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.
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.
men world body
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.
philosophy literature mythology
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
criticism doe may
A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
reading incomplete incompetent
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
art giving imagination
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
believe adventure mind
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
literature
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
men criticism literature
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
people mind literature
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
space centre
We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.
fundamentals literature speech
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]
religion infinity kind
Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.