theory began to eclipse literary history as ground of broad, generalizing work. Yet question remains why this shift occurred to begin with. One might go further and say that even at time Auerbach was writing Mimesis, era of philological method had ended, and no new generation was being trained to do his kind of work even if they wanted to. This is Edward Said's view, for example, in a recent article on state of literary studies. Even as he argues that the tiresome wheel-spinning and elaboration of much literary theory have gotten out of hand by now, he adds a caveat:

Screen memories: Hollywood cinema on the psychoanalytic couch

1 Real Signification's: An anatomy of Psychoanalytic Film Criticism 2 Cult Cinema: Casablanca - If it's So Schmaltzy, Why am I weeping? 3 The Detective Film: The Maltese Falcon-Even Paranoids Have Enemies 4 War Movies: Dangerous Recuperations - Red Dawn, Rambo, and the new Decaturism 5 Psycho: The apes at the windows 6 Reimagining the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien and the Contemporary Cruel Horror Film 7 Fiction into Film - Problems of adaption: Improper Bostonians 8 On the Mcmovie: Less is Less at the Simplex 9 Raiders of the lost text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always 10 Working Girl: Leveraged Sell-out 11 Enemies: A Love Story.

Latitude Rising: Historical Continuity in Canadian Nordicity

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, George Woodcock wrote, concerns Homeric wanderer returning to mysteriously changed homeland. (f.1) Anyone who wanders through conflicting conceptions of Canada's North cannot help but feel similar change. It has changed its latitude: from country as whole as North to country having distinct But has it changed its attitude? Think of question in terms of holding compass. All directions are somewhere beyond us. We are at centre. If we call where we are North, we put ourselves where we are not - we decentre ourselves. False knowledge results about both where we are and where we say we are, fugue whose full effects are still to be seen.The country-as-North began at Confederation, with R.G. Haliburton's patriotic essay On Northern Culture; it continued steadily to John Sutherland's nationalist journal Northern Review and Donald Creighton's studies. In our time, John Diefenbaker heralded full vision in his 1958 campaign: a new Canada - Canada of North. While Edmund Wilson reminisced that Canada was the 'North Woods' - of upstate New York, Malcolm Ross told us we were more than Yankees, and W.L. Morton asserted that was one of four permanent factors in Canadian history. Cole Harris argued that our character and destiny bound us, somewhat Prometheus-like, to Precambrian Shield, while Mordecai Richler introduced his own calling Canada white, Protestant, heterosexual ghetto of north. Northrop Frye discussed north as symbol in Canadian writing, and Eli Mandel approved it. Frye also said that irony and tragedy dominate Canadian poetry, view that corresponded nicely with section in Anatomy of Criticism called Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire, even if Frye ignored Canadian literature. It corresponds entirely if we include W.L. Morton's belief that life moral or puritanical and creates disposition for satire. Oddly, E.D. Blodgett agrees with Frye that pastoralism predominates in Canadian literature, but he still entitles relevant chapter Cold Pastorals. How, then, do we take F.K. Hare's dissent, that Canadians have not, as nation, put North anywhere near centre of their mythology, or Rudy Wiebe's regret that Canadians have so little comprehension of our own nordicity? Part of our national mythology climatic and temperamental difference between Victoria, Montreal, and Tuktoyaktuk. Or are we just series of similarly frozen blocks, as Philip Stratford teased when he said that whereas United States 'melting pot' Canada 'a tray of ice cubes'? (f.2)Our mythology Here we move into second, conflicting sense of northernness: North-of-country. We find disagreement - but, surprisingly, little commentary - over location of Canada's Lack of consensus may result from its corollary topic of North-as-frontier, which itself shifty concern. Even William Westfall, in his landmark essay on Canadian regionalism, lets location slip like an ice cube from his grasp; his deconstruction of metaphor of northern land into regions - Atlantic, Central, Prairie, and Pacific - drops North as region entirely. Has it fallen into snow of Gilles Vigneault's pays - l'hiver - or Canada that, as Robert Kroetsch chuffs, is as timeless as winter? George Woodcock skips over it in his Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature, which informed by Canadian nationalism and related phenomenon of regionalism. Has North fallen down shaft of The Northern Miner, trade journal published in Don Mills, Ontario? Will light from Penumbra Press, Northern Publisher, as it likes to be known, of Moonbeam but mainly Waterloo, help us find it? Will we finally have to concede that North too slippery an entity, one that we can only hope to catch glimpses of in Northward Journal, periodical which serves northern arts from Kapuskasing base but also receives mail in downtown Toronto? …

