Northrop Frye and the poetics of process / Caterina Nella Cotrupi.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Challenging the dismissive view of Frye's work as closed and outdated, Cotrupi explores the implications of his proposition that the history of criticism may be seen as having two main approaches -- literature as "product" and literature as "process."

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CHOICE Review

This short, insightful study focuses on the importance in Frye's criticism of the Longinian critical emphasis of the creative, experiential, and psychological aspects of literature--the view of "literature as process," in contrast to the Aristotelian emphasis of techne, "literature as product." The Longinian tradition informed Frye's definitions of late-18th-century sensibility and the "thematic mode" of criticism outlined in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957); in his later writings, the poetic of process is the basis of a more theoretical criticism of literature as a whole and an ethical theory of cultural production that extends to educational and theological issues (God understood as a verb implying "a process of accomplishing itself"). Cotrupi argues that Giambattista Vico's effort to join creation and knowledge, art and science, in a unified theory of culture was a major influence on this development, and she aims to show the affinities between the ideas of Frye and Vico--especially the latter's formulation of the verum factum principle, i.e., the idea that "truth or meaning is made, not perceived." Though Cotrupi is not the first to notice this relationship, her use of materials in Frye's notebooks and the scholarship of Italian students of Vico makes her account of it a useful addition to Frye studies at the graduate and research level. G. R. Wasserman emeritus, Russell Sage College