"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
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Northrop Frye
Geburtstag: 14. Juli 1912
Todesdatum: 23. Januar 1991
Andere Namen: Нортроп Фрай, Нортроп Фрај, ਨੋਰਥਰੋਪ ਫ੍ਰਾਈ
Northrop Frye, CC war ein kanadischer Literaturkritiker.
Frye wuchs in Moncton auf. Er studierte Theologie an der Victoria University, einem Teil der University of Toronto, und wurde zum Priester der United Church of Canada geweiht. Nach der Priesterweihe studierte er einige Zeit in Oxford, um dann für seine gesamte restliche Berufskarriere an die Victoria University zurückzukehren.
Erste internationale Anerkennung erlangte er bereits als Student mit seiner Analyse der Dichtung von William Blake, die bis dahin als wahnhaft, weitschweifig und unverständlich galt. Frye zeigte, dass ihr ein systematisches System von Metaphern aus der Bibel und Paradise Lost zugrunde lag. Diese Analyse wurde 1947 unter dem Titel Fearful Symmetry veröffentlicht.
Zehn Jahre später erweiterte er diesen Ansatz in Anatomy of Criticism. Er argumentierte, dass bestimmte Archetypen und Symbole in der gesamten Literatur verwendet würden. In The Great Code zeigte er auf, dass Bilder und Szenen aus der Bibel die gesamte westliche Literatur durchziehen.
Zu seinen wichtigsten Werken gehören die Bush Garden Essays über die kanadische Literatur. Er prägte Themen wie die "Garrison Mentality", die die kanadische Literatur auszeichnen. Margaret Atwood hat diesen thematischen Ansatz für ihr Buch "Survival. Essai sur la littérature canadienne" aufgegriffen.Frye erhielt viele Ehrungen. 1969 wurde er in die American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1976 in die American Philosophical Society und 1981 als Ehrenmitglied in die American Academy of Arts and Letters gewählt. Im Jahr 2000 wurde eine Briefmarke mit seinem Bild herausgegeben. Wikipedia
Zitate Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Kontext: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
Quelle: "Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), p. 871
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Kontext: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... 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 is still with us.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
— Northrop Frye, buch The Well-Tempered Critic
The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Kontext: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Kontext: The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking... If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in... it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog.
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
Kontext: A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Kontext: In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Kontext: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
„I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.“
"Statement for the Day of My Death"
"Quotes"
Kontext: 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.
„The poet…is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Kontext: The poet... is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.
„Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher:“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland
Kontext: Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia.
„Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Kontext: Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too.
„Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Kontext: We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.
„Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts,“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Kontext: One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. 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 as also possibilities.
"Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002)
Kontext: The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects... Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)
Kontext: Man is born lost in a forest. If he is obsessed by the thereness of the forest, he stays lost and goes in circles; if he assumes the forest is not there, he keeps bumping into trees. The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through. The street in the city, the highway in the desert, the pathway of the planets through the labyrinth of the stars, are parallel forms. (1:111)
„The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure“
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Kontext: The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that tis main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quite for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.
Preface of the 1969 edition of Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
"Quotes", Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
Kontext: I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerful in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Kontext: The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that tis main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quite for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.