Critical Polyphony: The Second Essay in the Anatomy of Criticism

CRITICAL POLYPHONY: THE SECOND ESSAY IN THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM JU DITH W EIL University of Manitoba N o r t h r o p Frye spent much of his career demonstrating that it is de­ sirable to be in several minds at any one time. He pointed out that our categories generally “interpenetrate” with one another and that our philoso­ phies imitate “that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought.” 1 Not surprisingly, Frye’s comparison of the Menippean satire or “anatomy” to the novel has often been cited as evidence that his own Anatomy of Criticism is more creative than analytic. In a recent fine essay on Frye’s style, Bert O. States reports his discovery that he was reading Frye “mainly for pleasure” (458). States praises Frye’s “wit” in the highest terms that our age of criticism has to offer. He links Frye’s “categorical absurdity” and particularized “centripetal” criticism to that of Derrida and Barthes (476). And he associates the Anatomy as a whole with Brueghel’s detached visions of Flemish life — the street scenes, the carnivals, and, above all, the intricate Tower of Babel (471-73). These analogies are so appealing that I would like to believe them. I would like to agree with that wisely foolish reader, Robert Kroetsch, when he con­ nects Frye and Bakhtin as liberating influences in The Lovely Treachery of Words. For Kroetsch (who may, of course, be deliberately misreading here), Frye is a carnivalizing prophet who has taught Canadian writers that “guile and violence . . . are the basic stuff of narrative” (159). Like States’s, Kroetsch’s Frye sounds distinctly post-modern, and post-modernists, as Linda Hutcheon keeps reminding us, are by and large guileful ironists, tricky parodists. Why not include Frye in this wonderful and provocative company? One reason for doubting Frye’s affiliation with ironists is that he generally does not hide his meanings. When ironists stop revelling in absence and indeterminacy, most of them start speaking duplicitously. A strong sense of disjunctiveness does resound in Frye’s notorious dry mocks, and many of his readers have relished what Angus Fletcher called the “low comedy” of Frye’s style.2But to use irony in this way is not necessarily to be a full-time ironist. T.S. Eliot once questioned “the use of irony to give the appearance of a philosophy of life, as something final and not instrumental.” When irony does become a philosophy of life, Eliot surmised, it becomes “an evasion of the difficulty of living, where it pretends to be a kind of solution of it” E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 (quoted by Ricks, 6). Frye’s treatment of irony suggests that like Eliot he may have distinguished speculative instrument from philosophic stance. In the Anatomy, he complained that “an ironic provincialism . . . is in the ascendant,” and asserted that “no set of critical standards derived from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about poetry” (62). In The Critical Path, he wrote that irony “is not the centre of human reality but only one of several modes of imaginative expression, and it is a function of the critic to provide some perspective for irony” (132). My main concern here will be to argue that the Second Essay of the Anatomy, “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols,” provides such a “perspective.” It exposes the limita­ tions of irony as a mode of criticism — that of the new critics “ascendant” in 1957, but also that of their successors in post-modern theory. To clarify the difference between philosophical ironists and a Frye who uses irony as an instrument, it may help to begin by considering the exam­ ple of Richard Rorty. This philosopher was hired several years ago by the University of Virginia’s English department in order, as Nathan Scott, a de­ partment member, put it, to “keep them honest” (63). Their idea was that since “large philosophical claims of one kind or another are implicitly being made in all systematic theory of literature . . . such claims need to be fully aired and carefully examined...

