The Beginning Was The Word - Research, Northrop Frye

This dissertation makes "In the beginning was the Word" as the departure to contextualize Northrop Frye's critical thoughts from the following three aspects: language, literature criticism, cultural criticism. Besides, the title indicates both the religion backgrounds and language-centrism tendency of Frye's critical theories. Moreover, the ultimate goal of critisim is to create a Utopian of language through metaphorical identification.In Chapter one, I will expound Frye's opinion on language by means of analogue. In Frye's view, it is the word rather than nature that create the world. In order to illuminate word's superior power over nature, I will make Rousseau's Nature as a target being attacked from different dimensions. Blake's anti-nature attitude actually is one of Frye's important imagination sources; Derrida's desconstruction of nature also points to Frye's "language modes". Among the four language modes, kerygma plays a far more important role than others in Frye's context. Although "apocalyptic" or "prophetic" is synonyms for kerygma, the latter is not an ordinary rhetoric mean but a mode of poetic language that takes account of the mythical and literary qualities which cannot be separated from the biblical texture. Frye believes that the metaphoric characteristic of kerygma can represent presence, which consequently provides the order of words with a center. Words' power to present presence, which Frye believes and assures, distinguishes himself from the deconstructionists mostly.In Chapter two, I mainly contextualize The Anatomy of Critisim and concentrate on the myth-archetype critisim as a literature theory, which shows a wide cultural and anthropology perspective that concerns with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication. Actually, sometimes myth and archetype is the same thing, it might be convenient to say myth only when referring to narrative (ritual), and archetype (dream) when speaking of significance. The myth-archetype critisim inherits the poetic tradition from Aristotle and may be seen from two approaches----literature as product and literature as process. The former indicates the rational and structural elements of literature; the latter includes the visual image and ocular of language process. Generally speaking, myth-archetype critisim is the combination of Catharsis and Ecstasis, product and process, knowledge and experience, which obviously indicates the reader-oritened tendency in Frye's theory.In Chapter three, I will expound Frye's cultural critisim under the context of liberism. The liberal paradox----the tension between individual and community----changes into another tension beween aestheticism and determinism, which can be exhibited in the following dichotomy in Frye's ctitical terms: (1) centripetal vs centrifugal. (2) myth of freedom vs myth of concern. (3) words vs ideology. While the modern cultural critics pay much more attention to determinism, that is to say, they just take literature as the product of society, history or ideology. Frye knows that aesthetic autonomy does not exist in reality, while he insists on literature's ethical goal that may be realized through education and critisim. Education can create a language Utopia, which is a higher world full of language and imagination without any alienation.