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
art criticism body
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
mind atheism taught
The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.
civilization world landscape
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
poetic literal primaries
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
ego temptation stronger
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
character tennessee kind
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
way language mankind
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
men animal body
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
imagination pieces educated
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
special old-testament type
Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.
united-states culture threat
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
language surrender metaphor
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
infinity
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.
business mixtures flattery
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.