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Herman Northrop Frye, CC, MA (Oxon), DD, D.Litt., FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991), a Canadian, was one of the most distinguished literary critics and literary theorists of the twentieth century. The Order of Canada is the highest civilian honour within the Canadian system of honours, with membership awarded to those who exemplify the order's Latin In the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin, the degree of Master of Arts or Master in Arts ( MA) is awarded to Bachelors Doctor of Letters ( Latin: Litterarum doctor; DLitt; or Litt D The Royal Society of Canada ( Société royale du Canada) now known as the RSC Academies of Arts Humanities and Sciences of Canada ( SRC Académies des Arts Events 1223 - Louis VIII becomes King of France upon the death of his father Philip II of France. Year 1912 ( MCMXII) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Leap year starting Events 393 - Roman Emperor Theodosius I proclaims his nine year old son Honorius co-emperor Year 1991 ( MCMXCI) was a Common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar. Country to "Dominion of Canada" or "Canadian Federation" or anything else please read the Talk Page Literary criticism is the study discussion evaluation and interpretation of Literature. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on

Contents

Biography

Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec but raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, Frye studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Quebec (kwɨˈbɛk Moncton ( is a Canadian city located in Westmorland County, New Brunswick. New Brunswick ( French: Nouveau-Brunswick /nuvobʁɔnzwik/ is one of Canada 's three Maritime provinces and is the only constitutionally Victoria University ("Vic" for short is a Federated school of the University of Toronto, consisting of Victoria College and Emmanuel College This article is about the University of Toronto's St George Campus He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (part of Victoria University). Emmanuel College is the United Church of Canada seminary of Victoria University at the University of Toronto. After a brief stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada. Saskatchewan (səˈskætʃəwən) is a prairie province in Canada, which has an area of 588276 The United Church of Canada was founded in 1925 as a merger of four Christian denominations two thirds of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (then the largest Canadian Protestant He then studied at Merton College, Oxford[1], before returning to Victoria College for his entire professional career. See also Wardens of Merton College Oxford. Merton College is also the name of a college in the London Borough of Merton. Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until that point, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827 was an English poet, painter, and Printmaker. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and from the Bible. Paradise Lost is an Epic poem in Blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. Etymology According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible is from Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin Not only was his study of Blake's poetry a major contribution, but in his book, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that deeply influenced the study of literature in general. Frye was a major influence on, amongst others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood. Harold Bloom' (born July 11, 1930) is a Literary critic. Bloom defended 19th-century Romantic poets at a time when their reputations Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian Writer.

His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism, one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. Herman Northrop Frye 's Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays (Princeton University Press 1957 attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope theory principles

Frye engaged in cultural and social criticism and was the recipient of some 39 honorary degrees.

Frye was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1958. The Royal Society of Canada ( Société royale du Canada) now known as the RSC Academies of Arts Humanities and Sciences of Canada ( SRC Académies des Arts The Lorne Pierce Medal is awarded every two years by the Royal Society of Canada to recognize achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical In 1972 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. The Order of Canada is the highest civilian honour within the Canadian system of honours, with membership awarded to those who exemplify the order's Latin

Frye died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. Mount Pleasant Cemetery is a famous Cemetery located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Toronto (təˈrɒntoʊ colloquially pronounced or) is the largest city in Canada and is the provincial capital of Ontario Ontario (ɒnˈtɛrioʊ is a province located in the central part of Canada, the largest by population and second largest after Quebec

In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. This is a list of notables on stamps of Canada. A John Abbott (1952 Emma Albani (1980 Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha An international literary festival The Frye Festival, named in Frye's honour, takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick. The Frye Festival, formerly known as the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival, is a bilingual (French and English literary festival

Northrop Frye Centre [1], part of Victoria College in the University of Toronto, was named in his honour, as was the Humanities Stream of the Vic One Program at Victoria College and the Northrop Frye Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Contribution to literary criticism

The insights gained from his study of Blake set Frye on his critical path, and shaped his contributions to literary criticism and theory. William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827 was an English poet, painter, and Printmaker. Literary criticism is the study discussion evaluation and interpretation of Literature. As the first critic to postulate a systematic theory of criticism, “to work out,” in his own words, “a unified commentary on the theory of literary criticism” (Stubborn Structure 160), Frye’s primary contribution was to shape the discipline of criticism. Inspired by his work on Blake, Frye first articulated his unified theory ten years after Fearful Symmetry, in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which he described as an attempt at a “synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism” (Anatomy 3). Herman Northrop Frye 's Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays (Princeton University Press 1957 attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope theory principles Asking “what if criticism is a science as well as an art?” (7), Frye launched the pursuit which was to occupy the rest of his career – that of establishing criticism as a “coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason” (Hamilton 34).

Criticism as a science

As A. C. Hamilton outlines in Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism, Frye’s assumption of coherence for literary criticism carries important implications. Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, independent of literature. Claiming with John Stuart Mill that “the artist . John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 &ndash 8 May 1873 British Philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential . . is not heard but overheard,” Frye insists that

The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with (Anatomy 5).

