Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSCwas a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 July 1912
CitySherbrooke, Canada
CountryCanada
important identity problem
It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?
revolution rejects
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.
people heaven cosmos
The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.
art tolerance use
Literature encourages tolerance-bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
country moral making-money
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
speech use language
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]
jobs two mind
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
space goes-on scared
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
mind unity metaphor
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
strong romance fiction
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
believe people suffering
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
educational preparation notion
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
art nature models
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
essence limits culture
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.