Mental Twinges

The following notes are from Part 3 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye . Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.

The following notes are from Part 2 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye . Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.

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.

The following notes are from an article Elemenatal Teaching and Elemental Scholarship by Northrop Frye, published in PMLA, Vol. 79, No. 2 (May, 1964), pp. 11-18 and available from JSTOR .

In 1964 Frye wrote an article for the Modern Language Association (MLA) entitle d Elementary Teaching and Elementary Scholarship the final paragraph of which really struck home (emphasis added):

This is strictly my interpretation of what Frye has said in Creation and Recreation . (Notes: One , Two , Three ) We live in a world our culture has created and which we help to recreate every day. This world exists in two forms: as the world of our professed beliefs and as the world our acts continuously recreate. Our professed beliefs act as a mirror, we see what we choose to see, what society agrees on as being true. Occasionally we are jolted by a look behind the scenes and the consequences of our true beliefs, revealed by our actions, are made visible. Often it is art that allows us this glimpse into reality and when it ceases to do that, when it ceases to free what we have culturally repressed, it becomes merely decorative and not creative.

An outline and summary of Chapter 3 of Creation and Recreation by Northrup Frye. University of Toronto Press. 1980. Web. 2016.  See previous posts for outlines of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 . The numbering used below corresponds to paragraph placement within the chapter in the original text.