Northrop Frye and the Literary Canon

NORTHROP FRYE AND THE LITERARY CANON A.C . H A M ILTO N Queen’s University I. THE LITERARY CANON I t has been said — correctly, I believe — that the controversy over the liter­ ary canon “is one of the more important events in the history of twentiethcentury criticism.” 1 For a conference on this controversy, Frye’s writings provide an excellent set of parameters. He began his career in 1947 with Fearful Symmetry in which he argues that Blake’s engraved poems, which “were intended to form an exclusive and definitive canon” (6), deserve a central place within the canon of English literature. In 1957 with Anatomy of Criticism, however, he circumvented the formation of any literary canon by showing how all literary works together form an order of words as one body of literature. Then, in the many books up to his final phase, he sought to undermine the basis for any canon-formation by arguing that all uses of words relate to what he called society’s mythological universe based on the Bible. In his final phase, in The Great Code, Words With Power, and The Double Vision, he related the Bible as sacred scripture to literature as secular scripture in order to set up the mother of all canons, a universe of words. No loose canons were allowed to endanger this verbal universe: every literary work — even every use of words — provided him with canon-fodder. By the end of his career, then, the canon-revisionist who had become the greatest canon-breaker became the greatest canon-maker. By denying, at least in theory, any separation of the canonical from the non-canonical, Frye rejected the very concept of a canon, which involves — for whatever reason, and the reasons are many and complex — the selection of certain works as the standard or rule for the rest. For a canon is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. By virtue of being included within a privileged tradition of texts, a literary work is distinguished not only as being canonical but also as not being apocryphal. It becomes not just one more of many on the outside but one of the few on the inside, a member of a very exclusive club. It is pried loose from its particular historical context to exist trans-historically with other canonical works in an atemporal world. It acquires an aura that is bestowed on the religious canon: to be one of the select is to be one of the elect. A canon suggests a unified body of works that E n g l i s h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 constitutes one book, a world of its own, or a living organism which is more than the sum of its parts and which gives life to each of its members. Each work shares the social authority granted to the canon itself and is regarded as worthy of the most serious attention. Through that attention, it becomes part of a complex intertextual network of social significance at the centre of our culture. Once in the canon, its text is privileged and will be preserved in an authoritative edition; each word is open to extensive annotation; the work will be read in ways that demand and justify endless commentary; and in being constantly recreated, it will never be allowed to die. The canon confers value: one can point to the canonical work and say that this is the measure by which to judge other works, the measure to which other works aspire, the measure of what literature is. In discussing any canon, it soon becomes difficult not to hypostatize it as a single essence that merits a capital letter. Works excluded from the canon are similarly defined by their exclusion. A non-canonical work may be expected, for example, to appeal to the vulgar rather than to the educated, and directed to a mass audience,'usually sepa­ rating men from women — Wild West stories as against popular romances — rather than to the general reader; it will be published as a paper-back rather than a...

