Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Class 9/15/08

While I can't necessarily catagorize all aspects of class as interesting (My appology for the slight offence). Two words defined by Dr. Sexon stood out as critical terms in relation to lit crit and especially our study of Northrop Frye.

Mimesis- meaning mimiced
Poiesis- meaning created

These definitions led me to question wether Frye believed in Poesis because as he contends "we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressivly moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, begining to move back" (pg. 52, Anatomy of Criticism) If all literature is displaced myth how can any new meaning in literature be created. Has the human race already created all meaning possible in literature? This sits a bit uneasy however I don't believe Frye to be so regimented in his doctrine. While I agree that most if not all literature stems from ancient ritual or myth or instinct as Frye believes, new created meaning can be interpreted due to each reader's ability to interpret texts personally. Poiesis then is not a dead term. For some reason while reading Frye I got this impression initally however my cloudy brain cleared itself with a bit of windy blogging. After all "how can I know what I think until I see what I say" (E.M. Forster)

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