Comments on: The Broken Estate

By: Jonathan Allan

Jonathan Allan — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:54:42 +0000

What is to be gained by setting up this binary wherein Frye is either a “literary theorist” or a “religious visionary”? Or, what is at stake in this argument that Frye is more a literary theorist and less a religious visionary? I’m not sure I understand why readers (we?) would want to see Frye without religion.

By: Robert Denham

Robert Denham — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:49:31 +0000

Two things we should avoid, I think, in thinking about Frye’s work are dogmatism and reductionism. Both inhibit understanding. Books and articles have been written about Frye as a structuralist, as embodying a poetics of process, as a phenomenologist, as a dialectical thinker, as a Blakean Romantic, and a host of other things, including Frye as a religious thinker. To deny this last is to deny practically everything Frye wrote during the last decade and a half of his life. At least one shouldn’t make pronouncements about what Frye is or isn’t without having read volumes 4, 5, 6, 13, 18, 19, 26 of the Collected Works. This considerable body of writing does not gainsay Frye’s status as a literary theorist.

By: Joseph Adamson

Joseph Adamson — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:09:29 +0000

It’s not an either/or choice, Veronica. It is both/and. Frye is not a religious visionary at the expense of his literary criticism and theory, or other aspects of his thought. His work is multi-layered and complex–interpenetrating, to use his own word–and the beauty of it is that it opens up so many avenues of insight: literary, spiritual, religious, social, cultural, political, psychological, etc., in a way that very few thinkers do. You are being unfair to the writers at this website to say that we are trying to recreate Frye as a religious visionary. He was a religious visionary, and much else besides, and if you are intellectually honest and go through the last several months of posting you will see that many aspects of Frye’s work are addressed here. One of the reasons the religious got so much attention was simply because of your intervention and objections. We are interested in promoting a diversity of interests here, but it is my distinct impression that because of your own atheistic beliefs and ideology you are promoting a very specific agenda and line of thought. To deny, however, against all available evidence, the importance of the religious and spiritual dimension of Frye’s work is not a viable position. That dog won’t hunt.

By: Veronica Abbass

Veronica Abbass — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:39:12 +0000

It is possible to come to a very different interpretation of Frye’s words, an interpretation that restores Frye’s reputation a leading literary theorist.

This writers on this website seem to want to recreate Frye to make him a religious visionary. In a comment on March 2, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/chezjb6, Matthew quotes from the 1949 diary:

“Stayed home & decided to hell with it–I mean correspondence & Forum editorials & such. I’m a Methodist; I hate taking time from the Lord’s work. The Lord’s work for me is sitting still in a comfortable chair thinking beautiful thoughts, & occasionally writing them down. This also happens to be what I like to do, which just shows you how wise the Lord is. …” (8.124)

This appears to be a private and playful Frye, playing with words to justify not doing what he should do but what he wants to do.

The passages you include here indicate that Frye, the literary theorist, used the Bible as a set of stories and went “beyond the Bible” in the same way someone could go beyond George Eliot’s novel _Middlemarch_ to visualize Middlemarch, the place.