Celebrations: Frye’s The Double Vision and Laurence’s Dance on the Earth

CELEBRATIONS: FRYE’S THE DOUBLE VISION AND LAURENCE’S DANCE ON THE EARTH C L A R A TH O M A S York University And if the worst of all came upon us, if we had to fight to the last ditch for our freedom, with our brothers killed and our cities in smoking ruins, our poets would still stand over against us, and break out in hymns to the glory of God and in praise of his beautiful world. (Northrop Frye, “The Writer and the Univer­ sity,” 1957) I see old women dancing dancing on the earth I hear old women singing singing children’s birth dance on, old women, dance amidst the strife, sing out, old women, sing for life I am one among them dancing on the earth, mourning, grieving, raging, yet jubilating birth. (Margaret Laurence, Dance on the Earth, 1989) T e n years ago now, I wrote an article called “Towards Freedom: The Work of Margaret Laurence and Northrop Frye.” I was impelled to do that as a debt of gratitude to the two authors who had, in my time, most strikingly and effectively liberated Canadian writers, readers, and scholars from the lingering trauma of the “colonial cringe.” I wrote: Her [Laurence’s] Manawaka . . . has established the authenticity of its characters and culture as part of Canada’s imaginative landscape. . . . E n g l i s h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 It is living for her readers, densely peopled with the Curries and Shipleys , Tonnerres, Macleods, Connors, Camerons, Logans and Gunns, with all their dilemmas, aspirations, triumphs and tragedies. Hagar, Rachel, Stacey, Vanessa and Morag all free themselves within the limits of their situations and capabilities; the cumulative effect of the Manawaka cycle is profoundly emancipating. (TF 89) Similarly, from Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism to his “Conclusion” to the Literary History, and on through The Bush Garden and Divisions on a Ground to The Great Code and Words With Power, we have been given an unbroken line of illumination, inspiration, and the blessed assurance that we were not on the fringes but on the inside of a splendid, many-faceted, ultimately unified literary enterprise, moving finally to the goal that has been intrinsic to all of them through the years, “a community of vision.” The final testaments of Northrop Frye and Margaret Laurence, The Double Vision and Dance on the Earth, both of them published posthu­ mously, are in the truest sense “celebrations,” harvests of experience and conviction extended to us in the ways their writers knew best: Words with Power. Margaret Laurence’s convictions and affirmations first took shape in her novels and then, in her later years, in the essays she wrote and speeches she gave in aid of the many causes to which she was devoted. Her final memoir was a breakaway from both of these channels of communication; it is the testament of her own life directed as a legacy first to her daughter, her nieces, her friends, and then to all her readers. Northrop Frye’s insights were embodied in his decades of lectures, as well as the books, articles, and addresses for which he was known world-wide. But his final work, The Double Vision, was, like Margaret’s, more intimately directed, its first three chapters delivered to the alumni of Emmanuel College, his theological associates, and, in a very real sense, his lifelong, special classmates. The Honorary Degree, Doctor of Sacred Letters, that Margaret accepted in 1982 from Frye as Chancellor of Victoria University meant something very special to her, vindicating the thrust and intention of all her work, under threat at that time from the censors whose depredations were so hurtful to her. To me, watching the ceremony, it was a unique experience, witnessing the coming together as peers of the writer and the scholar, for both of whom I felt inexpressible affection and admiration. One from Moncton, one from Neepawa, and both of them embodying one of the powerful essences of Canadianism — Ross Woodman described The Great Code as providing “a comprehensive account of the roots of the...

The Children of Concern

THE CHILDREN OF CONCERN F R A N K K E R M O D E Cambridge University W oRDS with Power is not quite the book that hints and promises dropped and made in The Great Code had led one to expect. Encouraged to think of that book as the first volume of a two-volume work, we were waiting for the sequel, but that expectation is disappointed on the first page of Words with Power, for Northrop Frye at once confesses that he tried and failed to keep the promise, adding that publication of the present book “has been delayed by my poor judgment in not starting once again at square one” (xi). Consequently the work that resulted from this fresh start doesn’t, as both readers and author had hoped, take up all the specifically biblical issues that were, as it were, left over, or that needed more definition. There’s still a lot in it about the Bible, and there are many links with and references to The Great Code, but Frye himself accurately describes this new book, in the form it finally assumed, as a successor to Anatomy of Criticism. In that work, written over thirty years ago, he laid down a program to which, quite without authoritarian pedantry, he has ever since adhered. Any disappointment at the loss of a sequel to The Great Code should be easily borne, for Words with Power is a great achievement; it could be, though happily the author assures us it isn’t, a climactic farewell perfor­ mance. [Professor Kermode wrote his article before Frye’s death in 1991.] Its scope is enormous, for it deals not only with the Bible but with literature at large — literature being the most important instance of the way humanity tries to reconcile its social and individual needs with the conditions of its existence in the world. In Myth and Metaphor — a lesser work than Words with Power only be­ cause, made up of discrete essays, it is more fragmentary and occasionally repetitive — Frye speaks of poets as “the children of concern.” They are entitled to be called so because although they cannot help reflecting, and participating in, contemporary ideologies, they can offer something more, a liberation from ideology, an essential visionary bonus. This bonus is the something more that in the nature of things we need, but of which ignorance and poverty may, and in most cases do, deprive us. “When we become intol­ erably oppressed,” as Frye puts it in an extraordinarily eloquent passage at the end of Words with Power, “by the mystery of human existence and by what seems the utter impotence of God to do or even care anything about E n g l is h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 human suffering, we enter the stage of Eliot’s ‘word in the desert,’ and hear all the rhetoric of ideologues, expurgating, revising, setting straight, rational­ izing, proclaiming the time of renovation. After that, perhaps, the terrifying and welcome voice may begin, annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost” (313). Here Frye is referring to the voice of God addressing Job from the whirl­ wind, the great speech which, as he reads it, cuts through trivial issues of guilt and innocence and presents the sufferer with a vision of the primal creation. That vision contains one pole of “intelligible harmony” and an­ other where leviathan is king over all the children of pride (311). Frye’s own exaltation at the thought of a poetry which might do for us what God did for Job is a measure of his prophetic seriousness, which is unmatched by any living critic and has sublimity, a literary quality first described by the ancient critic Longinus, whom Frye admires. Meanwhile, pending such a clearing of the human vision, we have concern. Concern for concern irradiates both of these books. Frye has always identi­ fied his responsibility as an educator as the training of imagination and the clarification of “the social vision.” He is remarkably self-consistent, and like his basic ideas his pedagogy...

Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism

Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism

Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Anatomy and Bionomics of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Cases

ABOUT A THIRD OF A CENTURY AGO, as a Harvard undergraduate, I decided to sign up for a course on literature and myth, but after some debate. A man named Frye was giving it; I had never heard of Mr. Frye; a professor, maybe, but not a Harvard professor; would he meet the level of sophistication that we Harvardians expected and deserved? The first lecture dried up my doubts like a laser beam hitting a mosquito puddle. A mob of other students, probably faculty too, pressed to hear those lectures, which changed venue to a vast, dim crypt in the Fogg Art Museum. There Mr. Frye revealed to us on endlessly recycled blackboard space much of his forthcoming book, Anatomy of Criticism. As astounded baritones cry out in Italian operas, Cielo! Qual lampo! and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays this lampo flashed for forty minutes of lecture and ten minutes of virtuosic answers to queries from all comers. Of course I became an ardent Fryean. I rushed off to read Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell and the epigones of Jung; I strove to read Blake; best of all, in blissful April I bought Anatomy of Criticism moist from the presses, and I devoured it with an intense combined pleasure of rediscovery and new insights. Rereading Anatomy of Criticism in 1990, I found myself once again amazed by its scope, its audacity, its typical level of insight, its contrapuntal narrative logic. I was also wakened, as I could not have been in 1957, to its potent response to ideals current at the time, my own ideals then. With a bracing boom-time confidence, Anatomy of Criticism upholds apolitical purism, the example of science, and above all, a system for sorting systems. That fed us what we craved in those

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

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

Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World by David Cook

David Cook, Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 122. $19.95 cloth; $7.95 paper (u.s.) “The image that informs the study is closer to that of the caricature than that of the photograph” (6). With this opening statement of intendon David Cook might seem to deflect the reviewer from any question other than the aesthetics, and ethics, of willed artistic distortion: “A Frye whose features have been pulled and twisted: . . . both fictional and nonfictional.” Blasphemy perhaps, but hardly heresy. Yet in the next paragraph stance and style rejoin the world of conventional academic discourse: “The con­ cern here will be with Frye as a social critic and, in particular, with Frye’s defense of liberalism and his critique of technology.” This “caricature” has, it seems, both context and text. The final sentences of Cook’s “ Preface” confirm, again discursively, the unavoidable pun of the book’s sub-title: “ the New World symbolizes human­ ity’s attempt at forming a new vision. Thus the main theme of this study is Northrop Frye’s ‘America: A Prophecy’ ; a vision of the New World” (6). The illustration facing, Blake’s own title-page, redirects us toward visionary “ caricature,” as do the book’s other illustrations ending with Douglas Mar­ tin’s wryly elevated Frye. Cook’s Northrop Frye, then, is a half-study, half­ vision, in a half-visionary mode, of Frye’s New World both as a specifically North American New World and as the new world of Frye’s total thought. Or so, at the very least, it allows us to take it. Frye’s views on Canadian culture have been widely assessed in all the appropriate places; Cook’s version of these views will no doubt be equally scrutinized for its authority and helpfulness. How complete, how fair, is it to judge the new world of Frye’s total thought by the New World example, symbolic or not, offered by Frye’s specifically Canadian concerns? Can faults in the example, if found, be readily translated into flaws in the concept? So far Frye’s comments on Canadian culture have been occasional in both senses. They are found mainly in The Modern Century, The Bush Garden, and Divisions on a Ground: one set of three talks and two gatherings of assorted chapters, addresses, and reviews, the second less than the first. Cook draws on all these with, so far as I can judge, care. But Frye has not yet made an extended, systematic consideration of Canadian culture comparable to those he has made of Blake, of criticism, and of the Bible. Nor are his collections of Canadian commentary as wide-ranging in cultural and social thought and content as his comparable non-Canadian collections. Should all this affect our response to Cook’s use of these Canadian materials for his version of Northrop Frye? What, then, of Frye’s vision of another, more universal new world: one shaped imaginatively by “intrinsically educational and architectonic . .. kinds 349 of knowledge and experience that should become the informing principle for civilized life,” a transformed, apocalyptic, anagogic “living in the here and now as if in the kingdom of love and freedom.” 1 For years Frye has maintained that as to “ the social reference of literary criticism . . . I have written about practically nothing else.” 2 Yet such critics of Frye as Graff, Jameson, and above all Lentricchia, question either the genuine presence of such an activity or the adequacy of its results.3 For Terry Eagleton at his most dismissive, “Northrop Frye and the New Critics thought they had brought off a synthesis of the two [technocratic rationality and spiritual wholeness], but how many students of literature read them today?” 4 (More, perhaps, than Eagleton can see from his personal centre of the universe.) Such criticisms call for reply on their own discursive, analytic ground, some full re-assessment of Frye’s authority as general cultural and social critic as well as of his Anatomy of Criticism’s importance to, and grounding in, general cultural and social concerns, Marxist or Arnoldian. David Cook does not engage such critics of Frye directly, either through conventional...

FRYE IN CANBERRA

Frye's speech at the Australian National University on 27 June, 1986-around which the Humanities Research Centre's Northrop Frye Seminar was based-was titled Myth, Metaphor and Identity. speech-and Frye's visit-took place in the context of Frye's preparation of the successor to Great Code: a volume which will take up the theme of The Bible and Literature (as Great Code is subtitled) again, but this time more from the perspective of secular literature. Canberra talk confirmed what Frye's longstanding readers would already have suspected: that the new volume will be anything but a tracing of allusions or direct influences operative between the Bible and literature. As usual, Frye is trying to see his subject, not historically-as distributed through time-but typologically: as spread out in some kind of conceptual space. And here, as in Great Code and the Anatomy of Criticism, the organizing categories of that space will be called Myth and Metaphor. Frye's thinking-more, perhaps, than that of any other significant twentieth-century critic-has always been holistic, fearfully symmetrical, tending towards a unity of theme and a consistency of purpose. As a result, his work has been characterized less by progress or development or revision than by a spiralling movement of thought-one in which a limited set of central themes is repeatedly returned to and progressively unfolded. Myth, Metaphor and Identity was no exception to this rule, and was full of resonances with Frye's past-and future-writings. This was obvious right from the start, when Frye situated the speech in terms of the central polemical thrust of the Anatomy: his search, throughout his critical life, for a conception of criticism that would make it independent of the art it deals with and, more importantly, of such neighbouring disciplines as history and philosophy. If criticism is to avoid becoming an allegory of theology or psychology or aesthetics, then it will need to establish a clearer sense of the authority of the art it deals with. authority of literature has never been as clearly recognized as that of, say, science: an authority which has rendered science, to some degree, independent of governing ideologies and institutions. It is this question of establishing the nature of the poet's authority

