Faculty Publications

Fearful Summary: What Northrop Frye's Scholarship has Taught Me so Far

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book/Conference Title

English Studies in Canada

Volume

37

Issue

2

First Page

33

Last Page

40

Abstract

With regards to Art, I ask my classroom students, "Why do you suppose that liberal education has traditionally been divided into arts and Sciences?" Such a division suggests that educated people have found their engagement with the Arts (and the artistic method) to be as important as Science (and the scientific method) in producing important knowledge. [...]assumptions have caused adults to make childish predictions that the physical world will end on specific days (the latest group was the Family Radio broadcasting network and its founder, Harold Camping, who predicted that the world would end with apocalyptic fireworks on 21 May 2011). (Frye mentions in Anatomy of Criticism that we cannot see the word "cat" without having an image of a cat, from our experiences, flash into our minds.) If an adult does not get a critical distance on his understanding of the phenomena of words, he or she doesn't realize that those words trigger images in his mind, and he doesn't see that the images are from childhood and so are simplistic and carry emotional baggage of childhood memories. If we've interpreted the fossil record correctly, humans had been around a lot longer, but with fewer technological resources, and yet they were aware of time and had narratives to help clarify their understanding of things.

Department

Department of Languages and Literatures

Original Publication Date

6-2011

Publication Information

English Studies in Canada: ESC. 37.2 (June 2011): 33-40.

Language

en

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