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Anger and Dismay

Denis Donoghue, 19 July 1984

Literary Education: A Revaluation 
by James Gribble.
Cambridge, 182 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 521 25315 2
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Reconstructing Literature 
edited by Laurence Lerner.
Blackwell, 218 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 631 13323 2
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Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory 
by Geoffrey Thurley.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 33436 1
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... whole maintained toward literary theory. It may even have served to justify indifference to what Northrop Frye called for, and called ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organised, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main principles of which are as yet unknown to ...

Wild, Fierce Yale

Geoffrey Hartman, 21 October 1982

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 157 pp., £6.50, April 1982, 0 416 32060 0
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... sensibility’) into an Era of Abstraction. Before deconstruction hit, critics in America, from Northrop Frye to Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, had already questioned that myth of history. (Its more sporadic critique in England is summarised by F.W. Bateson in the first volume of Essays in Criticism.) Here again what seemed to be a humanistic matter ...

Textual Intercourse

Claude Rawson, 6 February 1986

The Name of Action: Critical Essays 
by John Fraser.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, December 1984, 0 521 25876 6
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... similar state of incomprehension by a less colourful route. There are also two essays on critics: Northrop Frye, bad because he treats literature as though it were an objective science, though Fraser wants us to know that he himself admires ‘empiricism’ in its proper place; and Yvor Winters, good because of his ‘awareness’ of the relations ...

Catching

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1996

Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew 
by John Felstiner.
Yale, 344 pp., £19.95, June 1995, 0 300 06068 8
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Breathturn 
by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris.
Sun & Moon, 261 pp., $21.95, September 1995, 1 55713 218 6
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... Celan ‘had hardly any use for realism of a kind that merely imitates and reproduces, for what Northrop Frye has called “the low mimetic”’. He never wrote anything like Berryman’s ‘I didn’t – I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade’ and the corollary is that we aren’t now being told what Celan liked for breakfast. We don’t know with ...

Bile, Blood, Bilge, Mulch

Daniel Soar: What’s got into Martin Amis?, 4 January 2007

House of Meetings 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 198 pp., £15.99, September 2006, 0 224 07609 4
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... is), merely shrivels and dies.’ Satire as militant irony is a formulation that was invented by Northrop Frye, another systematising preacher; and Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is a model that Amis has always tried to emulate. The collected grotesques that animate all Amis’s novels – from the scabrous adolescent ...
Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida 
edited by John Sturrock.
Oxford, 190 pp., £5.50, January 1980, 0 19 215839 2
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... not surprising, then, that Foucault’s own discourse tends to assume the form of what the critic Northrop Frye calls the ‘existential projection’ of a rhetorical trope into a metaphysics. This rhetorical trope is catachresis, and Foucault’s style not only displays a profusion of the various figures sanctioned by catachresis, such as ...

A Good Reason to Murder Your Landlady

Terry Eagleton: I.A. Richards, 25 April 2002

I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-38 
edited by John Constable.
Routledge, 595 pp., December 2001, 0 415 21731 8
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... as possible with the least sacrifice or curtailment. Like almost all criticism from Aristotle to Northrop Frye, Richards makes the formalist assumption that unity and coherence are goods in themselves, a value-judgment which his system presupposes rather than demonstrates. It is just that he replaces a traditional Romantic organicism with a more ...

Is it Art?

John Lanchester: Video games, 1 January 2009

... players, but which strike non-gamers as arbitrary and confining and a little bit stupid. Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video ...

Not at Home

Emma Smith: Shipwrecked in Illyria, 16 February 2023

... the play as a (kind of) comedy.These are all versions of ‘green world’ plays, in which, as Northrop Frye pointed out in the 1950s, ‘the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a real world, moves into a green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal ...

Paul de Man’s Proverbs of Hell

Geoffrey Hartman, 15 March 1984

... religious or metaphysical concepts: the reconciliation of opposites, organic form, or (as in Northrop Frye) archetypal form. The ‘insight’ of the New Criticism, then, was accompanied by a ‘blindness’ in direct relation to the intolerable force of that insight. Like a Blakean Giant Form those close readers shrunk back, at the level of ...

Hayden White and History

Stephen Bann, 17 September 1987

The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation 
by Hayden White.
Johns Hopkins, 248 pp., £20.80, May 1987, 0 8018 2937 2
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Post-Structuralism and the Question of History 
edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £27.50, February 1987, 0 521 32759 8
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... of history surviving from the 19th century. Using Vico’s traditional battery of tropes, and Northrop Frye’s more recent notion of ‘emplotment’ according to the patterns of tragedy and comedy, White justified his intuition that ‘style’ was not merely an incidental embellishment of 19th-century historical writing; it was possible to ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an omnibus review of four books by Northrop Frye. ‘Notes on “Camp”’ transmits on an entirely different frequency, its sentences tapping to a snappier syncopation. Inspired by gay friends and confidants such as Elliott Stein, whose Paris hotel room was a campy shrine of sacred ...

Silly Willy

Jonathan Bate, 25 April 1991

William Blake: His Life 
by James King.
Weidenfeld, 263 pp., £25, March 1991, 0 297 81160 6
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... it is immersed in the books that Blake knew and loved and thought that he was re-authoring, Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is a far better introduction than a book like King’s (‘Blake charged Thomas Butts’s son £26 5s Od per annum for engraving lessons’). Now that Frye is dead, Blake’s best living ...

It’s Finished

John Lanchester: The Banks, 28 May 2009

... before the bank had to go back to the markets for more capital, a document of unusual interest. Northrop Frye somewhere defines ‘irony’ as involving a state of affairs in which words have a different meaning from their apparent sense. This can be achieved by the audience’s knowing something the speaker doesn’t: so the speaker is saying one ...

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