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Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

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
Literature
Lasts
Apocalypse
Last
Revelation
Body
Judgement
Human
Revelations
Humans
Criticism
Men
Awareness
Mankind

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
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Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a type or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
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The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
Northrop Frye
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One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... 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 also as possibilities.
Northrop Frye
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My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
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Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye