Academic Fragments, Part 1

What follows is a fragment of writing that I was working on developing into an essay while I was working on my dissertation.  Northrop Frye was very important to my scholarship and still is crucial to my understanding of literature.  It seems likely that I will come back to writing about his work in the future, but I will otherwise drop this here without further comment:

In the introduction to Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography, Robert D. Denham writes that 1974 is too early a time to suggest Northrop Frye's impact on literary criticism.  This will turn out to be a common sentiment over the intervening 35 years as scholars continue to declare it too early to determine Frye's impact on the study of literature and, in 2011, I would suggest that it is still to early to determine the impact that Frye's work has had on the many fields within literary criticism that he worked.  Too early because of the revival in interest in Frye's work that has begun over the last decade and too early because of the nearly completed publication of thirty volumes of Frye's previously unpublished writings in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  Contained within these collected works are scattered musings on one central idea that unites many of the disparate threads within Frye's thought: interpenetration.  

The concept of interpenetration is never wholly developed in the notebooks.  To assign it a definitive meaning would be unfair to Frye because it was never a concept he formally developed, but rather used as a heuristic for relating the unlike, for finding the unity in the disparate, and for linking the unlinkable.  In short, interpenetration is “a sense of the universal here” (Frye Collected 13: 162).  

(notebook 53)on the non-dialectical nature of interpenetration: “Hegel showed how the thesis involved its own antithesis, although I think the 'synthesis' has been foinsted on him by his followers” (Frye Collected 6: 616).   thesis and antithesis – coexisting – is the key.  The non-resolution of competing forces is not progressive or teleological

Reading the concept of interpenetration back into Anatomy clarifies two of Frye's central questions: first, it illustrates the interdependence of art and criticism and second, the concept of interpenetration provides a clearer model of genre blending that takes place in the encyclopedic form.  Frye argues that “criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with” (5).  For Frye, criticism does not happen in isolation from art or from the world but is mutually coextensive and affective with art and the world.  In other words, criticism and art interpenetrate.  

To demonstrate this claim, I turn to two segments of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.  Taken together, these segments demonstrate two of Frye's key concepts: the integration of genre that is the encyclopedic form and the interpenetration of art and criticism.  

Much of Frye's criticism derives from his unique characterization of the relationship between the subject and the object.  For Frye, this relationship recurs in myth and metaphor and manifests, ultimately, in the concept of interpenetration.  In “The Koine of Myth” Frye describes the metaphor 

Robert Denham identifies three contexts which Frye first derives the term “interpenetration”: historical, philosophical, and religious.  Frye will later apply the concept to the social and several other contexts.  For the purposes of this essay, I would propose a generalized context for interpenetration that is closer to what Denham identifies as a form of Hegelian synthesis, or aufhebung.  Interpenetration, then, is dialectical in the sense that synthesis does not abolish either thesis or antithesis, but preserves both originary terms.  

-”The movement toward interpenetration, then, is a movement away from power, ideology, and secondary concern, while the focus of the genuine community is dialogue.  . . . Ideology is monologic and exclusive, but in dialogue the opposites of different ideologies interpenetrate” (48)

In the first segment I will discuss, the reader is treated to an extract from prodigy Hal Incandenza's term paper on the hero in television and in the second segment (an extended footnote to the main text), a fellow student of Hal's plagiarizes a term paper on fictional politics in the novel.  

Hal 140-2

Struck 1055-1062 n.304

Denham, Robert D.  Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.

Frye, Northrop.  Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.