Frye

In reading "Archetypes in Literature" I got my first taste of Frye, and was honestly not as overwhelmed as Sexson frightened me into expecting I would be. True it was dense and very intellectual, but I feel that I was able to grasp what Frye was trying to communicate.

I've always had a problem with criticism when we attempted it in my high school classes, but now I understand were weren't practicing actually criticism, just trying to guess what the author meant (or what the teacher thought the author meant) in their writing. In Frye's comparison of literature to music and painting I grasped what I think to be a key factor in critically looking at a work; patterns and rhythms. Frye points that a large part of criticism is finding the corresponding patterns between one piece of work and others to uncover exactly category and genre a particular piece of writing falls into.

I was also pleastly surprised when Frye wrote about the myth and the archetypes that were interpreted into each season. I recognized many of the representations (Summer as comedy and romance, fall and sunset as tragedy and death) from my previous high school AP English class.