tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post8022530257923362837..comments2024-03-26T01:10:13.720+00:00Comments on Teach Me Tonight: Northrop Frye on RomanceE. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-27215274920849480792011-01-06T16:25:38.061+00:002011-01-06T16:25:38.061+00:00This comment has been removed by the author.Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09577417918428286900noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-69447033396032973462011-01-06T13:25:47.675+00:002011-01-06T13:25:47.675+00:00Interesting--and I wonder whether the publication ...Interesting--and I wonder whether the publication of the Notebooks provides the opportunity for some sort of "Neo-Frygian" critical turn.<br /><br />Practically speaking, though, I wonder what the reception outside our charmed circle of popular romance scholars would be to a paper drawing primarily on Frye as its critical resource. What would a peer-reviewer at the Journal of Popular Culture or Mosaic say, for example? (Or even at JPRS, perhaps.) Are there critics who've built on Frye that you found useful in the dissertation?E. M. Selingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-61508543089439465332011-01-05T19:48:38.219+00:002011-01-05T19:48:38.219+00:00I think there is a sort of reluctant attitude towa...I think there is a sort of reluctant attitude towards Frye in Canada. Linda Hutcheon in an introduction to _The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination_ writes: "Canadian poet and critic Eli Mandel once claimed that the Canadian criticism of Northrop Frye - that world-renowned and most formidable theorist of literature - was cogent and powerful but also widely misunderstood" (vii). Though Hutcheon through Mandel is talking specifically about his Canadian literary criticism, it seems that the same holds true for much of Frye's criticism. I think that there is a general feeling that Frye's work was "good in its time" but, to borrow an oft-cited Frye-ism, perhaps now is time for "new directions from old." And, in many regards, I think that is precisely what many in popular romance studies (like you) are doing: drawing on Frye's old directions and giving them a new life.Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09577417918428286900noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-21119821534980518072011-01-05T15:10:59.370+00:002011-01-05T15:10:59.370+00:00Two thoughts, Jonathan!
In my courses on popular...Two thoughts, Jonathan! <br /><br />In my courses on popular romance (I'm about to teach my 23rd, or something like that), several ideas from Frye prove extremely useful, year after year, in framing the genre. <br /><br />The first come from his contrast between Romance and realism in the Anatomy of Criticism: that in Romance “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended" (AC 33), and that in Romance, characterization tends to be structural, rather than psychological. This really helps keep students from objecting too loudly or too long that the novels we're reading "aren't realistic," or that characters aren't behaving (or aren't described) in the three-dimensional way they've been taught to prize.<br /><br />The second, even more crucial, is his notion of "design." In the texts my students have previously studied, the symmetries and other marks of authorial design have mostly been subtle or hidden out of sight; in popular romance novels, they tend to be much more visible. The passage I like to give them is this:<br /><br />"This affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and yet romantic enough to be a ‘good story,’ which means a clearly designed one. The introduction of an omen or portent, or the device of making a whole story the fulfillment of a prophecy given at the beginning, is an example. Such a device suggests, in its existential projection, a conception of ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent will. Actually, it is a piece of pure literary design, giving the beginning some symmetrical relationship with the end, and the only ineluctable will involved is that of the author" (AC 139).<br /><br />I don't know The Secular Scripture or the Notebooks well yet, but it looks like they'll be of use. <br /><br />Is it the case, though, that in Canada, Frye is still a foundational critic? My sense here in the US (correct me if I'm wrong, anyone) is that he's seen as quite old-fashioned, even a bit declasse. Is he due for an American revival?E. M. Selingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-5478393133141651482011-01-05T13:10:47.899+00:002011-01-05T13:10:47.899+00:00I saw this over at www.theeducatedimagination.com ...I saw this over at www.theeducatedimagination.com today and was struck by the way Frye talks about popular literature. Additionally, I think this is something that Pam spoke about in her keynote address at the IASPR conference:<br /><br />The distinction between popular culture and highbrow culture assumes that there are two different kinds of people, and I think that’s extremely dubious. I don’t see the virginal purity of highbrow literature trying to keep itself unsullied from the pollutions of popular culture. Umberto Eco wasn’t any less a semiotics scholar for writing a bestselling romance [The Name of the Rose]. There isn’t a qualitative distinction. It just doesn’t exist. And I think that the tendency on the part of the mass media as a whole is to abolish this distinction. (CW 24, 766)Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09577417918428286900noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-9342222322304883612011-01-04T14:36:49.039+00:002011-01-04T14:36:49.039+00:00Thanks, Laura and Pam! I will try and write other...Thanks, Laura and Pam! I will try and write other posts on Frye here -- likely involving the Notebooks as well.Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09577417918428286900noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-41834159545031118032011-01-03T18:34:36.940+00:002011-01-03T18:34:36.940+00:00Thanks, Jonathan. I suspect what I was doing was t...Thanks, Jonathan. I suspect what I was doing was thinking through why I think the study of romance is important, and picking out bits of Frye which resonated with me as I did that.Laura Vivancohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00906661869372622821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-61935953739038924112011-01-03T14:03:49.019+00:002011-01-03T14:03:49.019+00:00Frye had a long term interest in romance, so I'...Frye had a long term interest in romance, so I'm not sure what to say in response, Laura. Michael Dolzani in his introduction to _Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance_ writes: "In his earlier writings, Frye thinks of romance almost entirely as a by-product of Romanticism, and of Romanticism as the last and most decadent phase of the Spenglerian decline of the west" (CW XV:xxiii). Dolzani explains that there is a second period in Frye's theorisations: "In the period of _Anatomy_, Frye acknowledges that romance is far older than Romanticism; indeed, if folktale is its first manifestation, it is conterminous with myth itself. Romance thus becomes, in this period, a subsidiary double of myth" (CW XV:xxiv). Then, of course, another period: "It is only in the final phase that romance becomes for Frye a full Blakean contrary to myth. He has come to realize that his heritage from Blake is in fact double, and that this is a good thing, because 'Without Contraries Is no Progression'" (CW XV:xxiv). <br /><br />Dolzani's introduction is wonderful because it is quite elaborate and very aware of Frye's history with romance.<br /><br />Joe Adamson and Jean Wilson in their introduction to _The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991_ write: "In Notes 56a, one of hte _Secular Scripture_ notebooks, [Frye] remarks that after search for some time for a 'unified theme,' he now has 'the main structure of a book [he has] been ambitious to write for at least twenty year, without understanding what it was, except in bits and pieces' [CW XV:199-200]. His hope is to 'make it the subject of [the lectures] at Harvard. After all, it's fundamentally an expansion of the paper I did for the Harvard myth conference.' The latter paper, 'Myth, Fiction, and Displacement', first published in 1961, outlines and develops a 'central principle about 'myth criticism': that myth is a structural element in literature because literature as a whole is a 'displaced' mythology'" (CW XVIII:xxiv).<br /><br />This certainly does not answer why Frye wrote specifically about romance, but rather shows that it was a long-term concern for Frye.Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09577417918428286900noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-61443254900969222262011-01-03T12:23:24.169+00:002011-01-03T12:23:24.169+00:00The idea in Frye that I am most engaged with at th...The idea in Frye that I am most engaged with at the moment is this: "...in all histories of fiction the realists form the skeleton; the romancers lack their moral dignity, and are just entertainers" (_Collected Works Vol. 15: Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance_, 191). Putting the romancers--the American ones, in my case--in the center of the history of fiction, rather than in the footnotes, is my current project.<br /><br />A huge hat tip to Jonathan who suggested that I read Frye's notebooks.Pam Regishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16026260173036547212noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-19860758804758093012011-01-02T18:36:51.301+00:002011-01-02T18:36:51.301+00:00Frye’s goal in The Secular Scripture: “I am trying...<i>Frye’s goal in </i>The Secular Scripture<i>: “I am trying to suggest a literary perspective on [romance] which may help to bring it into the area of literary criticism instead of confining it to linguistics or to the less fashionable suburbs of sociology” (26, CW XVIII:21).</i><br /><br />In his "Polemical Introduction" to the <i>Anatomy of Criticism</i> Frye set his "literary perspective" up against "what belongs only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice" (9). I wonder if he chose romance as the subject of <i>The Secular Scripture</i> partly because the "history of taste" had been so consistently prejudiced against it and partly because he felt that if that prejudice remained unchallenged, "the bulk of popular literature" would remain outside the domain of the literary critic.<br /><br />In other words, saving the romance from prejudice may be a good in itself, but I suspect Frye also thought it necessary for the good of literary criticism.Laura Vivancohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00906661869372622821noreply@blogger.com