Alec Scott / en Celebrating Northrop Frye /news/celebrating-northrop-frye <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Celebrating Northrop Frye</span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>sgupta</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2012-07-13T07:58:20-04:00" title="Friday, July 13, 2012 - 07:58" class="datetime">Fri, 07/13/2012 - 07:58</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">Jeff Sprang's portrait depicts Frye at the blackboard in front of his lesson The Conspectus of Genres (image courtesy of Jeff Sprang)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alec-scott" hreflang="en">Alec Scott</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alec-scott-files-u-t-news" hreflang="en">Alec Scott with files from 茄子直播 News</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-legacy field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Author legacy</div> <div class="field__item">Alec Scott, with files from 茄子直播 News</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/top-stories" hreflang="en">Top Stories</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/english" hreflang="en">English</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/alumni" hreflang="en">茄子直播</a></div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>July 14 marks the 100th birthday of the late <strong>Northrop Frye</strong> - and across Canada, scholars, writers, alumni and fans are remembering and celebrating the legendary professor who transformed literary criticism.</p> <p>鈥淗e was brilliant and extremely articulate,鈥 says alumnus and artist <strong>Jeff Sprang</strong>, 60, recalling a class he took with Frye in the early 1970s. 鈥淗e would have been about the age I am now, and I was one of those students who sat at the back and kept my head down and my mouth shut 鈥 but he was very, very gentle with those brave souls who sat at the front and asked questions.鈥</p> <p>Decades later, Sprang ran into a former classmate and, after reminiscing about the class, found himself researching the professor鈥檚 work and life. The result: a watercolour portrait which Sprang donated to Victoria College at 茄子直播 along with limited edition prints to use in fundraising.</p> <p>鈥淭he importance of education is one of the things I took away from that class,鈥 said Sprang. 鈥淎nd I thought if they could use it to help a deserving student in need that would be terrific.鈥</p> <p>Frye鈥檚 lasting impact is something <strong>Dawn Arnold</strong>, a New College alumna who graduated in 1989, understands well. In 2000, the French and English lit grad and others came up with the idea of holding a <a href="http://www.frye.ca/content/eng/home">literary festival </a>to honour Frye in Moncton, New Brunswick, the town where the scholar spent much of his youth.</p> <p>鈥淧eople said no one would come,鈥 Arnold says. So she felt justifiably proud when a respectable 3,000 people attended the first year, and when the crowds kept growing 鈥 to 17,000 last year.</p> <p>The bilingual festival has surprised skeptics also by drawing many distinguished Canadian and internationally known authors, such as Richard Ford, Alistair MacLeod and Ursula Hegi.</p> <p>鈥淲e鈥檝e had winners of all the major national and international prizes,鈥 says Arnold.</p> <p>But for a long time, there was one conspicuous no-show. Every year, Arnold would invite Frye鈥檚 former student <strong>Margaret Atwood</strong> (BA 1961 Victoria); every year, a polite refusal.</p> <p>In 2010, Arnold found herself next to the renowned author at a security checkpoint at Pearson Airport, both of them getting their hands swabbed for bomb residue. Arnold seized her opportunity, swiftly introducing herself and pressing her cause.</p> <p>Atwood was a good sport about being buttonholed: 鈥淚 should never be allowed out in public,鈥 she later joked 鈥 and accepted the invitation to deliver last year鈥檚 keynote address, serving up an irreverent talk about the brainy professor鈥檚 impact on her and his other students.</p> <p>This year, in honour of the scholar鈥檚 centenary, the festival commissioned a life-sized bronze sculpture of Frye unveiled July 13 in front of the Moncton Public Library.&nbsp;</p> <p>It鈥檚 the latest in a series of centenary tributes that began with the publication of a special edition of <em>University of Toronto Quarterly, The Future of Northrop Frye: Centennial Perspectives </em>with guest editors <strong>Germaine Warkentin</strong> and <strong>Linda Hutcheon</strong>. (See the journal <a href="http://www.utpjournals.com/utq811.html">here</a>)</p> <p>Last month, the CBC re-broadcast its three-hour Ideas <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/06/25/the-ideas-of-northrop-frye/">series on Frye</a> and his work.</p> <p>In August, Knox College will be offering <em>Northrop Frye, Einstein of the Verbal Universe </em>as part of its<a href="https://www.events.utoronto.ca/index.php?action=singleView&amp;eventid=8451"> summer program</a>.</p> <p>And, in October, Frye鈥檚 alma mater, Victoria College, will host its own international conference to mark the centenary, with themes ranging from 鈥淐anadian Literature in a Post-National Age鈥 to 鈥淭he Survival of the Literary Imagination in the Digital Age.鈥 (Read more <a href="http://northropfryeconference.utoronto.ca/">here</a>.)</p> <p>University Professor Emeritus <strong>Edward Chamberlin </strong>will be among the speakers.</p> <p>鈥淔rye鈥檚 basic message 鈥 that the imagination shapes reality 鈥 continues to be relevant,鈥 Chamberlin says. 鈥淲e still live through our stories.鈥</p> <p>Read more about Frye's legacy <a href="http://news.utoronto.ca/fryes-anatomy">here</a>.</p> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-picpath field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">picpath</div> <div class="field__item">sites/default/files/Frye-Watercolour_12_07_13_0.jpg</div> </div> Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:58:20 +0000 sgupta 4309 at Frye's Anatomy /news/fryes-anatomy <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Frye's Anatomy</span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>sgupta</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2012-07-13T07:14:35-04:00" title="Friday, July 13, 2012 - 07:14" class="datetime">Fri, 07/13/2012 - 07:14</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">Northrop Frye (centre) with Prime Minister Lester Pearson (right) and A.B.B. Moore, president of Victoria University in 1963 (photo courtesy 茄子直播 Archives)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alec-scott" hreflang="en">Alec Scott</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-legacy field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Author legacy</div> <div class="field__item">Alec Scott</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/features" hreflang="en">Features</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/faculty" hreflang="en">Faculty</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/english" hreflang="en">English</a></div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>When <strong>Francesca Valente</strong> decided to come to Toronto from her native Italy in 1977 to do a master鈥檚 degree in Canadian literature, her friends from university thought she鈥檇 lost her good sense, opting to voyage into what they thought of as a cultural wasteland.</p> <p>But Valente and her friends were in for a surprise: while at 茄子直播, she got the chance to study under the globally renowned literary critic and theorist <strong>Northrop Frye</strong>, one of the 20th century鈥檚 most quoted, most lionized thinkers.</p> <p>Valente calls Frye 鈥渢he Maestro鈥 to this day, 21 years after his death. She says he inspired her to make culture 鈥 and especially literature 鈥 the centre of her varied post鈥撉炎又辈 career. Over the years, she has arranged literary readings, art exhibits and academic conferences 鈥 and translated several of Frye鈥檚 works into Italian. The latter endeavour she undertook purely out of love for his writing, she says, since for translation, 鈥測ou get paid enough to buy a pair of stockings.鈥</p> <p>Valente was not alone in being inspired by Frye. He was one of those teachers who often altered the direction of individual students鈥 lives. The longtime English professor (one of 茄子直播鈥檚 longest serving) overcame his natural shyness sufficiently to give <strong>Margaret Atwood</strong> some personal advice when she earned her BA in 1961 鈥 鈥渄eflecting鈥 her, she said recently, from her 鈥渂ohemian plans鈥 to run away to Europe.</p> <p>鈥淗e knew of my writerly ambitions, and gave it as his opinion that I would probably get more writing done at Harvard than by drudging away as a waitress in Paris or London, while drinking absinthe and smoking myself to death.鈥</p> <p>The advice gives a sense of how deeply Frye valued what the academy had to offer: discipline for the mind and fodder for the creative soul.</p> <p>Certainly, he himself always flourished in academe 鈥 both as a student at 茄子直播 and at Oxford University during the Depression, and then as a professor. While teaching at 茄子直播鈥檚 Victoria College from 1939 to near his death in 1991, he published many books and scholarly articles about the literary greats, modern and antique, parsing the likes of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Baldassare Castiglione, T.S. Eliot and William Blake. He didn鈥檛 limit himself to a particular period, national literature or genre 鈥 he grandly took the whole of literature as his subject.</p> <p>As if wrestling with the giants wasn鈥檛 enough, he also sought to reform the whole project of literary criticism, wanting to turn it into a quasi-scientific discipline. For this, he was called 鈥 sometimes reverently, sometimes not 鈥 the Einstein of criticism. His 1957 work, <em>Anatomy of Criticism</em>, sought to show how every story ever told could be fit into four essential moulds. Further, the book analyzed literature in light of psychoanalyst Carl Jung鈥檚 work with archetypes, arguing that certain common symbols and figures populate all of literature, from folktales and ancient myths to contemporary novels.</p> <p>It sounds, perhaps, to the general-interest reader like difficult stuff 鈥 and it is 鈥 but Frye鈥檚 writing is at least not opaque. He made a religion of clarity and turned out lucid, stylish sentence after lucid, stylish sentence. The complexity was always in the thought, not the prose.</p> <p>鈥淚n a way that some academics are not, Frye was a writer,鈥 says University Professor Emeritus <strong>Edward Chamberlin</strong>, a former grad student of Frye鈥檚. Valente agrees: 鈥淚 had to try to live up to his beautiful sentences when I was translating them.鈥</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p>Perhaps partly on the strength of its eminently readable style, <em>Anatomy</em> sold well immediately, and for two decades became an inescapable text for English students, assigned by professors at universities around the world. Frye鈥檚 influence reached its height in 1978, when only Plato, Marx, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lenin, Freud and Roland Barthes were more frequently cited by fellow academics. They even used an adjective 鈥 鈥淔rygian鈥 鈥 to describe arguments inspired by him or young scholars following his lead.</p> <p>During the postmodernist wave that began to wash over North America in the 1980s, though, <em>Anatomy</em> fell out of style, and many hip, young literature profs took it off their reading lists. But, by then, the never-still Frye had moved on to the project that would absorb his last decade: showing how the Bible was the bedrock on which all Western literature sits.