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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.

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
Teaching
Impossible
Literature
Difficult

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
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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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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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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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One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
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Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye