Word: northrops
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...brushed its aura and made the rabbit the symbol of his whole slick fantasy world. But when you're inventing fantasy to entertain your children during a long, boring car trip you leave out the details that enrapture the slavering American male. You retrograde modern romance, back to Northrop Frye's original "love and adventure" formula, away from modern "lust and bloodlust." And you even leave out most of the "love," to concentrate on your heroes-intrepid rabbits surviving against all obstacles. Richard Adams wrote that fantasy and called it Watership Down: it won both British awards for children...
...Northrop Frye tells a good story about how he came to teach the Bible. When he was still a junior instructor at Toronto University he talked to the chairman of his department, complaining that he wasn't able to teach his students Milton's Paradise Lost. The students weren't receptive. And he suggested teaching them the Bible instead. The chairman asked Frye how he could possibly teach students the Bible if they didn't know the difference between pharisees and philistines. Frye replied that it probably didn't make any difference considering the society they were going into...
There's a lot more to Frye's criticism; this is just a rough sketch. His elegantly straight-forward approach and his vast knowledge of literature is something you will have to experience in person. Perhaps the real beauty of Northrop Frye is that be can't be classified. As he says, "those who are incapable of distinguishing between a recognition of archetypes and a Procrustean methodology which forces everything into a prefabricated scheme would be well advised to leave the whole question alone." Since Frye is something of an archetype himself, maybe it's better to let him make...
...crit mogul (who has finally managed to have himself translated from Bristol to Cambridge University) will speak in the Winthrop House JCR the day after school begins, April 8 at 8 p.m. The title of Ricks's lecture--seriously--is "Five Songs by Bob Dylan." Rumor has it Northrop Frye, in response, is considering adding a coda to his Norton Lectures on "The Secular Scripture" to be called "Myths of Ascent and Descent in 'Lay, Lady, Lay'." Such rumors, though, like so many scriptures themselves, may well be apocryphal...
Before Fisher cooked that red snapper or walked through Brattle Square that Friday afternoon he had been doing other things that characterize him better, if only because he left them. That morning he had been in Northrop Frye's course on the typology of the Bible--hence the Bible under his right arm--and the day before he had been at work on a wooden creation he calls a sculpture--hence...