</p> <p>While his international reputation rose and fell, his standing on campus remained relatively constant. For most of the last four decades (of the five) he taught at 茄子直播, he was considered an intellectual beacon for the university 鈥 one of the profs (with his contemporary <strong>Marshall McLuhan</strong>) who鈥檇 put 茄子直播 on the global radar.</p> <p>By all accounts, he wasn鈥檛 a dramatic lecturer, but he could pack a lot of thought efficiently into a short time.</p> <p>鈥淗e鈥檇 leave the room, and there鈥檇 be a stunned hush, and then everyone would burst out chattering, bowled over at how much was covered,鈥 recalls former student <strong>Jean O鈥橤rady </strong>(BA 1964 Victoria, PhD 1978). She鈥檚 spent much of the last two decades as the associate editor of <em>The Collected Works of Northrop Frye </em>鈥 the last of the 30 volumes is being released, appropriately enough, this year, the centenary of his birth.</p> <p>The director of 茄子直播鈥檚 Centre for Comparative Literature, Professor <strong>Neil ten Kortenaar</strong>, is also a former student 鈥 and one of those organizing a conference at 茄子直播 this fall to mark Frye鈥檚 centenary. He remembers taking a course on the Bible with Frye in the 1980s: 鈥淗e鈥檇 just sit up there lecturing away, not looking much at his notes: totally, effortlessly coherent. Meanwhile, we鈥檇 be flipping madly through our Bibles, as he jumped all over. When I thought about becoming a professor, it was never with the thought that I could become him. He was just way beyond.鈥</p> <p>Frye鈥檚 biographer John Ayre writes of how groups of students regaled each other with Frye anecdotes at Murray鈥檚, a cheap-and-cheerful student hangout of the 1950s. 鈥淲hat did God say today?鈥 was a common question.</p> <p>鈥淪ome of his students may have called him God,鈥 Chamberlin says. 鈥淚 never did, though. He was a vast person, yes, but he was still very much a person.鈥</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p>His divinity also wasn鈥檛 evident to his schoolmates in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and then Moncton, New Brunswick 鈥 where his family moved after the failure of his father鈥檚 hardware business. Some of his classmates bullied the weedy, piano-playing youngster, with his easily damaged, wire-rimmed spectacles and his thatch of unruly blond hair reaching for the sky. (His vertical hair would become, in due course, something of a campus landmark.)</p> <p>Later, the adult Frye would remember his boyish self, envying the physique that the giant Samson showed off in the illustrated Bible stories his staunchly Methodist mother read him. In addition to the failure of the family business, the tragedy that overshadowed Frye鈥檚 upbringing was the death in the First World War of his much older brother, Howard. His mother often made it clear to the living boy that he was not, would never be, a patch on the dearly departed. (And, toward the end of her life, when her mind went, she鈥檇 address him by her dead son鈥檚 name.)</p> <p>Still, despite her occasional belittling, the boy Northrop had grand dreams for himself: a composer, a novelist 鈥 writing a cycle of books to set beside the leather-bound Sir Walter Scotts on the shelf. His prescient high school nickname: Professor.</p> <p>Frye鈥檚 ticket out of Moncton 鈥 and toward that nickname 鈥 came, oddly enough, through his prodigious ability to type. With his piano-strengthened fingers, he shone in a typing class at Moncton鈥檚 Success Business College (where he went after high school). The college sent him to Toronto, twice, to compete in one of the Jazz Age rages, a typing competition 鈥 held each time in Massey Hall. Before the second trip, he secured admission to Victoria College. Frye competed desultorily in the type-a-thon, and then stayed to begin his life鈥檚 work.</p> <p>He won whatever scholarships were necessary to take him through Vic (undergrad nickname: Buttercup, due to his hair colour), and then went on to Oxford, where the writer C.S. Lewis was, once, his examiner.</p> <p>It was at Vic that he met his wife-to-be, <strong>Helen Kemp</strong>, another arts student. He was doing the lighting on a student production of The Gondoliers, and she was offstage giving line prompts. She was an artist鈥檚 daughter, and as such had an entree into the Toronto cultural scene that Frye wanted desperately to join. She was also a great devotee of the piano 鈥 and could play every bit as well as he.</p> <p>Their letters when they were separated for long periods 鈥 when he studied literature at Oxford, or she art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London 鈥 reveal a relationship that was equal parts heart and mind. In one impassioned note, Frye wrote: 鈥淓very time I think of seeing you again my stomach feels as if it had electric wires in it.鈥</p> <p>He鈥檇 later dedicate his magnum opus 鈥 1957鈥檚 <em>Anatomy of Criticism</em> 鈥 to her (in Latin: HELENAE UXORI) and once commented, after her death, that he hoped to make his next book one worthy of 鈥淗elen and God鈥 鈥 in that order.</p> <p>After reviewing their warm and witty correspondence, one of the country鈥檚 leading Frye enthusiasts, journalist Robert Fulford wrote: 鈥淔rye was that rare creature, a prodigy whose promise was entirely fulfilled. 鈥 This came about through the love of a woman both good and wise, as in many old-fashioned tales.鈥</p> <p>Still, they shared a regret: they never bore any children together. She conceived once, but it was before they were married and settled, and they decided to arrange an abortion. She likely become pregnant a second time, but it is not clear what happened 鈥 only that she didn鈥檛 have the child.</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p>The outward facts of Frye鈥檚 life, his interactions with others, however painful or pleasant, can ultimately explain but little about him. His friends, former students and colleagues, report that there was always something fugitive 鈥 something untouched and untouchable 鈥 about the man.</p> <p>鈥淭here was a part of him that was entirely his own, that was fundamentally solitary,鈥 says Robert Denham, a Frye scholar and professor emeritus of English at Roanoke College in Virginia and the editor of several volumes of Frye鈥檚 Collected Works.</p> <p>What, then, of the life of his beautiful, cloistered mind?</p> <p>Like many great and clear thinkers, Frye was fond of walking 鈥 he couldn鈥檛 drive, instead taking the subway to work at 茄子直播. Once (as a student) he walked the whole of Bloor Street in a day; after he was married and living uptown, he鈥檇 often pace, with Helen or not, up and down St. Clair Ave.</p> <p>The thoughts travelled in two basic streams on his early walks 鈥 followed by a third in later ones. First, he engaged his intellect with the Western tradition鈥檚 most challenging, canonical writers, especially those with a religious bent. His career really began with the book that put him on the literary criticism map: <em>Fearful Symmetry</em>, an analysis of William Blake鈥檚 difficult prophetic poems, published in 1947 by Princeton University Press.</p> <p>The American publishing house鈥檚 acceptance was a coup for a then-obscure young academic from Canada. Books on Milton and Eliot would follow, and he鈥檇 produce dozens more in the course of his life. Essentially, Frye saw literature as soluble: with enough hard work, you could figure out what it meant 鈥 or a range of plausible meanings.</p> <p>Second, he ambitiously developed a system for categorizing every story ever written or told, from cowboy westerns to whodunits, from futuristic sci-fi back to the myths of primitive societies, from comedies of manners to the bloodiest war fiction.</p> <p>鈥淗e wasn鈥檛 someone who only paid attention to high literature,鈥 Chamberlin says. 鈥淗e鈥檇 love to take a break to read a detective novel over a beer in a pub. If you mentioned one you鈥檇 read, he鈥檇 soon have bought it and read through it.鈥</p> <p>He also liked crosswords, often polishing off one from <em>The Times </em>during a quiet half hour in Vic鈥檚 senior common room.</p> <p>In the keynote address at last year鈥檚 Frye Festival in Moncton, Atwood adeptly, and somewhat jokily, described the basic schema set out in <em>Anatomy of Criticism</em>: 鈥淸There are] four main types of story: the romance, in which the hero journeys on a quest, kills dragons and rescues maidens; the comedy, in which the hero and the maiden can鈥檛 get together due to interference by censorious old fogies, but which, after complication, ends with marriage; the tragedy, in which the protagonist falls from a height and ends up dead or in exile; and irony, in which old fogies sit round a winter fire in a frozen world and tell tales.鈥</p> <p>Frye鈥檚 schema, and his discussion of Jungian archetypes, bowled over the academic and general reading world upon Anatomy鈥檚 release in 1957. Many felt, as essayist Angus Fletcher had suggested, that Frye鈥檚 work had done what Baron Haussmann鈥檚 redesign of Paris had: opened up large boulevards through old, formerly clogged neighbourhoods. For two decades, the book held sway and by the time Valente arrived at 茄子直播 from Italy in the late 1970s, Frye was considered by many the world鈥檚 foremost literary scholar.<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p><br> In the 1980s came the postmodern deluge 鈥 the first wave of deconstructionists, semioticians and post-structuralists. For the latter, Frye鈥檚 structure was exactly what they were seeking to put behind them. Frye鈥檚 carefully worked out categories, and subcategories, were increasingly derided as the 鈥減igeonholes鈥 of an overly anal mind; in the identity politics era, his engagement with the canon, the writings of all those dead white males, appeared retrograde. The miscellaneous thinkers lumped together under the banner of postmodernism dismissed Frye鈥檚 belief that literature鈥檚 meaning could be ascertained with some certainty 鈥 to them, words on the page were blank 鈥渟ignifiers鈥 with absolutely no connection to the 鈥渟ignified鈥 (the meaning).</p> <p>Although Frye made some salty comments in his ever-present notebooks about the onslaught of deconstructionists (鈥淸there is] a sentence from Julia Kristeva [that] I can no more understand than I could eat a lobster with its shell on鈥), he didn鈥檛 express many public worries about his falling stock. Instead, he continued to shift gears, working on what would become his third intellectual contribution: showing how the Bible鈥檚 stories underlay all of Western literature.</p> <p>He produced 1982鈥檚 <em>The Great Code</em> 鈥 which made an original contribution both to biblical and literary scholarship. His notebooks also reveal a genuine interest in Buddhism and Islam 鈥 he had particular time for religions where God takes on human form. Most of the books and articles he turned out in the 鈥80s tended to work this same religion-meets-literature vein.</p> <p>This then was the third and final stream of his thought 鈥 one he undertook while his beloved and once pin-sharp Helen fell prey to the too-slow goodbye of Alzheimer鈥檚, passing away at last in 1986. He married again two years later, and worked until his death in 1991. In a sense, this scripture-centered work returned him full circle to those beautifully illustrated Bible stories his mother read to him when he was little. He hadn鈥檛 become a physical Samson in the interim, but his mental powers were formidable.<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p><br> A tall, symmetrical stone house 鈥 the quintessential Upper Canadian farmhouse 鈥 sits near Christie Lake in West Flamborough, a rustic village not far from Hamilton, Ontario. Its occupant Alvin Lee was a longtime English professor at McMaster and then its president. Over the last two decades, Lee has shepherded 鈥 with Jean O鈥橤rady鈥檚 able assistance 鈥 the posthumous publication of Frye鈥檚 Collected Works in 30 volumes.</p> <p>鈥淔rye was never one to sit in his university roost,鈥 Lee says, over coffee. 