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 people use
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
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.
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]
writing looks use
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
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]