Notes from CBC's "The Ideas of Northrop Frye - Part I"
The following notes are from Part 1 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye . Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.
Popular posts from this blog
Notes on Adorno - “History and Freedom” - Lecture 6
Conflict and Survival In this lecture Adorno recaps the first five lectures and discusses the legitimacy of the bourgeois philosopher’s idea that conflict is reality and that society survives because of its conflicts rather than in spite of them. He asks how mankind survives under these circumstances and whether or not we can imagine a history that does not involve conflict. Recap of First Five Lectures The ‘universal’ asserts itself as an ‘historical process’ and has a ‘logical structure’ (49). It has negative aspects for individuals and positive aspects for the species; it “[joins] mankind together in societies...in a totality” (49). The totality both expresses and threatens the destruction of everything beneath it while at the same time it acts as a “cohesive force to which society owes its survival” (49). Marx’s Law of Value Marx agrees with this positive view and it forms an element of his “optimistic view of history” (49). In Marx, it is expressed in “the law of value...
ITTOL - Lecture 8 - Semiotics and Structuralism
In this lecture we're introduced to Semiotics and Structuralism, not because they are part of literary theory, but because they strongly influenced the development of literary theory. Semiology is "the study of existing, conventional, communicative systems" and semiotics is any language (means of communication?) composed of a system of signs . The concept was first developed by Ferdinand de Saussere , a Swiss linguist, although his work has had a stronger influence in the humanities and social sciences (if Wikipedia is to be believed) than linguistics.