鈥淗e got involved in secondary education 鈥 working on high school texts. He sat on the CRTC. He spoke to school groups, did interviews. He was engaged politically.鈥</p> <p>Indeed, he (and Helen) actively supported abortion rights and championed the precursor to the NDP. Unlike many literary bookworms, he had a nose and enthusiasm for politics 鈥 and a dislike of anti-democratic extremes. He disagreed hotly with those in his circle who expressed either fascist or communist sympathies in the Depression-polarized 1930s.</p> <p>Frye was an early promoter of Canadian literature, dutifully doing a roundup of each year鈥檚 poetry offerings in the 1950s, when it was still popular to disdain or ignore all local writing. As a poetry reviewer, he once got himself in trouble by declaring: 鈥淥ne can get as tired of buttocks in [Irving] Layton as of buttercups in the Canadian Poetry Magazine.鈥 This provoked the irrepressible Montreal poet to conduct a long public campaign against Frye.</p> <p>In the decade or so before he died, Frye had the satisfaction of seeing CanLit grow from a field occupied by aesthetically minded amateurs to one filled with professional writers, most notably his former student Atwood. In his quiet, detached way, he was something of a patriot 鈥 and several times turned down lucrative job offers from leading American universities.<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>[pagebreak]</p> <p>Frye once wrote: 鈥淚 have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me.鈥</p> <p>It is, to a certain extent, true. A scholar鈥檚 life is notoriously hard to mark with clear external signposts. But in amongst the umpteen reverie-filled walks, there were certain high moments.</p> <p>In the 1974-75 school year, Frye landed one of the academic world鈥檚 bulliest pulpits, the Norton Professorship at Harvard University 鈥 other recipients have included Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein, Jorge Luis Borges and e.e. cummings. He is reported to have impressed his audiences over the course of several packed lectures and overstuffed classes 鈥 they applauded at his first lecture when he drew his then-famous diagram of literature on the blackboard. A student newspaper joked: 鈥淗is was the first oversubscribed Bible course since the 7th century.鈥</p> <p>There were, of course, the honorary doctorates 鈥 38 in total. And the shy man must have been secretly pleased by the rowdy pageantry that greeted his appointment as principal of Victoria College in 1959, with students exuberantly throwing toilet-paper rolls around an all-college meeting in celebration, and one carrying a placard saying, 鈥淭he Truth Shall Make You Frye鈥 鈥 altering the words carved on Old Vic.</p> <p>Frye once said a critic鈥檚 role was to play John the Baptist to the extraordinary writer鈥檚 Jesus. To herald the greatness of another 鈥 it is a role with some dignity to it, but it also requires some selflessness.</p> <p>Although he was generally humble before the works he identified as great or worthy of notice, he was not, in the end, unduly modest about his critical abilities. One day, when Denham was going through Frye鈥檚 files, he came across a single piece of paper. On it was typed: 鈥淪tatement for the Day of My Death.鈥 Below, it read: 鈥淭he twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars鈥han I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.鈥</p> <p>Will the centenary of his birth help return Frye to his once central role in literary criticism? Will posterity agree that he had genius? Chamberlin hopes so.</p> <p>鈥淩eputations go up and down 鈥 that鈥檚 what they do. But I think it will rest over the long haul on his writing about texts 鈥 the extraordinary, enlivening insights he has on the books he turns to. He was first and last a reader.鈥</p> <p>At the end of her Canadian adventure, following several years as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto, Valente gave everyone in her professional circle a bookmark to remember her by. On it she had printed some words from Frye 鈥 ones she says she鈥檚 lived by.</p> <p>The bookmark read: 鈥淭he fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.鈥<br> &nbsp;</p> <p>Watch an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=4rFZ2C-k8ZQ">interview</a> with Northrop Frye, from 1973<br> &nbsp;</p> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-picpath field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">picpath</div> <div class="field__item">sites/default/files/Frye_12_07_13.jpg</div> </div> Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:14:35 +0000 sgupta 4308 at Marshall鈥檚 Laws /news/marshall%E2%80%99s-laws <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Marshall鈥檚 Laws</span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>sgupta</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2011-09-21T13:09:16-04:00" title="Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - 13:09" class="datetime">Wed, 09/21/2011 - 13:09</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">Marshall McLuhan in his office, taken March 25 1963. (Photo by Jack Marshall)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alec-scott" hreflang="en">Alec Scott</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-legacy field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Author legacy</div> <div class="field__item">Alec Scott</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/features" hreflang="en">Features</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/digital-media" hreflang="en">Digital Media</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-subheadline field--type-string-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Subheadline</div> <div class="field__item">Fifty years after the publication of his most famous works, we鈥檙e still making sense of Marshall McLuhan </div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>It鈥檚 inconspicuous, even humble, just about the size of a tall two-car garage off a parking lot, near the larger buildings that make up St. Michael鈥檚 College. On the summer day I visit, the diminutive coach house where <strong>Marshall McLuhan </strong>once worked has been temporarily cleared of most of its furniture and umpteen books. There is just a sole remaining intimation that McLuhan spent the last decade of his life working here (he took it over in 1968 and died in 1980): In the almost empty main room, there鈥檚 the chaise longue that the lanky man used to lie upon during his famous seminars, extemporizing fluently. By the accounts of people who knew him, he was one of the 20th century鈥檚 great talkers.