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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Educational
Notion
Education
Must
Fatuous
Life
Dismal
Reject
Rejects
Preparation

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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
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Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
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In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
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The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
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No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
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Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
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