Thinking Activity: Northrop Frye

Thinking Activity : Northrop Frye 

Herman Northrop Frye was Canadian literary critic, Theorist and considere as one of the most influential critic of 20th century.

Literary work of Northrop Frye 

• Fearful Symmetry (1947)
• Fables ofIdentity (1963)
• The Modern Century (1967),
• The Stubborn Structure (1970)
• TheCritical Path (1971)
• The Secular Scripture (1976)
• The Great Code (1982) and hislast book
• Words with Power (1990)
• The Great Code II.

Most influential work :-

•  Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
• “The Archetypes of Literature,” first published in the Kenyon Review (1951) and later reprinted in Fables of Identity, is, in Frye’s words, “to some extent a summarized statement ofthe critical program” later expanded.

Archetypal

Criticism 

1. What is Archetypal Criticism? What does the archetypal critic to do?

Northrop Frye provided a proper theoretical concept of archetypal Criticism. Frye believes that Archetype is in literature so in Archetypal Criticism he concerned that analyzing a text in concern to the Myths and Archetypes they are  in text it reflects in a form of image, description, allusions, symbols references etc. 

The effort of Archetypal Criticism replaces New Criticism but Northrop Frye does not conected to another pology  of and psychoanalysis as Frazer & Jung, Therefore Frye concern to the Archetype. Jungian Theory consists  the idea about Archetypal as 

"a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious."

Frye begins this essay by stating that art can be studied systematically. That study is called criticism. We cannot expect literature to behave like a science. But we can expect criticism to behave like a science. Criticism as we find it in journals and scholarly monographs has every characteristic of a science. Evidence is examined scientifically, texts are edited scientifically. 

Prosody is scientific in structure, so is phonetics; so is philosophy. And yet in studying this kind of critical science the student may feel he is moving away from literatur. He finds that literature is flanked on one side by and on the other by philosophy.

2. What is Frye trying to prove by giving an analogy of 'physics' to nature and Criticism to literature?

Here, the Northrop Frye given the Archetypes, which is identified into the different parts as it  based on seasons because systematically the whole structure of has Frye had made it depends upon the nature and natural aspects. So various seasons are played vital role in literary Criticism and also it comes as a symbol.  

There is a logic to linked between the actions and seasons , because the any kind of rival or birth is come in comedy, associated with spring.  Basically the victory which elements comes as symbol over winter and Tragedy associated with  tragic end or the downfall of the protagonist.  So it goes with the change of seasons, Therefore it comes in Autumn.

 Then in the winter connected with the satire and mockery which concern with the hero and it symbolizes the absence of the productivity.  After at last one, Romance usually comes in summer, it represented in the frame of achievement and marriage.