</p> <p>Nearby, the bells toll at St. Basil鈥檚 Church 鈥 where McLuhan, a devout (but not dogmatic) Catholic went to mass every midday and where, in honour of his centenary (he would have turned 100 in July), a memorial mass was recently held for the family, friends and enthusiasts of the late media theorist.</p> <p>On the walls of the coach house are photos of bygone technologies, ones that were cutting edge in McLuhan鈥檚 day 鈥 typewriters, Dictaphones, computers larger than 747s, which, despite their size, were less powerful than today鈥檚 laptops. These pictures, shot by photographer Robert Bean to honour McLuhan鈥檚 centenary, emphasize the theorist鈥檚 achievement in anticipating so much about the Internet. On a white screen, near the chaise longue, a slide-show depicts miscellaneous items from archives relating to McLuhan: the gaudy bands from the cigars he savoured; pages from a draft of one of his books typed by his wife with his edits scrawled all over them; a passport photo from when he was a fresh-faced youth from the prairies, about to embark on the international academic odyssey that would (eventually) bring him such acclaim.</p> <p>I peer hard at this photo of a blandly handsome, long-headed young man, looking (in vain) for signs that he鈥檇 become remarkable. 鈥淢arshall McLuhan, what are you doin鈥?鈥 This was a catchphrase on <em>Rowan &amp; Martin鈥檚 Laugh-In</em>, the comedy show big in the late 1960s 鈥 intended to poke gentle fun at the abstruse thinker. Certainly, McLuhan had been fab in that era. With the publication of <em>Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</em> in 1964, he鈥檇 captivated 鈥 and puzzled 鈥 a generation. Suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere, referenced on <em>Laugh-In</em>; interviewed by <em>Playboy</em>; giving talks to the top executives at GE, IBM and Bell Telephone. No less astute a cultural observer than Tom Wolfe compared him in the pages of <em>New York </em>magazine to revolutionary thinkers such as Freud, Newton and Darwin. The Sage of Aquarius, they called him. Another academic might have squirmed at the cutesy designation. With his own love of wordplay and disdain for the often stuffy, standing-on-ceremony of academic life, he probably loved it.</p> <p>Lewis Lapham, the former editor of <em>Harper鈥檚</em> and current head of <em>Lapham鈥檚 Quarterly</em>, says that McLuhan was no less than the foremost oracle of his age. 鈥淪eldom in living memory,鈥 he comments, 鈥渉as so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret into the centre ring of the celebrity circus.鈥</p> <p>McLuhan grew up in the 鈥渞emote garrets鈥 of Edmonton and Winnipeg, the son of a sociable, seldom-do-well father and a striving and strident mother, who helped support the family by giving dramatic readings of the acknowledged literary greats across the prairies and sometimes beyond. After studying some of those sonorous greats himself at the University of Manitoba, McLuhan won a scholarship to continue his literary studies at Cambridge 鈥 the reason for obtaining a passport photo.</p> <p>At Cambridge, he learned to prefer the modernists 鈥 James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, particularly 鈥 to the grand figures of the Victorian and earlier eras. The modernists larded their technically difficult works with references to the new electric technologies 鈥 telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures 鈥 providing a model for engagement with technology that McLuhan himself would follow. He learned to analyze poetry and prose dispassionately 鈥 the no-nos were to say how a work made you feel or to speak to its moral compass. He also closely examined combinations of words for their effects. This was, essentially, the same close-reading, ostensibly judgment-free, effects-based approach he鈥檇 later take to parsing newer media.</p> <p>He began to shift gears from literary criticism to media analysis during his first teaching job at the University of Wisconsin 鈥 Madison. 鈥淚 was confronted with young Americans I was incapable of understanding,鈥 he was quoted saying in <em>Playboy</em>. 鈥淚 felt an urgent need to study their popular culture in order to get through.鈥</p> <p>And so, in his first book, <em>The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man</em>, he applied his literary-critic tools to magazine advertising and comic strips. His book, a series of essays, came out in 1951, five years after he鈥檇 come to the University of Toronto as a junior English professor at St. Michael鈥檚 College. It was idiosyncratic enough to dismay some of his new colleagues 鈥 pop-culture criticism was not yet a wholly respectable pursuit for an academic 鈥 and it also didn鈥檛 make much of a splash beyond the academy.</p> <p><em>The Mechanical Bride</em> lacked the intellectual framework that would distinguish his later works, but the book鈥檚 scattershot brilliance did impress a man who would become McLuhan鈥檚 key intellectual model: 茄子直播 economic historian Harold Innis, who had made his reputation by analyzing Canadian history through the lens of the staples it exported. The admiration was returned: McLuhan would emulate Innis鈥檚 so-called 鈥渕osaic鈥 writing style (aphoristic, dense, not linear) and appreciated the substance of the older man鈥檚 thought. He found particularly intriguing Innis鈥檚 theory that different types of media each had a 鈥渂ias鈥 鈭 a tendency toward different political and social messages. This would presage McLuhan鈥檚 more radical dictum that made the medium itself the message.