Northrop Frye and the educational responsibilities of contemporary criticism

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis is a rereading of Northrop Frye's literary theory within the current critical and cultural milieu. It addresses the charge by literary, social, and feminist theorists that Frye's criticism constitutes an escape from irony into romance, one more concerned with the mediation of literature by convention than with literature's disintegrative effect on the conventions of contemporary ideology. For his critics, Frye's is a liberal criticism, eager for the expression of individual concern in literature, deaf to its radical social voice. Also, feminist critics argue that Frye's liberalism is evidenced in his conflation of literary experience with the study of texts as spatial structures made familiar by the categories of patriarchal ideology: an understanding of literary experience that relegates engagement with literature in time to the status of a stock response. According to this thesis, Frye's critics can be answered through a comparison of his criticism with that of Theodor Adorno. On the basis of similarities between these two thinkers, Frye's criticism is seen to go beyond liberal ideology, apprehending literature as an ironic recuperation of romance from its indoctrinating role in contemporary mass culture. But the ironic recuperation of romance as literary form is also a remedy to the postmodern culture industry's neutralization of ironic response; that is, to mass culture's conflation of viewer savvy with world-weary resignation to there being nothing to experience beyond the self-interested slogans of patriarchal ideology. Frye's prescribed education in literary convention, then, is prerequisite to the contemporary reader's literary experience being more than an unconscious affirmation of culture industry formulas. His criticism gives priority to the expression of individual concern in literature in order that readers might apprehend literature's capacity to resist contemporary society's reduction of social concern to expressions of ideology. And Frey's criticism insists that literature be apprehended as a spatialized structure to resist the unreflective linearity imposed on experience by the culture industry and patriarchal interpretation. Critical resistance to patriarchy, however, also entails a poetics of refusal, which the logic of Frye's system accommodates but which Frye, as critic, rejects.Ph.D