The Secular Scripture

Here are a few things that Frye compares to one another:

Imagination vs reality
Romantic vs realistic
Asleep (dreaming) vs waking (reality
horizontal vs vertical
and then vs hence
work vs play
created scripture vs revealed scripture

Random thoughts, notes, quotes, and questions:

p. 24: Do you think that popular literature is really a waste of time, as is suggested?

p. 36: Displacement: The adjusting of a formulaic structure to a roughly credible context.

p.42: "...What gives a novelist moral dignity is not the story he tells, but a wisdom and insight brought to bear on the world outside literature, and which he has managed to capture within literature.

p. 43: So, Frye identifies a problem of people concentrating on what the book talks about rather than what is actually presents.

p. 45: Victorian art and literature being very representative of the world, because that was a reflection of values at the time. What values of today are reflected in modern art and literature?
"What is being said about society that the story is reflecting?"

p. 47-48: Can real life coincidences be described in terms of  "hence" narrative? if so, what does this imply about fate and determinism as opposed to if coincidences are described with "and then" narrative?

p. 52: "The general principle is that the higher us we are, the more clearly we can see the bottom of the action as a demonic parody of the top." Meaning, the further away we are from a past action, the better we can see that our own lives are merely displacements of previous things that have already happened to us.

p. 56: Is it possible that film has indeed destroyed realism in literature?


The romance seeps out into the world that it reflects.