</p> <p><br> McLuhan鈥檚 thoughts also gained solidity and momentum through an innovative collaboration with 茄子直播 colleagues from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, urban planning and economics. With a generous grant from the Ford Foundation to study the shifting media environment in the early days of the television era, McLuhan and his colleagues conducted research, held seminars and wrote up their thoughts in an academic magazine called <em>Explorations</em>, which was published at 茄子直播. Typical was an experiment that had different students absorbing the same lecture by print, television and radio, and then being tested on their retention. TV won, radio came second and print brought up the rear. 鈥淚n these seminars,鈥 says Janine Marchessault, a York professor and McLuhan scholar, 鈥渋t was really a think-tank environment, everyone trying to figure out, in McLuhan鈥檚 words, what the hell was going on.鈥</p> <p>McLuhan conceived of and led this interdisciplinary project at a time when university departments were still, by and large, jealously guarded, separate fiefdoms. This was one of the many ways McLuhan would challenge academic tradition in the course of his career. 鈥淭his was the dawn of interdisciplinarity,鈥 says Dominique Scheffel- Dunand, director of the McLuhan Coach House Institute. 鈥淗e pioneered the concept.鈥 Just as his thoughts revolutionized thinking about the media, his actions challenged the idea of what a university was and what the professors who served it might usefully do.</p> <p>And so, with the benefit of a framework adapted from Innis and the fresh thoughts coming out of the interdisciplinary seminars, McLuhan launched his first major intellectual rocket, <em>The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man</em> (1962). It opened the discussion that he would continue for the rest of his life 鈥 in the confines of the coach house and elsewhere. Here, he began to say what, to his mind, the (dying) print age meant and what the (rising) electric era entailed.</p> <p>In the <em>Gutenberg Galaxy</em>, in his magnum opus, <em>Understanding Media</em> (1964), and in the playful <em>The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects </em>(1967), he鈥檇 contrast the <em>Gutenberg Galaxy</em> with what he called the Marconi Constellation. He spoke in pithy sound bites, something the media loved. In this way also, he was ahead of his time: soon it would become common, even <em>de rigueur</em> for professors to try to share their ideas with the larger public. But it wasn鈥檛 so common then.</p> <p>鈥淗e attracted a lot of attention to the university and also to himself,鈥 says his son (and, in later years, his frequent collaborator) Eric. 鈥淭his didn鈥檛 make some of his colleagues very happy, because they thought they knew at least as much as he did and they weren鈥檛 getting noticed.鈥</p> <p>McLuhan served up a typical verbal gust in the <em>Playboy </em>interview, summarizing his view of what the invention of type meant: 鈥淎s a drastic extension of man, it . . . was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization.鈥</p> <p>With this ability to cover such a sweep, it is little wonder that his students would sometimes leave his seminars exhilarated, sometimes stunned. One of his former students (and one of his biographers) Philip Marchand comments, 鈥淭he class was at 9 o鈥檆lock, which for me was too early. But you didn鈥檛 want to miss them 鈥 they were events 鈥 so much went on in them.鈥 Once, for instance, as a surprise, McLuhan brought the then-new prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a fan of McLuhan鈥檚, to a class.</p> <p>Another student, Bruce (B.W.) Powe, who鈥檇 become a friend of McLuhan鈥檚 and is now a media studies scholar and professor at York, remembers having an oral exam with McLuhan. 鈥淚 asked him a question early on, and he just took off, and for the next two hours spoke.鈥 Powe got an A. 鈥淢aybe I asked him the right question,鈥 he says with a chuckle. Marchand heard many such stories when he worked on the biography <em>Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger</em>. 鈥淗e always struck his colleagues as a bit of a wild man; he violated so many canons of academic behaviour.鈥</p> <p>Still, on the strength of his first book, the attention he was garnering and the growing popularity of his seminars, 茄子直播 set up the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963 for McLuhan to lead. It would 鈥渟tudy the psychic and social consequences of technology and the media.鈥 There wasn鈥檛 initially much to the centre apart from the title (it would move to the coach house in 1968) but it gave McLuhan the official approval to do what he was doing anyway: forging a new discipline 鈥 communication studies.</p> <p>He never attempted to sketch out a globalizing theory of media. Instead, he poked at it with a series of intuitions he鈥檇 test in talks with his students and colleagues. He called these aphoristic thoughts 鈥減robes.鈥 (This was another way he didn鈥檛 quite fit in academe, where definitiveness tends to be valued highly.)</p> <p>Type, he鈥檇 say, privileged the eye over the other senses, as had the alphabet before it. By contrast, radio and television re-engaged the ears and were fluid where type was fixed. He鈥檇 point out that different media engaged the senses differently and therefore 鈥 this was the key point 鈥 had radically different effects on the brain. In this way, the medium itself is the message. This is an idea subsequent neurological research has largely borne out. 鈥淭he recent research on the so-called iBrain,鈥 Powe says, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 all anticipated in McLuhan.