Archetypes of Literature, Frye

This immediately popped up before I got to the full text of Archetypes of Literature:
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ap/consider/frye/indexfryeov.htm
Which is a visual of pages 104-110 of my version, which is extremely helpful.

I don't know if my link to the text will help, but here it is.
http://www.jstor.org.proxybz.lib.montana.edu/stable/pdfplus/4333216.pdf
If you can't find it otherwise, go to the MSU library site, click on Articles. Under J-L, JSTOR is there and you can access it via the library site if you have a library account set up online.

On to my first draft of my thoughts on the actual text so far:

"It is therefore impossible to 'learn literature': one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature" (Frye 92).

I think what Frye is driving at right from the beginning is that learning is done in most part progressively, systematically, except for with literature. Lit itself cannot be Learned as much as Inferred, via the process of literary criticism: criticism is the system for which you can learn from lit.

"He finds that literature is the central division of the 'humanities,' flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy [....] [F]or the systematic mental organization of the subject, the student has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for the ideas" (Frye 93).

Frye's really questing for a systematic and uniform approach to criticism, which he attempts to lay out for his readers. The first part borrows from other humanities, such as the mental faculties concerning events and time from history and others such as understanding and thought from philosophy.

"Criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one" (Frye 94).

There are a bunch of unworthy works of literature out there, but as in life, in criticism, there is also the good and the bad. (At least in Frye's estimation, which sounds a LOT like his hated value judgments to me).

"I suggest that what is at present missing from literary criticism is a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole. Such a principle, though it would retain the centripetal perspective of structural analysis, would try to give the same perspective to other kinds of criticism too. The first postulate of this hypothesis is the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence" (Frye 96).

Frye addresses the central struggle of literary criticism by pointing out the basic tension, which is that there is no single approach to learning about literature. There are many generally accepted schools of thought, but even those divisions aren't strictly one or the other. There are so many approaches that the reader almost needs more than one approach to even learn about how to approach lit, which makes everything seem rather daunting.

"We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we "see" what he means" (102).

I think this last bit sums up the recurring comment of Prof. Sexton, that "how do you know what you mean unless you see what you say?" As readers come to understand the underlying structures through lit crit, we can "see" how literature works and therefore, understand it better. This understanding is better and deeper than just hearing the words and liking them, because the pattern to understand is much clearer.