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[princeofcairo]

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

Comments

[trooper6]

Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers is a great album!

[robin_d_laws]

Mmm, Frye. I knew you were a man of impeccable judgment.

Valerie took one of his undergrad courses at university, a fact I am deeply envious of.

I think you'll also dig The Great Code, the first of his two-part magnum opus on the Bible. I have to admit that I bogged down midway through Words With Power, the second part.

[whswhs]

You hadn't read Frye before? Oh my god. Had I realized, I should certainly have told you about him. Anatomy of Criticism has been on my shelves for something like a quarter century; it's the most useful single book of literary criticism I've ever read. Among other things, Frye insists on giving equal weight to comedy and romance (which includes heroic quests and a lot of other stuff that's common in the Wonders and Marvels genres) with tragedy and ironic realism, which provides a much more balanced perspective on literature.

His five levels of mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic are directly applicable to role-playing games, too; they're lurking in the infrastructure of GURPS Fantasy. I think I put Frye into the bibliography . . .

[gbsteve]

The best book I've read on literary criticism is Beginning Theory by Peter Barry. Not that I've read a lot of literary criticism - I tend to prefer philosophy. But the two do overlap somewhat, and very much so in more modern philosophy with its emphasis on language.

I actually have a soft spot for Derrida but I do find it hard to reconcile his project, or perhaps those of his followers, with any idea of meaning. But then French philosophy and sociology, and possibly Lit Crit, has for a long time had its head up its arse.

[anonymous]

Very interesting summary; you've made me want to seek that book out, which is not what I normally think of doing vis-a-vis literary criticism (short essays by someone like Eliot, yes; long books, no

[princeofcairo]

The mathematics analogy is certainly interesting, though I think you've got the particular (ahem) mapping backwards: if literature -> mathematics and critics -> mathematicians, then you really can't have any mathematical equivalents of poets. Either they're all critics -- which is certainly elevating criticism by association! -- or they're mostly poets, with some occasionally playing the role of critic, e.g., David Hilbert with his famous program of unsolved problems, and perhaps "Nicholas Bourbaki".

That discontinuity is what I was trying to get at above, by the device of separating Genius Mathematicians, who "see" math like Galois and Euler and so forth, from Regular Mathematicians, who take these insights and apply them to the body of the discipline. To use your notation: if literature -> mathematics, then poets -> Euler or Gauss and critics -> normal mathematicians. It's as if Pythagoras had wound up convincing everyone that to do "real" math, you had to wait for a vision from the Muses.

[anonymous]

Yes, I see your analogy. But I'm not so sure that you can really apply it to mathematics. In poetry you have a preponderance of "pure" poets, great and small, along with some poets who do criticism some of the time (Dryden, Pope, Eliot). You also have a large body, these days, of "pure" critics, who probably couldn't write a worthwhile poem to save their lives but who can -- well, some of them -- contribute to criticism. Naturally, there are some in-betweeners -- poets who do lots of criticism, critics who (occasionally) write well -- but I'd agree that by and large there's a discontinuity in poets versus literary critics, and between poems and works of criticism.

What I don't see in mathematics is a large body of "critics". "Applying insights to the body of the discipline" is what essentially all real mathematicians are trying to do, genius or not; "normal" mathematicians are not really doing something akin to literary criticism. I think the analogy probably breaks down here: in this respect, mathematics is not like poetry (or

[princeofcairo]

Yes, I see your analogy. But I'm not so sure that you can really apply it to mathematics.

Well, neither was I, which is why I wrote that the parallel is not exact, above.

However, regardless of my insupportable supporting structure, I think that Frye's actual statement, which is that literature is as real a thing, and as independent of human observers, as mathematics, is essential to Frye's argument. And, quite possibly, correct, although obviously there's no way to tell for sure. What Frye demonstrates fairly convincingly is that literature behaves as if it were real, and that criticism should perhaps do likewise.