Tom Willard’s lecture “Northrop Frye and the Art of Reading”

28 Oct 2015 - 15:00 / 28 Oct 2015 - 17:00

The Northrop Frye Centre is pleased to announce a guest lecture by Northrop Frye Centre Visiting Fellow, Prof. Tom Willard, entitled “Northrop Frye and the Art of Reading” on Wednesday, October 28^th in the Northrop Frye Centre (VC102) at 3:00pm. All are welcome. Please click here to RSVP as space is limited.

The recently published notebooks and diaries of Northrop Frye give reason to think that his view of reading has been widely misunderstood—that, far from making a unique claim for the literary critic, he always wanted to empower what Samuel Johnson called the “common reader” and that this power extended beyond reading a single text to developing a useful sense of “literature as a whole.” After discussing Frye’s views of centrifugal and centripetal reading and the reading of texts over time and in space, along with related terms in Anatomy of Criticism, the talk will turn to a sample reading of a poem Frye discussed in both classes and public lectures.