Fables Of Identity Research Articles

Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. xxxii+445.

<i>Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose</i>. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. xxxii+445.

The Nation and Its Fictions: History and Allegory in Tagore's Gora

In Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora (1910) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), literary works which employ the fiction of nativity to examine a paradoxical moment of historical origin, the idea of the nation is subjected to intolerable strain. Fables of identity are constructed in both novels, yet instead of a ‘hardening’ of the metaphysical idea that sustains the allegorical parallel, what we witness is a radical dissolution or disintegration of the categories of nation and narrative at the very site of their inscription. I will argue that in both works, the symbolic equation of novel and nation opens up fissures in historical experience.

Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature Gordon Teskey Northrop Frye . Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 20 of The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press. lix, 494. $100.00 In the preface to Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye says that his synoptic study of literature and its criticism began as a study of Edmund Spenser's traditional symbolism so as to complement his study, in Fearful Symmetry (1947), of the private symbolism of Blake. As he addressed some preliminary theoretical issues, these expanded to become a different book. The original project on Spenser was reduced to an article, 'The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,' a brilliant scherzo on the original design. [End Page 368] This picture, although accurate in outline, is complicated when we follow Frye's labours from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s as they appear in this volume, which collects six notebooks and five sets of typed notes on Renaissance literature, divided into three parts: a running commentary on two-thirds of The Faerie Queene, notes on the symbolism of Shakespeare's plays and on the dramatic tradition from Aristophanes to Shaw, and notes on lyric poetry and non-fiction prose. The intellectual framework is partly disclosed (more elaborate ones appear in the notes) in the first item in this volume: the Guggenheim Fellowship Application Frye submitted in 1949, which proposed to complete three books – on epic, drama, and prose – amounting, as the editor, Michael Dolzani, says, 'to a complete study of literature up to about 1600.' A fourth volume on 'the breakdown of the literary synthesis that culminated in the Renaissance' was planned to follow, now published as Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance, volume 15 of the Collected Works. We're not done yet. These four volumes were to be half of an eight-volume synthesis of modern thought on the model of Spengler and Toynbee, which Frye referred to, with a touch of self-mockery, as an 'ogdoad.' What happened to these vast designs? After Anatomy of Criticism, Frye wrote the many smaller, more accessible books that these labours made possible: on romance, on Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, on Milton, on education, on creativity, etc., plus the major essay collections, Fables of Identity and Spiritus Mundi. The plans concocted in Frye's late thirties ran up against a life of increasing responsibility and fame, and these classically elegant studies, most of them based on public lectures, resulted. Even so, Frye struggled mightily throughout the 1960s and early 1970s with what he called a 'Third Book' (volume nine of the Collected Works), which was abandoned when he turned to the final major effort of his career: the two-volume study of the Bible, The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990). The materials in this volume require painstaking editing and copious annotation, an immense labour Dolzani has accomplished triumphantly. The introduction is perhaps less detached from Frye's manner and style of thinking than is ideal for this purpose, but it communicates the enthusiasm one will need for the hard slogging to follow: 385 pages of tightly packed cerebration struggling to organize itself from within. We watch Frye engaged in the laborious process of hammering his thoughts – which are consistently, often explosively brilliant – into a unity that is still a long way off. We are thus looking at unfinished – and sometimes, as with the Spenser commentary, unfinishable and unfocused – writing; but each of the paragraphs is polished into near-publishable form. Still, Frye talks a good deal to himself – he even tells himself once to shut up. He writes some very funny passages and throws out good zingers – 'the public does not know what it wants, but it knows what [End Page 369] it expects' – of the kind we have come to enjoy in his books. And there's a small but welcome dose of swearing and bad attitude. The erudition is even more impressive than it is in the published books, where he's trying hard to tone it down, and his command of the primary texts is amazing. Throughout the Shakespeare commentary, for...

Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography

Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography. E. NENI PANOURGIÁ. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xxvi + 242 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index.

Resistance, Misrecognition, or Identity? Images of Rural and Urban in Three Recent Greek Ethnographies

The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. NADIA SEREMETAKIS. Chicago IL University of Chicago Press. 1991, xi + 275 pp. Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography. NENI PANOURGIA. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1995, xxiv + 242 pp. Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle. VASSOS ARGYROU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996, x + 210 pp. Since its beginning the ethnography of Greece has struggled with the relationship between the rural and the urban. In a country that has suffered extreme rural depopulation since the time of its brutal civil war (1945-49), which was largely fought in these villages, anthropological concern with rural communities has seemed to some particularly misplaced. Yet as a recent documentary on Greece points out, rural depopulation is somewhat of a facade, as many nouveau and even long-time urbanites continue to register for voting purposes in their home villages and return for festive occasions (Triffit 1993). When you ask a Greek are you from? the response will only elicit the further question where is your village? Even the first studies of Greece carried out in the late 1950s and early 1960s recognized some of these tensions. Campbell's (1964) study of Sarakatsani transhumant shepherds focussed in large part on the patronage networks that connected them to the centers of power. Friedl's (1964) model of got anthropological thinking going on the processes by which rural villagers were made to feel backward by their urban cousins, and thus were willing to sell off their land to buy apartments in Athens as dowries to attract high-status urban grooms. The lagging emulation thesis was picked up by Stewart (1991). He updated Zeno's paradox in showing how rural villagers who have rejected superstition as part of their quest for modernity have once again fallen behind their urban cousins who have now embraced astrology, tarot readings, and other revamped signs of the West. Others, such as Herzfeld (1987), argued for the centrality of the rural in Greek national ideology, and thus showed how economically marginalized Greek villagers have tried to use this national discourse to claim political and ideological power as representatives of true Greek virtues. More pragmatically, Buck-Sutton (1988), foreshadowing transnationalist discourse, posed the question what is a village in a nation of migrants? examining how village identity is reconstituted by urban-based migrant associations. And Hirschon (1989) challenged the distinction between rural and urban identities in her work on the role of religion and ritual in a community of Asia Minor refugees in urban Piraeus. My own field research on the Dodecanese island of Kalymnos also touched on issues of the rural and the urban. I first came to Kalymnos in 1980 on a study-abroad program for American students. Kalymnos had been chosen by the director of the program in part because he believed that it still retained many of the traditional aspects of Greek life that had been lost in Athens and other regions overrun by tourism. But if my early experience of Kalymnos was as a repository of I also was attracted to the cosmopolitan outlook of Kalymnians. This perhaps reflected the fact that Kalymnos's rocky environment never supported much agriculture, and thus Kalymnos has long been primarily oriented toward seafaring: from the legendary sponge divers to fishermen and sailors. My own research, however, was shaped by my attraction to the Geertzian experience-near approach as well as a Foucauldian concept of discursive practices. This led to a focus not on how Kalymnos was a repository of traditional Greek lifeways, but rather on how Kalymnians used the categories tradition, custom, and history in negotiating their identity in relation to a number of key others: from neighboring islanders living off the fat of the tourist boom, to corrupt Athenians, modern Western Europeans and innocent Americans (Sutton 1998). …

Neni Panourgiá, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin Press. Pp. xxiii, 242, 27 plates.

Neni Panourgiá, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin Press. Pp. xxiii, 242, 27 plates.

Death as Theory and EthnographyFragments of Death: Fables of Identity, an Athenian Anthropography. By Neni Panourgiá. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Death as Theory and Ethnography<i>Fragments of Death: Fables of Identity, an Athenian Anthropography</i>. By Neni Panourgiá. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Gender, Death, and Memory in Greece: New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941-1964 . Janet Hart. ; Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography . Neni Panourgia.

New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941-1964. Janet Hart Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography. Neni Panourgia. Madison

Fragments of death, fables of identity: an Athenian anthropography

Following the lives of men and women in the neighbourhoods of Athens, this study considers how individuals define their identity as Athenians, as members of a family, as subjects of a policy, and in death or mourning.

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

Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self by Milton J. Bates (review)

Book Reviews91 Works Reviewed Montherlant, Henry de. Thrasylle. Paris: Robert Laffont; Lausanne: J.-P. Laubscher, 1984. 171 p. Peyrefitte, Roger, and Pierre Sipriot, eds. Correspondance: Henry de Montherlant-Roger Peyrefitte. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983. 321 p. Raimond, Michel. Les Romans de Montherlant. Paris: C.D.U. et SEDES Réunis, 1982. 220 p. Sipriot, Pierre. Montherlant sans masque, Tome I, L'Enfant prodigue (18951932 ). Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982. 500 p. MILTON J. BATES. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985. 319 p. In his preface, Bates states that his intended audience is not necessarily the Stevens specialist, but rather the student who has been "balked" by the difficulties of Stevens' poetry. His goal is not to write biography but to show how Stevens transcended biography through the masks he created in his poetry. The title comes from a line in "From the Journal of Crispin": "What counts is the mythology of self." In tracing these "fables of identity," Bates uses a primarily historical approach to reveal how Stevens' inner life was shaped by his outer life, particularly by his relationships with other people. Bates traces Stevens' mythology of self back to his father, a lawyer and sometime poet, and to George Santayana, Stevens' mentor at Harvard. Stevens regarded his father as the active and involved man of the world, in contrast to the detached and contemplative Santayana, Bates argues, and Stevens "spent a lifetime trying to restore these halves to their first integrity," what James Russell Lowell called "mystic-practicalism" (35). But there is insufficient evidence to support such an assertion, and Bates' contention appears to be mere speculation. The appearance of such sweeping statements without adequate support is one of the major weaknesses of the book. Too often, Bates resorts to hedge words such as "may," "probably," or "perhaps" without providing the necessary support. Another problem is a tendency to ramble and a lack of focus. In some chapters, particularly the last one, explications of individual poems appear without any apparent relationship to each other or to the chapter as a whole. Occasionally, the analyses do not elucidate the supposed topic of the chapter. But I do not wish to detract from the virtues of the book, which are many. Bates quite admirably achieves what he set out to do — to provide an interesting study of the life and works of a very complex poet, who is often unintelligible to the novitiate. It is a fine introduction to a difficult poet. Bates' biographical interpretations of the poems seem quite valid and interesting when he has the necessary evidence to support them. He traces Stevens' use of comic personae to love letters written to his future wife, Elsie Kachel, in which he created a cast of characters such as ' 'Tom Folio" and ' Old Prune" to hide his self-consciousness. These masks anticipate his later "aesthetic dandyism" (100) 92Rocky Mountain Review and his "fops of fancy" such as Bantam, Berserk, Carlos, Peter Quince, and Crispin (117). In "The Comedian as the Letter C," Crispin imagines himself as "A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown." These masks give way to medium man during Stevens' middle phase and to the paysan in the late poetry. Bates points out that the latter is marked by traditional images of stability and authority such as God and family. The book is also useful in that it places Stevens in a historical continuum with particular references to the English decadent movement, Stevens' literary predecessors, and to the leftist critics who regarded Stevens as an "ivory tower" poet (166). The leftists were not his only critics, however: Frost accused Stevens of writing "bric-a-brac," and others such as Louis Untermeyer charged that his verse was merely "decorative" or decadent (147). In presenting Stevens' poetic theory as well as the reaction of his contemporaries, Bates provides the reader with a solid introduction to the poems and their intellectual milieu. Also helpful is Bates' discussion of key terms intrinsic to any consideration of the works. The Interior Paramour is Stevens' term for the muse, his creative anima (60). Pure poetry, according to Stevens, consists of "images and images alone, or images and the music...