This “declaration of independence” (Hart xv) is necessarily a measured one for Frye. For coherence requires that the autonomy of criticism, the need to eradicate its conception as “a parasitic form of literary expression, . . . a second-hand imitation of creative power” (Anatomy 3), sits in dynamic tension with the need to establish integrity for it as a discipline. For Frye, this kind of coherent, critical integrity involves claiming a body of knowledge for criticism that, while independent of literature, is yet constrained by it: “If criticism exists,” he declares, “it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field” itself (Anatomy 7).

Frye’s conceptual framework for literature

In seeking integrity for criticism, Frye rejects what he termed the deterministic fallacy. He defines this as the movement of “a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics [to] express . . . that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less” (Anatomy 6). By attaching criticism to an external framework rather than locating the framework for criticism within literature, this kind of critic essentially “substitute[s] a critical attitude for criticism. ” For Frye critical integrity means that “the axioms and postulates of criticism . . . have to grow out of the art it deals with” (Anatomy 6).

Taking his cue from Aristotle, Frye’s methodology in defining a conceptual framework begins inductively, “follow[ing] the natural order and begin[ning] with the primary facts” (Anatomy 15). Aristotle (Greek Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC was a Greek philosopher a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. The primary facts, in this case, are the works of literature themselves. And what did Frye’s inductive survey of these “facts” reveal? Significantly, they revealed “a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to [primitive formulas]” (Anatomy 17). This revelation prompted his next move, or rather, ‘inductive leap’:

I suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole (Anatomy 16).

Arguing that “criticism cannot be a systematic [and thus scientific] study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so,” Frye puts forward the hypothesis that “just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of ‘works,’ but an order of words” (Anatomy 17). This order of words constitutes criticism’s conceptual framework, its coordinating principle.

The order of words

The recurring primitive formulas Frye noticed in his survey of the “greatest classics” provide literature with an order of words, a “skeleton” which allows the reader “to respond imaginatively to any literary work by seeing it in the larger perspective provided by its literary and social contexts” (Hamilton 20). Frye identifies these formulas as the “conventional myths and metaphors” which he calls "archetypes" (Spiritus Mundi 118). The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore" An archetype ( pronounced: /ˈɑːkɪtaɪp/ (Brit or /ˈɑrkɪtaɪp/ (Amer The archetypes of literature exist, Frye argues, as an order of words, providing criticism with a conceptual framework and a body of knowledge derived not from an ideological system but rooted in the imagination itself. Thus, rather than interpreting literary works from some ideological ‘position’ – what Frye calls the “superimposed critical attitude” (Anatomy 7) – criticism instead finds integrity within the literary field itself.

Criticism for Frye, then, is not a task of evaluation – that is, of rejecting or accepting a literary work – but rather simply of recognizing it for what it is and understanding it in relation to other works within the ‘order of words’ (Cotrupi 4). Imposing value judgments on literature belongs, according to Frye, “only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice” (Anatomy 9). Genuine criticism “progresses toward making the whole of literature intelligible” (Anatomy 9) so that its goal is ultimately knowledge and not evaluation. For the critic in Frye's mode, then,

. . . a literary work should be contemplated as a pattern of knowledge, an act that must be distinguished, at least initially, from any direct experience of the work, . . . [Thus] criticism begins when reading ends: no longer imaginatively subjected to a literary work, the critic tries to make sense out of it, not by going to some historical context or by commenting on the immediate experience of reading but by seeing its structure within literature and literature within culture (Hamilton 27). Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate" generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic

A theory of the imagination

Once asked whether his critical theory were Romantic, Frye responded, “Oh, it’s entirely Romantic, yes” (Stingle 1). Romanticism is a complex artistic literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the It is Romantic in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that is, “in the expanded sense of giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling” (Stingle 2). As artifacts of the imagination, literary works, including “the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, and folk-tale” (Archetypes 1450) form, in Frye’s vision, a potentially unified imaginative experience. A ritual is a set of actions often thought to have Symbolic value the performance of which is usually prescribed by a Religion or by the Traditions The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore" History The concept of folklore developed as part of the 19th century ideology of Romantic nationalism, leading to the reshaping of oral traditions to serve modern ideological He reminds us that literature is the “central and most important extension” of mythology: “. The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore" . . every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature” (Words with Power xiii). Mythology and literature thus inhabit and function within the same imaginative world, one that is “governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres” (Hart 23). Integrity for criticism requires that it too operate within the sphere of the imagination, and not seek an organizing principle in ideology. To do so, claims Frye,

. . . leaves out the central structural principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes. Such structural principles are certainly conditioned by social and historical factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of form that points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from all its adaptations to its social environment (Words with Power xiii).

