Showing papers by "Northrop Frye published in 1985"

The expanding world of metaphor

Abstract: Let us start with literature, and with the fact that literature is an art of words That means, in the first place, a difference of emphasis between the art and the words If we choose the emphasis on words, we soon begin to relate the verbal structures we call literary to other verbal structures We find that there are no clearly marked boundaries, only centres of interest There are many writers, ranging from Plato to Sartre, whom it is difficult, or more accurately unnecessary, to classify as literary or philosophical Gradually more and more boundaries dissolve, including the boundary between creators and critics, as every criticism is also a recreation Sooner or later, in pursuing this direction of study, literary criticism, philosophy, and most of the social sciences come to converge on the study of language itself The characteristics of language are clearly the essential clue to the nature of everything built out of language The developments in linguistics and semiotics in the last quartercentury have shown us how language both expresses and structures our consciousness in time and space I speak of these developments only in passing, because there are many scholars who can speak about them with more authority than I can In this area of study a word is primarily a signifier, related arbitrarily, or more precisely by convention, to what it signifies What makes a word a word is its difference from other words, and what gives words a public meaning for a community is the disentangling of them from the associations of those who use them, including the author Jacques Derrida in particular has emphasized that this attitude to language is one in which writing or printing is logically prior to the spoken word In oral discourse the words are still, in a manner of speaking, unborn, still attached to an enclosing presence or speaking personality We can also, however, turn to the other emphasis on the art of