The Great Code Cracked

"Northrop Frye for Dummies"

Chapter 1: Language
- Translation
-"Language" - translatable language, concrete things
- 3 Stages
-Age of the Divine: Metaphorical
-Age of Heroes: Metonymical
-Age of Men: Demotic
- Bible as representing fourth stage of kerygma(revelation)
- Trope: Figure of speech
*Age of Gods (Divine) Explained
- Hieroglyphic age is "poetic"
- Little emphasis on separating the subject and the object
- Warrior "boasts" (Genesis 4:23)
- Vow (Judges11:35)
- All words considered to be concrete
- Intensely physical
- Homer: soul, mind, time, and courage are embodied
- Kairos: a crucial moment in time is a "notch in an arrow."
*Age of the Heroes Explained
- Language is more individualized
- Words are outward expression of inner thoughts
- Intellect and emotion experience a split
- Example: Plato is a 2nd phase thinker
- Thought superior to nature
- Concepts and allegories
- Commentary is the leading genre
- Metonymy (pg 15)
*Age of Men Explained
- Thought to have began in the 16th century
- Fact gathering
- Language as descriptive of an objective order
- Religious questions are pointless
- Words are words alone
- Deconstruction
- Descriptive writer distrusts figurative language
- In the 3rd phase consciousness modulates from soul to mind
- Science as basis of induction

It seems that Frye's analysis of human nature is a dim one, that people truly are getting dumber, or as I see it, more distracted.

-Kerygma: linguistic idiom of the Bible

*Role of Poetry
- Keeps aboe the metaphorical use of language
- Suggests the "this is that" structure of metaphor (pg 25)
- Primary function of literature is to keep re-creating the first metaphorical phase of language during the domination of later phases (pg 28)
-(I personally find this very interesting. Other theorists find poetry to be trite, a lesser form of learning where things are comprised of deception. But Frye places it back on a pedestal arguing for the metaphorical phroasing poetry is created through.)