Myth therefore provides structure to literature simply because literature as a whole is “displaced mythology” (Bates 21). Hart makes the point well when he states that “For Frye, the story, and not the argument, is at the centre of literature and society. The base of society is mythical and narrative and not ideological and dialectical” (19). This idea, which is central in Frye’s criticism, was first suggested to him by Giambattista Vico. Giambattista Vico, Giambattista Vigo or Giovanni Battista Vico ( June 23, 1668 – January 23, 1744) was an Italian

Frye’s critical method

Frye uses the terms ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world. Lyric poetry, for instance, like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," is dominantly centripetal, stressing the sound and movement and imagery of the ordered words. " Ode on a Grecian Urn " is a Poem by John Keats, written in 1819 and first published in January 1820 Rhetorical novels, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, are dominantly centrifugal, stressing the thematic connection of the stories and characters to the social order. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly is an anti- Slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. The "Ode" has centrifugal tendencies, relying for its effects on elements of history and pottery and visual aesthetics. Cabin has centripetal tendencies, relying on syntax and lexical choice to delineate characters and establish mood. But the one veers inward, the other pushes outward. Criticism reflects these movements, centripetally focusing on the aesthetic function of literature, centrifugally on the social function of literature.

While some critics or schools of criticism emphasize one movement over the other, for Frye, both movements are essential: “criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature” (Critical Path 25). He would therefore agree, at least in part, with the New Critics of his day in their centripetal insistence on structural analysis. New Criticism was a dominant trend in English and American Literary criticism of the mid twentieth century from the 1920s to the early 1960s But for Frye this is only part of the story: “It is right,” he declares, “that the first effort of critical apprehension should take the form of a rhetorical or structural analysis of a work of art. But a purely structural approach has the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology. ” That is, it doesn’t develop “any explanation of how the structure came to be what it was and what its nearest relatives are. Structural analysis brings rhetoric back to criticism, but we need a new poetics as well . . . ” (Archetypes 1447).

Archetypal criticism as “a new poetics”

For Frye, this “new poetics” is to be found in the principle of the mythological framework, which has come to be known as ‘archetypal criticism’. It is through the lens of this framework, which is essentially a centrifugal movement of backing up from the text towards the archetype, that the social function of literary criticism becomes apparent. Essentially, “what criticism can do,” according to Frye, “is awaken students to successive levels of awareness of the mythology that lies behind the ideology in which their society indoctrinates them” (Stingle 4). That is, the study of recurring structural patterns grants students an emancipatory distance from their own society, and gives them a vision of a higher human state – the Longinian sublime – that is not accessible directly through their own experience, but ultimately transforms and expands their experience, so that the poetic model becomes a model to live by. Longinus (Λογγῖνος is the conventional name of the author of the treatise On the Sublime (Περὶ ὕψους a work which focuses on the effect of In what he terms a “kerygmatic mode,” myths become “myths to live by” and metaphors “metaphors to live in,” which “. . . not only work for us but constantly expand our horizons, [so that] we may enter the world of [kerygma or transformative power] and pass on to others what we have found to be true for ourselves” (Double Vision 18).

Because of its important social function, Frye felt that literary criticism was an essential part of a liberal education, and worked tirelessly to communicate his ideas to a wider audience. The term liberal education has its origins in the medieval concept of the Liberal arts but now is primarily associated with the Liberalism of the “For many years now,” he wrote in 1987, “I have been addressing myself primarily, not to other critics, but to students and a nonspecialist public, realizing that whatever new directions can come to my discipline will come from their needs and their intense if unfocused vision” (Auguries 7). It is therefore fitting that his last book, published posthumously, should be one that he describes as being “something of a shorter and more accessible version of the longer books, The Great Code and Words with Power,” which he asks his readers to read sympathetically, not “as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage, however near the pilgrimage may now be to its close” (Double Vision Preface).

See Also: Archetypal literary criticism

Influences: Vico and Blake

Vico, in The New Science, posited a view of language as fundamentally figurative, and introduced into Enlightenment discourse the notion of the role of the imagination in creating meaning. Archetypal literary criticism is a type of critical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and Archetypes (from the Greek archē, The Age of Enlightenment or The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century For Vico, poetic discourse is prior to philosophical discourse; philosophy is in fact derivative of poetry. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language Frye readily acknowledged the debt he owed to Vico in developing his literary theory, describing him as “the first modern thinker to understand that all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones” (Words with Power xii).

However, it was Blake, Frye’s “Virgilian guide” (Stingle 1), who first awakened Frye to the “mythological frame of our culture” (Cotrupi 14). William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827 was an English poet, painter, and Printmaker. In fact, Frye claims that his “second book [Anatomy] was contained in embryo in the first [Fearful Symmetry]” (Stubborn Structure 160). For it was in reflecting on the similarity between Blake and Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the “principle of the mythological framework,” the recognition that “the Bible was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology” (Hart 18). Etymology According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible is from Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature. As Hamilton asserts, “Blake’s claim that ‘the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art’ became the central doctrine of all [Frye’s] criticism” (39). This ‘doctrine’ found its fullest expression in Frye’s appropriately named The Great Code, which he described as “a preliminary investigation of Biblical structure and typology” whose purpose was ultimately to suggest “how the structure of the Bible, as revealed by its narrative and imagery, was related to the conventions and genres of Western literature” (Words with Power xi).

Works by Northrop Frye

The following is a list of his books, including the volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, an ongoing project under the editorship of Alvin A. Lee. Alvin A Lee, BA, MDiv, PhD, is a Literary critic. The majority of his academic career--some 39 years--was spent at McMaster University

Other accomplishments


External links

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