Cosmopolitan and National Culture in Northrop Frye

The essay explores a double trajectory in Frye’s writings between a universalist, cosmopolitan, understanding of culture that transcends locality, and an understanding of culture that traces its connections to the specificities of geography and history and, to some extent, embraces the idea of national and regional cultures. I argue that the two concepts in Frye are joined by the common idea of culture as the achievement of a realm of freedom from nature. I defend this oscillating movement in Frye’s thought by viewing it as a suggestively open-ended dialectic, one which does not seek to impose a static unity or synthesis upon its opposing terms. The dialectic between cosmos and locus allows Frye’s thought to grapple productively with what Pheng Cheah has called ‘the aporias of given culture’ – the various material, natural, and social givens that constitute culture even as they trouble its promised freedom for humanity.