but i had the bright idea of finding some of the crucial articles myself and photocopying them, so that eventually i can get it all bound and go through it. with certain authors i think i'll just pick up used copies of pivotal texts (e.g. Grammatology, Dialogic Imagination). so far i have the following in my little folder, mainly gleaned from the anthology:

Hayden White: "The Historical Text As Literary Artifact"
Deleuze & Guattari: "Introduction: Rhizome"
Barthes: "What is Writing?"
Barthes: "Authors and Writers"
Heidegger: "Language"
Levi-Strauss: "A Writing Lesson"
Lacan: "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious"
Lacan: "The Mirror Stage"
Plato: "Phaedrus"
Hegel: "Lordship and Bondage"

i'm hunting about for three others: Irigaray's "The Rape of the Letter," Foucault's "What is an Author?" and something from John Dollimore's "Sexual Dissidence."

what else? hmmm? needs to be short enough to photocopy, remember.

(edited because i blasphemingly forgot a right parenthesis.)

[ 01 May 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

quote:

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Originally posted by skdadl:
MK, I just spent ten minutes reading the Norton table of contents, and I see why you drool.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mohamad Khan:

i meant to ask you about Frye...something short.

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Public response: Goodness gracious! Look! at the time!! I must be off now. Ta ta till tomorrow.

quote:

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Originally posted by skdadl:

(Private true response: Frye? Something short? Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhh!)

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well, you can go on as long as you'd like about Frye, madame--but when it comes to my getting my hands on the guy myself, i can't very well photocopy the whole Anatomy of Criticism. what are the juicy bits?

(he said, sitting ten paces to the right of a great portrait of Frye seated on thin air, and facing in the direction of Northrop Frye Hall twenty-five paces away.)

[ 01 May 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

Anyone?

Anyway, a self-deprecating figure of great charm and wit. At one point he and Northrop Frye gave alternate lectures in a Shakespeare course at Victoria College. Being an idiot II (episode I, many times repeated, involved my failure to go hear ghost or Christmas -- or ghost of Christmas -- stories read by Robertson Davies at Massey College), I failed to sign up for that team-taught course the last year it was offered, sniffing that "well, it'll be jam-packed with people worshipping at Frye's feet, no chance of asking questions, etc., so forth, blahbity blah...." -- a downy lad I was and twee.

quote:

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i can't very well photocopy the whole Anatomy of Criticism. what are the juicy bits?

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See, Mohamad, you're just BEGGING for trouble here.

sorry skdadl...i promise i'll read it cover to cover...don't eat me!

Sorry to disappoint Michelle, now that she's got her feet up and all, but that argh was not meant to guilt the skimmers and anthology readers.

It's just that ... it would be SO much WORK ... *trails off*

And keeping it short would be even harder!

Seriously, some day I do mean to crib for everyone a table drawn up by the American theorist/historian Hayden White, whereupon he plotted out (oversimplified) versions of Frye's "modes of emplotment" and correlated them with (probably oversimplified) systems of categories from several other people -- having to do with forms of argument, attitudes towards time, etc.

I will admit I have found that grid a most useful little tool in talking about the poetic structure of prose texts that people don't usually analyse in terms of structure.

Like all Aristotelian taxonomies, systems of labels and categories and sub-categories, it is mere scaffolding, and used with too much naive faith, can make one sound, well, absurdly naive.

And yet -- it reveals much.

See Hayden White, Metahistory (ca 1970). (I see that Norton anthologizes something of White's -- probably something more recent.)