The Comic, The Centripetal Text, and the Canadian Novel

T H E C O M I C , T H E C E N T R IP E T A L T E X T , A N D T H E C A N A D IA N N O V E L * LOUIS K . MAC KENDRICK University of Windsor X propose a modest realignment, not a redefinition, of the vexed term “comic,” from the perspective of postmodern fictional practice and with reference to some English-Canadian novels. The argument will be tentative and general in substance, both in theory and in abbreviated demonstration from selected narratives. There are few pieces of critical writing that deal with what I will represent as the measure of comic fictions, and a limited supportive commentary — which I make no attempt to include — from those writers considered to be comic novelists. Nevertheless, each character­ istically manifests that awareness of technique which is central to my re­ alignment. For Canadian literature as a whole the distinctions between what are called “comedy,” “humour,” and “comic” are unclear, and they are not enforced in popular appreciations and reviews, nor in academic criticism. In the latter, the nature of comedy as a mode is often defined only to confirm the prototypes of character and plot, themselves principally dramatic, sum­ marized by Northrop Frye most conveniently in Anatomy of Criticism. While the kinds and degrees of comedy have been argued in terms of aesthetics, psychology, linguistics, and literature, it is ultimately these models which preoccupy literary criticism. Critical attention to comedy invariably settles on content, not on technique, on plot, not on distinctions of rhetoric. Such attention often shows an at best uneasy understanding, or acknowledgement, of any relationship between a story and its style, a tale and its telling. In his article “Surviving the Paraphrase,” Frank Davey noted that “in its brief lifetime, Canadian criticism has acquired a history of being reluctant to focus on the literary work — to deal with matters of form, language, style, structure and consciousness as these arise from the work as a unique con­ struct.”1 Again, John Moss has recently complained of an insular Canadian criticism, of “schematic generalization” that assumes a particular orthodoxy and avoids “aesthetic evaluation.”2 While there are other instances of such * Originally delivered as a paper at the 1982 ACUTE annua,! conference at the University of Ottawa. English Studies in C anada, x, 3, September 1984 disaffection, or proposals for alternate critical directions,3 my approach necessarily acknowledges Frye in The Secular Scripture when, discussing the conventions of literary structure, he writes: “There is still a strong tendency to avoid problems of technique and design and structure in fiction, and to concentrate on what the book talks about rather than on what it actually presents.”4 My emphasis on Canadian comic novels is technical and stylistic; I wish to preserve the autonomy of fiction and not assume, or pretend, that it is otherwise an imitation of actuality. “Humour” has a longtime association with Canadian writing: witness such relatively recent and representative anthologies as A Book of Canadian Humour (1951), The Treasury of Great Canadian Humour (1974), Cana­ dian Humour and Satire (1976), and The Leacock Medal Treasury (1976), not to mention a host of individual collections. A sampling of criticism whose subject is the nature of Canadian humour reveals several persistent themes. J. D. Logan sees Canadians as unable to change their basically Calvinist or Puritan moral outlook, and as unable to regard life and conduct other than fragmentarily: “The result is that to them the part is greater than the whole,” and Canadian humour is “either hard and dry, like the crackling of thorns under a pot, or ephemeral and idiotic.”5 While these observations are important to our awareness of structural niceties in Cana­ dian fictional comedy, it is their notion of polarity in performance that is immediately significant. Lionel Stevenson suggests, more kindly, that Cana­ dian humour, with its emphasis on action rather than on character, and its undeveloped qualities of subtlety and insight, pursues a middle course be­ tween American exaggeration and British restraint. It is a hearty sense of fun, arising from genuine joy of life, including an eye for the absurd...

The Bible as Fugue: Theme and Variations

Despite his outspoken lucidity ('the fear of heresy ... the deadliest social psychosis in history,' P 11), his academic humility ('what I briefly attempted myself in the Anatomy of Criticism,' p 224), and his colloquial casualness at times ('It makes good sense to call the Bible and the person of Christ by the same name,' p 77), there is a powerful aura of something covert and withheld in the writing of Northrop Frye, a cloud of awesome implication that remains forever on the horizon and which leads to much misunderstanding of his meaning.