The Educated Imagination ch 5 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 5 - Verticals of Adam

The last chapters outlined Frye's theory. Now he'll examine how his theory works in the practical world of teaching literature.

The general principle is that literature follows after a mythology in a sequence that parallels history. (I think that's what he's saying.) Myths are man's first step in trying to find his place in the world. Myths begin as stories about the deity and then become the form with which to pass on oral stories. It forms the foundation on which the rest of literature rests. The Bible might be considered a form of literature that falls into this category. So, then, scripture should be the child's earliest exposure to literature so that it forms the foundation for all later books. Frye isn't speaking as a Christian, but as a literary scholar. The Bible is often quoted and alluded to, and a student of literature won't get far without some familiarity with those references. And he's not talking about the spiritual truths, but the storyline from a literary perspective--the history and fate of the world as an epic tale.

On top of the Biblical framework should come classical mythology, its familiar characters and its cycles of life and rebirth, seasons, trials and victories. Patterns should be noted: the same patterns and plots from the Bible are repeated in mythology (and again in classics like Paradise Lost.) It's not easy to understand later literature if you miss the parallels between the Bible and myths. Early Bible developed into Psalms and Job as surely as mythology developed into Homer and the Greek dramas. Then came comedy, heroic romance, tragedy and irony. Comedy and heroic romance should be taught next. Tragedy and irony should be saved for older (middle school) students.

A student will get more out of Lorna Doone if he's seen the pattern of heroism and love from mythology, and if he can see the same pattern in a recent movie imitating Shakespeare. It doesn't matter if the student can't make value judgments and understand why Shakespeare is better than the movie. That will come with time and experience. Trying to rush him to value classics will just turn him off.

Stories should be read for what they are: just stories, whether they're myths, or classics, or modern romances. It doesn't help to try to find cryptic meaning where there is none.

Reading in other languages can teach students to value precise wording and using the correct phrase to convey exact meaning. It can be easy for students to become verbose unnecessarily just because they like wordiness. Language should convey thought and ideas, although it's not the only way. Music, art, architecture can also convey thought.

As students get older, they will begin to see that literature doesn't just relate to language, but to subjects like philosophy and science (because literature isn't just a bunch of words, but vital ideas. Sounds like CM!)

Most subjects are taught from the center and then move outward. But literature is often taught backwards, by trying to teach language application first, and then move into prose, and then poetry. But literature needs to start at the center--poetry--and then work outward. Nursery rhymes, and word rhythym, and the 'surge and sweep of Homer' shouldn't have to wait until techniques of language are mastered.

One reason some works are classics is because they capture a certain culture in time, such as Robinson Crusoe, or Tom Sawyer, or the Gettysburg Address, or the Victorian emphasis on manners to absurd lengths in Alice in Wonderland.

The purpose in teaching literature isn't so much to make writers of all students, but to transfer some of the imaginative element to him so he can taste heaven and hell and think beyond the narrow confines of his immediate surroundings.

The Purpose of Books

Okay, I still don't know how to do a trackback. But I really liked this conversation overheard at a library sale at The Common Room.

HaloScan and Trackback

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

This means that now anybody, not just Blogger members, can post comments. Haloscan allows me to delete comments and ban/report IP's that leave spam. And it's free.

Pretty cool, huh?

And here's a link I'm looking at to see exactly what a "trackback" is and how it's supposed to work.
http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/trackback.html
http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/

I still don't get it. it looks like I have to install software in order to be able to use trackback if I want to let another blogger know I've linked to their blog.

??

The Educated Imagination ch 4 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 4 - The Keys to Dreamland

Our world, artificial as it is, seems perfectly normal to us because we're so accustomed to it. But an alien first seeing our world might notice how much we all stick to convention -- we wear similar clothes, drive cars the same basic colors, adhere to accepted notions of beauty, etc, because nobody wants to appear odd. Even what we accept as truth is usually status quo, and attempts to expose new truth (like Galileo did) are resisted.

In literature, there's convention in its form: poetry couplets might have the same number of syllables, dramatic climax needs events to lead up to it, the good man always wins or gets the girl. Even literary irony has its own conventions--things happen that would never happen in real life, but are common within 'the maddened ethics of fairyland.' Symbols are very conventional. For example, song is compared to birds. Swans, being a bird that doesn't sing, has come to represent Shakespeare's poetry, which is beautiful but not a song. Certain authors focused on a particular symbol. Yeats had fairies, Shaw had life-force, Hemingway had bullfights, Dickens had bad writing to bring his characters to life. These things become conventions. To get around in the literary world, it's useful to know the alliterative vocabulary.

Prose is a written, cultivated language that's totally unlike what real people talk like. Nobody really talks like they do in books. Literary convention means that words have to be assembled in a literary way, not like casual speech. Or, in a novel, it's the how the events fit together, too.

