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David Telfer's avatar

Wonderful work as always, John. You needn't read the entirety of "The Bush Garden," although Frye's corpus is a cosmos, and you'll never go wrong adventuring in whatever corner of the universe he, like a god, gives light to. However, the final essay in the book, "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," more or less suffices for his general argument on CanLit—an argument under whose shadow the debate is still shaped. Here's the essay:

https://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.com/2009/02/conclusion-to-literary-history-of.html

(I fear I'm becoming a tedious CanLit whisperer—a subject that scarcely even piques my peripheral interests. If the New Republic once deemed “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” the most boring headline in the world, then “worthwhile CanLit paper” may well be the most boring readerly invitation.)

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

Excellent work. I haven’t read quite enough of Frye and Bloom to be comfortable saying if the Plotinus/Iamblichus connection is right, although it perhaps casts the father of Neoplatonism in too anticosmic of a light. Incidentally on the pagan-catholic point: I find it interesting to contrast that critique with the one I received in the still dimly anti-catholic (nonwithstanding the ubiquity of Irish, Polish and Italian-descended friends) rural New England protestant milieu I was raised in, which was rather more Dostoevskyian in its distrust of the “universal temporal power” claimed by the church over the believer.

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