Abstract

This article focuses on the place of paradox in Northrop Frye’s writing and teaching, principally by way of several key examples. Paradox tends to counter, at least superficially, popular opinion and common sense, though in the interest of common enlightenment. The figure of paradox is linked by Frye to metaphor as a kind of logical contradiction that can nonetheless be a vehicle of truth, foremost in literature and religion. Such paradoxes are both a topic for Frye’s elucidations of literary and scriptural texts but also a mode enlisted in the very performance of Frye’s critical writing and teaching.

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