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
Northrop Frye quotes about
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.
literature
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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]
religion infinity kind
Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
intelligent men people
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.
religious men anxiety
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
art memories trying
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.
men water-of-life tree
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
book may old-testament
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically , as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
supremacy
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
art what-if criticism
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.