鈥 (Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan summarize the latest research showing how significantly new technologies are altering our brains in a recent book, <em>iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind</em>.)</p> <p>What did McLuhan believe the social consequences of these new technologies would be? The immediacy of television and other electrically powered devices (such as computers) would shift the very nature of time: instead of the one-thing-after-another, linear time of print, electronic media fostered an 鈥渁ll-at-onceness鈥 that would characterize the new age. (Certainly, this observation seems even more applicable in the Internet era than it was in McLuhan鈥檚 day. 鈥淲hat is the Internet, but 鈥榓ll-at-onceness鈥?鈥 Marchessault argues.)</p> <p>This simultaneity 鈥 of everyone all over the world plugged in to the same media 鈥 would connect us in a 鈥済lobal village.鈥 This term is often misused; it is not a warm and fuzzy place. For McLuhan, this village is as nasty as it is nice: 鈥淭he global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquility are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony 鈥 the customary life mode of any tribal people.鈥</p> <p>A new age called for a new kind of literacy taught in a new kind of university. As a <em>New York Times</em> reporter who interviewed McLuhan at the height of his fame summarized: 鈥淢cLuhan advocates radical changes in education because he believes that a contemporary man is not fully 鈥榣iterate鈥 if reading is his sole pleasure. 鈥榊ou must be literate in umpteen media to be really 鈥榣iterate鈥 nowadays.鈥欌</p> <p>McLuhan pushed for a move away from what he saw as an over-reliance on print teaching tools, since these wouldn鈥檛 reach many young students weaned on the new technologies. A good teacher would equip students with tools to understand and engage with the new media, and would treat the classroom as a place where the group, through lively debate, could make joint discoveries. A professor was a facilitator of fresh thoughts about the environment, not a revealer (in lectures) of definitive truths. 鈥淭he university he saw has yet to exist,鈥 Marchessault says. 鈥淚ts transformation into an institution for the electronic age remains incomplete.鈥</p> <p>Indeed, there was a sense of mission not quite completed at his death in 1980. Afterwards McLuhan鈥檚 star faded as abruptly as it had risen. 茄子直播 cleared out the coach house, while it considered whether to continue McLuhan鈥檚 centre in the absence of its prime mover. As Lapham comments, 鈥淢cLuhan鈥檚 name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility (go-go boots, Sgt. Pepper, Woodstock, the Vietnam War) that embodied the faded hopes of a discredited decade.鈥</p> <p>A professor in Fordham鈥檚 communication and media studies program (a program inspired by McLuhan鈥檚 work), Lance Strate remembers: 鈥淎s graduate students then [in the 1980s], we were told if you want to get a job, don鈥檛 mention that you like McLuhan. If you want to get something published in a journal, don鈥檛 cite McLuhan.鈥</p> <p>But McLuhan鈥檚 ideas wouldn鈥檛 stay down. His return to favour began, Lapham says, in the 1990s, when Wired magazine anointed him the patron saint of the Internet, and devoted space in some of its early issues to quote seemingly prescient bits of McLuhan鈥檚 writings on the media.</p> <p>In a recent paper, McLuhan鈥檚 longtime collaborator and friend Robert Logan, a 茄子直播 physics professor emeritus, argues, convincingly, that McLuhan鈥檚 work anticipated many particulars of the Internet age, from Twitter to Wikipedia, from laptop computers and smartphones to, as a result of the 鈥渁ll-at-onceness,鈥 reduced attention spans. 鈥淗e paid such attention to the present,鈥 his son Eric says, 鈥渁nd that enabled him to understand what would necessarily happen in the future.鈥</p> <p><em>The Guardian</em> and <em>New York Times</em> both recently put a book of McLuhan鈥檚 鈥 most remarkably, different books 鈥 on their lists of the 100 greatest non-fiction works ever written. They were the only Canadian entries on either list.</p> <p>And his centenary is turning out to be a big deal, in Toronto and elsewhere. There are slews of McLuhan-themed events: many book launches, mainly for works arguing that he remains relevant in the Internet Age (among them, Logan鈥檚 recently released <em>Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan</em>); multimedia art installations (on the walls of the Toronto subway system and at Toronto鈥檚 Nuit Blanche in October); and, of course, conferences (in Australia, Germany, Italy, Paraguay, Spain and at 茄子直播 and throughout Toronto in November on the theme of 鈥淢cLuhan 100: Then, Now, Next鈥).</p> <p>At his beloved coach house there have been talks this year on the topic of the 鈥淓dge of Academe鈥 鈥 the metaphorical space McLuhan consistently (and gladly) occupied. Scheffel- Dunand comments: 鈥淲e want his space, the Coach House, to be a place where you can do slow conversations, where you can really scrutinize what is happening to the university and the world today.鈥</p> <p>McLuhan鈥檚 essential message to his students at the coach house was the same as his justification for studying new media in the context of a reformed university. As he told <em>Playboy</em>: 鈥淚n the electronic age of instantaneous communication 鈥 our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced . . . trance, we will be their slaves.鈥</p> <p><em>Alec Scott (LLB 1994) splits his time between Toronto and San Francisco. He writes frequently about arts, travel and the law. This story first appeared in </em>茄子直播 Magazine<em>.</em><br> <br> <br> &nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-picpath field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">picpath</div> <div class="field__item">sites/default/files/McLuhan_UTmagstory_11_09_22.jpg</div> </div> Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:09:16 +0000 sgupta 2865 at