Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process by Caterina Nella Cotrupi (review)

344 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 siege, and needed an indefatigable and compelling champion. Frye took on this task with increasing relish, praising specialization and >concentration= in honours curricula as the best preparation of undergraduates for a responsible place in the world, while promoting the university and its faculty as >the powerhouse of freedom= which works best by autonomy, limitation, and prescription. On the vexed question of the relation between teaching and scholarship he remains clear and consistent: >To subordinate teaching to scholarship is the only way of guaranteeing the independence of the teacher within the university, and of encouraging his independence outside of it.= In a series of aestheticizing moves, he looks to >the rhythm of education= and >the healing power of what is called aesthetic distance= to salvage what is most enduringly valuable in individuals and societies and to move us towards the utopia of a university open to all whenever they wish to come. This volume is endlessly educative, a source of challenge and inspiration for all educators and supporters of our public system. (L.M. FINDLAY) Caterina Nella Cotrupi. Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process University of Toronto Press. xii, 146. $40.00, $14.95 W.H. Auden said that literature should be like a good cheese, local but prized elsewhere. In the last days of the single-subject monograph, the same might be said of a critical work. A book may have its particular detailed subject but should speak about everything else at the same time. I=d prefer to think of such a book as having a variety of interpenetrating centres, and in this light Nella Cotrupi=s Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process is a very good cheese. As an avid Frye reader, I found my horizons expanded on a number of central Frye issues: the acknowledged influence on Frye of eighteenth-century Italian writer Giambattista Vico; the evolving unities of Frye=s entire œuvre; Frye=s theories of metaphor as they relate to classical and Augustan theories of the sublime; his thoughts on the subject/object binary and of interpenetrating energies (I am inside what I contain); the issue of critical/creative processes themselves; finally the debate between literature and criticism as product or as process. Each of these issues, in Cotrupi=s hands, emanates from its own centre to a suggested horizon, where you find yourself scratching little reminders in the margin to think, say, about Vico as a deconstructionist, or Longinus as a process theologian. This book is rich with explicit and implied connections. And yet, to Cotrupi=s credit, one isn=t required to find the centre of the book among these centres. Traversing her detailed critical analyses and inviting scholarship is the concern of another book entitled something like The State of Critical Writing at the Present Time. To be sure, a dangerous can of worms to open, unless you speak your piece by the way, and make your largest HUMANITIES 345 claims the natural issuances of a jeweller=s-eye focus on the matter at hand. There is a group of readers that has always believed that Frye is still waiting for the rest of the critical world to catch up, or at least get what he=s saying. (Harold Bloom once complained that when he read someone else=s version of his theories he never recognized them; the same might be said of the typical Frye critiques of the past thirty years.) Work has gradually appeared in the past half-decade that reveals how Frye=s critical practices, his theories of metaphor, phases and levels of language, concepts of primary concern as relating to imagination and ideology, and late concepts of kerygma and interpenetration are as urgently relevant to a wide spectrum of critical and cultural debates as they ever were. But Cotrupi=s book makes the further case that Frye=s theoria might serve as a critical map of the times, provide clarity, overview, and purpose among the competing mandates of the contemporary critical scene. In her careful exposition of the poetics of process, Cotrupi walks us through the classical debate between the Aristotelian view of the sublime as a natural product, something big...