Northrop Frye Quotes (1912-1991)

“The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.”

“The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a greater temptation to the ego.”

“In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mobs.”

“I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake’s time which were useful for understanding Blake’s attitude to the world.”

“Some people pursue wholeness and integration; others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. Then too, the prophetic aspect of the arts is reflected”

“There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it.”

“Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.”

“Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. ... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring.”

“According to Jean-Paul Sarte, "hell is other people," but I'm not sure that Sarte wanted to spend the whole of eternity by himself.”

“It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western Literature of the Iliad'''s demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic. With the Iliad, once for all, an objective and disinterested element enters into the poet's vision of human life. Without this element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it acquires the authority that since the Iliad'' it has never lost, an authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of nature as an impersonal order.”

“What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.”

“Giving further impetus to literary study of the Bible was the work of several scholars of English and comparative literature, who extended their expertise in the analysis of literature to biblical texts. Most prominent were Northrop Frye ( The Great Code: The Bible and Literature), Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Poetry), and Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy, a study of the Gospel of Mark).”