Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries/Northrop Frye on Modern Culture/Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004), ix + 326pp. Cloth. $39.95. ISBN 0-8878-4185-6. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), xlix + 409pp. Cloth. £55. ISBN 0-8020-3696-1. Jean O'Grady and Wang Ning (eds), Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), xxv + 183pp. Cloth. $53 (£32). ISBN 0-8020-3720-8. Various entries in Northrop Frye's notebooks speculate about the relationship between writing and experience: 'Writing about it brings in a mythical shaping form that makes it true' (Denham, p. 314). Robert D. Denham's helpful selection from these notebooks, together with two recent books on Frye's achievement as a cultural theorist, shows exactly what he had in mind. To many postmodernists, Frye's is a name from the benighted critical past. In terms of his literary history and generic theories, he is viewed as a rigid Aristotelian schematiser. Little is made of his astute political and social commentaries which seem, in terms of contemporary critical tastes, tainted by a liberal-humanist optimism that is now both naive and intellectually unfashionable. However, Jan Gorak's meticulous edition of Frye's published articles on the arts, politics, history and society will certainly prompt a revision of the place of Canada's most famous critic in twentieth-century cultural politics. The reviews, essays and lectures which Gorak has collected, together with a searching and sympathetic introduction, aptly demonstrate the depth and breadth of Frye's scholarship, the intellectual traditions which he mastered in order to rebut, and the extent to which he made a 'thoughtful critical intervention in the national life' (p. xix). From reviews of popular films (Charlie Chaplin is something of an icon) to observations on such diverse topics as violence on television, the views of Wyndham Lewis and the symbolic significance of the Nuremberg Trials, these pieces illuminate key concerns that continuously inform Frye's cultural criticism. Significantly, he argues for what is now a 'truism' of contemporary literary theory: that society and our experience of it is a human construct. For Frye, culture is shaped and interpreted through powerful images and narratives that appeal at a profound level to the human consciousness but are also the ideological vehicles for promoting the interests of powerful institutions, like government and the global media. Many of Frye's pieces in this volume are given over to a sceptical delineation of twentieth-century society, beset by 'the alienation of progress' (p. 11) and imaginatively enslaved through the cultural symbolic order. An aggressive, predatory and self-seeking modernity - the 'absurd world of [Blake's] tiger' (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".