Zitate von Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Geburtstag: 14. Juli 1912
Todesdatum: 23. Januar 1991
Andere Namen: ਨੋਰਥਰੋਪ ਫ੍ਰਾਈ, Нортроп Фрај, Нортроп Фрай
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.
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kanadischer RegisseurZitate Northrop Frye
„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.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time, Context: 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.
„At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't.“
— 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, Context: 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.
„But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.“
— 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, Context: 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.
„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.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School, Context: [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.
„For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence, Context: 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.
„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.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947), Context: 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.
Preface of the 1969 edition of Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
„Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time, Context: 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,“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time, Context: 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.
„Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence, Context: 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.
„Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher:“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland, Context: 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.
„The poet…is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time, Context: The poet... is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.
„I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", Context: 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.
"Statement for the Day of My Death"
„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“
— Northrop Frye, buch The Well-Tempered Critic
"Quotes", Context: 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.
The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
„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.“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction, Context: 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.
„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“
— Northrop Frye
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence, Context: 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.
