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Addressed to educators and general readers--the "consumers of literature" from all walks of life--this important new book explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature. Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study of the Bible, as literature, and the Greek and Latin classics, as these embody all the great enduring themes of western man, and study of the great literary forms: tragedy and comedy, romance and irony.… (more)
User reviews
“All themes and narratives that you encounter belong to one interlocking family. You can see how true this is if you think of such words as tragedy or comedy or satire or romance: certain typical ways in which stories are told… I mentioned that all these stories go back to a single mythical story… which we can reconstruct from the myths and legends we have” The book tells us that a story called The White Goddess attempted to do just that. I think I will have to seek out this book at some point.
The book
Fascinating stuff, and Frye's style is so direct, so accessible that no one reading the book would feel intimidated, but rather excited at the world of imaginative possiblities. There is SO MUCH to savor and to keep in this slim volume, but let me just quote a little for you:
"So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others 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, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous."
That's wonderful, isn't it? Later he discusses the scene in "King Lear" where Gloucester's eyes are put out, using it as an example of how literature develops empathy -- "Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities."
I think I shall ask all my writing students to read this, as an introduction to Frye's work, and perhaps as a way to deepen their understanding of their own.