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
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.
intelligent men people
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
religious men anxiety
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
home simple men
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
men water-of-life tree
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
men apocalypse screens
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
war men young
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
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.
book technology men
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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