Frye and Hegel

This article traces the influence of Hegel upon Frye’s thought, beginning with the extraordinary paper he wrote on romanticism as a twenty-year-old undergraduate and continuing through his two books on the Bible, The Great Code and Words with Power and his posthumously published The Double Vision. It seeks to demonstrate what Frye means by saying, “If Hegel had written his Phenomenology in mythos-language instead of in logos-language a lot of my work would be done for me.” Particular attention is paid to the ways the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung plays out in Frye’s dialectic, which characteristically works to resolve the opposition between two categories. The article also considers the importance of the ladder metaphor in both Hegel and Frye.