Since literature is so removed from the real world, you can't confine it to the rules of real life. Here, Frye makes a case for why literature is above rules like obscenity and morality, but I'm not quite following him. (Maybe I'm one of the 'cranks' he's writing about who can't fully remove literature from any kind of accountability?)

Scientists need imagination as much as authors. After all, they have to get ideas and hunches and theories. But scientific ideas have to prove they work to be accepted. Literature doesn't have to 'work,' because literature doesn't relate to real life. Literature relates to other literature.

Although many people read as a form of escape, that's not really the purpose of literature. Many authors had a burning need to say what was in them, and faced persecution for it. They didn't do it so people could have a pleasant way to escape. They didn't do it to entertain (Shakespeare's scene of King Lear getting his eyes put out is hardly entertaining!) Literature can portray horror, yet it isn't *real* horror. We aren't supposed to enjoy the horror and cruelty in literature, that would be sadistic. But experiencing it in literature can help us to avoid the events that might lead to it in real life--it can serve as a warning and express our anxieties.

Then there's another kind of literature that envelopes us in beauty or heroism, the kind that would be too much in real life. Thus, in a sense, literature allows us to experience both heaven and hell vicariously.

We can imagine mankind as a whole experiencing these things as we read, thus taking us out of ourselves and uniting us with humanity. No one person could ever have the amount and variety of experiences first-hand that can be had from literature. Thus, in a sense, we can experience more of life by reading than we can by living. And when lots of people read the same books, they all share those experiences, forming a bond of community. [When people read timeless classics, they join the community of men throughout history who have read and discussed those classics. It's a community that crosses the barrier of place and time, and it allows us to share experience with them, and join in their 'great discussion.' It's a community of the ages, uniting men from every time and country, and all we have to do to join in, is to read the books they read and wrote.]

When we judge a book, we're not so much rating our personal like or dislike of it, but we're trying to discover how and where it fits in with other literature.

The Educated Imagination ch 3 by Northrop Frye

A continuation of my summarizing of this book. Chapters 1 and 2 are somewhere in the archives, about 2 weeks back.

Here they are:
chapter 1 The Motive for metaphor
chapter 2 the Singing School


Chapter 3 - Giants in Time

Characters in literature are rarely real people, they're usually charicatures. Even historical figures like Shakespeare's Hamlet are removed from reality and made more as types. Or they're immortalized in name only as poems. But they're very different from the real people who inspired the work. Does that make the author a liar? No, because literature's intent isn't to accurately convey factual information in the same way as history or news. Literature is more to identify the nature of man and life, to connect things to a larger theme.

People in literature resemble real people. In fact, we can usually recognize a bit of ourselves in literatary characters. Yet characters are also larger than life. They're sometimes heroes who have the power we wish we had, sort of a representative composite of lots of different people, but with an ironic twist. They have a weakness that destroys them. They're universal symbols of everything in man, written with allegory and simile, and not intended to be exact duplicates of any one person. And those literary characters come up in other works. For instance, lots of books make comparisons to Greek gods. The more characters you know, the more you'll understand the references in other books, and what the point about them being made is. The more literature you read, the more literary characters you'll know, and the more books will seem connected to each other because of common personalities. The more allusive allegories you're aware of, the more you'll understand as you come across it in stories.

Primitive people try to identify with a deity of some kind. Lovers want to identify with the one they love. Lunatics want to identify with some great cause. But all three are trying to identify with something. Since poets relate everything they see in nature to life, they're closer to primitive people. They try to make us suspend reality and believe in the world they present. That world is a place where anything might happen and all arguments are treated as plausible. Allowing ourselves to enter this world teaches us to have tolerance and faith in what others can imagine. it can give us confidence in people's dreams and possibilies. Interesting quote: 'Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme...but such people are much less common than bigots and in our world much less dangerous.'

The reason literature teaches tolerance is because it allows us to look at different situations and opinions from a detached perspective. It allows us to imagine 'what if?' without having to actually live it. Real life happens, and we can't choose it or predict it or make meaning of it. But in literature, we can go through experiences vicariously and allow ourselves to entertain possible meanings that the author suggests.

Dinner

Miss M is just starting to enjoy eating and feeding herself.

Chess

We believe in getting our kids off to an early start. It's never too early for academic pursuits!





As I remember, I think she won that game. ;)

This makes me mad!

I'm told that vile peddlers have started posting their garbage via comments on blogger blogs. Therefore, I've switched our blog so that nobody can post comments anymore. I don't need my son finding that kind of trash being left as a comment to one of his posts. I hope internet spammers are prosecuted to the extent that the general public doesn't have to continue taking more and more steps to keep them at bay. In this case, their rudeness is limiting my freedom, and that makes me mad!!

New Chair!

Miss M has a new chair for eating in. I'd say she likes it!

Trying Again

As promised, more pictures.