Canadian Content
I realize that to some people, this is going to sound like a post beginning "there's this great album I just heard, Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers". I realize that I certainly should have known all this long ago, and most certainly once I started dipping a semi-regular toe into the foaming waters of literary criticism. I understand and accept that I run the risk of betraying myself as an ignoramus. That said -- there's this great book I just read, Northrop Frye's 1957 starshell explosion Anatomy of Criticism.
Some excerpts can be found here, and a fair and interesting summary of Frye's career here.
The Anatomy is nothing less than an attempt at a "Summa Critica," an odd blending of the modernist, structuralist tendency to reduce everything to patterns, and the medieval, transcendant tendency to see everything as part of Pattern. Since Frye's great sympathies lie with Blake and the humanist side of Romanticism, he manages to get the best of both worlds while never falling into the trap of the One True Wayism that both have in common. He compares criticism and literature to mathematics; literature is a real structure, as real as math; critics need to see literature as mathematicians see math. (The parallel isn't exact, although one could draw one between Genius Psycho Mathematicians like Euler, who would be the poets, and Other Mathematicians who put Euler's realizations into the mainstream of the discipline, who would be the critics. Though Frye doesn't say so in so many words, the long, honorable list of critic-poets -- Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Poe, Wilde, Swinburne, Lovecraft, Eliot, Auden -- has an interesting parallel here, perhaps.) Just as the notion of "Marxist mathematics" or "Whig mathematics" would be ludicrous, Frye argues the same is true of criticism. Likewise, Frye separates criticism -- the eternally valid study of literature -- from taste -- the historically contingent question of quality. Ruskin, Arnold, even Wilson, and other great critics have sadly managed to confuse criticism with taste.
His work is intended to present four rational bases for criticism: historical (in which the five basic modes of writing appear sequentially, from myth through romance, to high and low mimetic, to the eironic[*]), symbolic (a specific adaptation of the medieval four levels of symbolism -- sign/motif, image, archetype, and monad), mythic (a brilliant set of interlocking constructions of basic literary structures, in the course of which he essentially provides in passing a substitute for Aristotle's lost book on comedy which I dare anyone to read without involuntarily applying it to every teen romantic comedy ever made), and formal (the most Aristotelian yet, discussing genre and form in literature).
I cannot stress how much this will teach an active reader about their own biases, as well as about the literary things they are ostensibly reading. There is a fair amount of "this is quite obviously how things are," which will grate on the nitpicky self of geeks, but it's hard enough to write clearly on this topic without adding a bunch of rhetorical mush to sate the terminally whiny. For example, Frye will occasionally re-use the same word for different meanings. Frye knows he does it, explains it just as clearly as he can, and joins Aristotle in kvetching about the poverty of critical language, and then gets on with the argument. This is just part of what requires an attentive, conceptually flexible reader for the book. Frye implicitly makes the perfectly sound argument that any worthwhile work of literature requires the same sort of reader, and especially requires those traits in a critic.
Frye near-as-dammit establishes that literary criticism is a specific discipline, to be approached like history ("criticism of action") or philosophy ("criticism of thought"). Of course, we can all think of historians, say, who see history as an excuse for special pleading, and even more literary critics likewise. And worse yet, Derrida came along right after Frye, and his Maenads dynamited the magnificent edifice Frye almost built. But look on his works, ye mighty traveller through the Commonwealth of Letters -- and take hope.
[*] Since it's proven impossible to get people to use even the common English word "ironic" correctly in either of its meanings, I despair at Frye's decision to use it to convey yet a third meaning, namely, "after the form of, connected with, or displaying Aristotelian tragic irony." Therefore, I spell *that* use "eironic," in an attempt to convey a different meaning with a different transliteration. I know this doesn't make anything any clearer, but it makes it differently unclear, which I have to consider progress.
Some excerpts can be found here, and a fair and interesting summary of Frye's career here.
The Anatomy is nothing less than an attempt at a "Summa Critica," an odd blending of the modernist, structuralist tendency to reduce everything to patterns, and the medieval, transcendant tendency to see everything as part of Pattern. Since Frye's great sympathies lie with Blake and the humanist side of Romanticism, he manages to get the best of both worlds while never falling into the trap of the One True Wayism that both have in common. He compares criticism and literature to mathematics; literature is a real structure, as real as math; critics need to see literature as mathematicians see math. (The parallel isn't exact, although one could draw one between Genius Psycho Mathematicians like Euler, who would be the poets, and Other Mathematicians who put Euler's realizations into the mainstream of the discipline, who would be the critics. Though Frye doesn't say so in so many words, the long, honorable list of critic-poets -- Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Poe, Wilde, Swinburne, Lovecraft, Eliot, Auden -- has an interesting parallel here, perhaps.) Just as the notion of "Marxist mathematics" or "Whig mathematics" would be ludicrous, Frye argues the same is true of criticism. Likewise, Frye separates criticism -- the eternally valid study of literature -- from taste -- the historically contingent question of quality. Ruskin, Arnold, even Wilson, and other great critics have sadly managed to confuse criticism with taste.
His work is intended to present four rational bases for criticism: historical (in which the five basic modes of writing appear sequentially, from myth through romance, to high and low mimetic, to the eironic[*]), symbolic (a specific adaptation of the medieval four levels of symbolism -- sign/motif, image, archetype, and monad), mythic (a brilliant set of interlocking constructions of basic literary structures, in the course of which he essentially provides in passing a substitute for Aristotle's lost book on comedy which I dare anyone to read without involuntarily applying it to every teen romantic comedy ever made), and formal (the most Aristotelian yet, discussing genre and form in literature).
I cannot stress how much this will teach an active reader about their own biases, as well as about the literary things they are ostensibly reading. There is a fair amount of "this is quite obviously how things are," which will grate on the nitpicky self of geeks, but it's hard enough to write clearly on this topic without adding a bunch of rhetorical mush to sate the terminally whiny. For example, Frye will occasionally re-use the same word for different meanings. Frye knows he does it, explains it just as clearly as he can, and joins Aristotle in kvetching about the poverty of critical language, and then gets on with the argument. This is just part of what requires an attentive, conceptually flexible reader for the book. Frye implicitly makes the perfectly sound argument that any worthwhile work of literature requires the same sort of reader, and especially requires those traits in a critic.
Frye near-as-dammit establishes that literary criticism is a specific discipline, to be approached like history ("criticism of action") or philosophy ("criticism of thought"). Of course, we can all think of historians, say, who see history as an excuse for special pleading, and even more literary critics likewise. And worse yet, Derrida came along right after Frye, and his Maenads dynamited the magnificent edifice Frye almost built. But look on his works, ye mighty traveller through the Commonwealth of Letters -- and take hope.
[*] Since it's proven impossible to get people to use even the common English word "ironic" correctly in either of its meanings, I despair at Frye's decision to use it to convey yet a third meaning, namely, "after the form of, connected with, or displaying Aristotelian tragic irony." Therefore, I spell *that* use "eironic," in an attempt to convey a different meaning with a different transliteration. I know this doesn't make anything any clearer, but it makes it differently unclear, which I have to consider progress.