Northrop Frye: Quotes about literature

Northrop Frye was Canadian literary critic and literary theorist. Explore interesting quotes on literature.

Northrop Frye: 274 quotes3 likes

“As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work”

Northrop Frye book The Well-Tempered Critic

The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.

“In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.

“Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

Northrop Frye

Source: The Educated Imagination

“Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”

Northrop Frye

The Stubborn Structure, p. 84
"Quotes"

“The world of literature is human in shape”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html <br class="br">Context: The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience... The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy.

“Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

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

Northrop Frye

21.101
"Quotes", Notebooks

“Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

Northrop Frye

Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), Introduction, p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=ZnSJb6PPnBoC&pg=PP81&lpg=PP81&dq=%22which+is+inherited,+transmitted+and+diversified+by+literature%22&source=bl&ots=xJ1cLDaUCI&sig=m6agYWMBlW0qfDYMA7aX9aNM8IE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PaCqUsiEM-issQT_4oGAAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22which%20is%20inherited%2C%20transmitted%20and%20diversified%20by%20literature%22&f=false <br class="br">"Quotes"

“In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.(pg.18)”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), p. 70