Nick Cole's Strange Company 3 is coming out April, so I started reading the first Strange Company again this week. And that got me to thinking about the use of convention in telling stories. We cannot truly understand literary genres without understanding the conventions that comprise them. Yet convention is| With Both Hands
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Adrian Cole's The Dream Lords will release on Amazon on January 15th, 2025, and you, my loyal readers, simply must pick this up, because this is the book for anyone who wanted Dune to be a comedy instead of a tragedy. Dune is| With Both Hands
With my recent comparison of two D&D-inspired anime using a method of genre analysis, this is a good time to get into Northrop Frye's fourth phase of interpretation, the mythical phase. In the mythical phase, we will interpret literary symbols as archetypes. This phase of interpretation speaks deeply to| With Both Hands
The society emerging at the conclusion of comedy represents, by contrast, a kind of moral norm, or pragmatically free society. Its ideals are seldom defined or formulated: definition and formulation belong to the humors, who want predictable activity. We are simply given to understand that the newly-married couple will live| With Both Hands
We are still in the the third phase of the Second Essay of the Anatomy of Criticism. This phase of symbolic interpretation got so big that I decided to split it into two parts. In the last installment, I promised to get into the much misunderstood concept of allegory. Allegory| With Both Hands
The third phase of Frye's phases of literal symbolism is the formal phase. This will be Frye's briefest section in the second essay, but don't let it fool you. Frye is making a synthesis out of the prior two phases, the literal and descriptive phases. This section will also be| With Both Hands
After our brief introduction to the Second Essay in the Anatomy of Criticism, we will turn to the phases of literary symbolism. This will get very abstract, very quickly, because we are going to try to describe things are that are nearly indescribable. Bear with me, the only way out| With Both Hands
Last time, we explored Northrop Frye's modes of heroic action, which creates a model in two dimensions, the mythic-ironic axis and the tragic-comic axis. In the latter part of the First Essay, Frye turns to another related way of categorizing stories: theme or "dianoia". Aristotle lists six aspects of poetry:| With Both Hands
In this post, I'll isolate one specific part from Northrop Frye's Phase Space so that we can look at it in more detail. Let's turn to Frye's model of the mode of heroic action. Frye surveys literature over time, and he classifies it according to a principle he borrows from| With Both Hands
I got my start on Northrop Frye through John J. Reilly's review of his most famous work, Anatomy of Criticism. Since then, I have come to appreciate Frye more and more as I develop my book criticism. I am most interested in genre fiction, especially adventure fiction written for men,| With Both Hands