Notable class 31 Jan

Northrup Frye doesn't ascribe to any particular school of criticism or author. He intends, instead, to provide a sort of universal (omniscient/present) view of what it means to read/interpret literature. He proposes to reduce literature to its lowest common denominator: words and their structure.
Does Northie think he's God?
What is the difference between myths and fairy tales? Are myths more about answering for our origins and then the fairy tales are displacements of those? I'm not sure I fully understand the concept of displacement just yet. Why is it called that and not replacement or misplacement?

Frye p.131 - talks about lit. analogous to music and painting. Those creative arts are different from literature because they do not attempt to be truly representative nor does an audience expect that, but enjoys it for itself.
He talks about how structural principles of music are clearly understood and can be taught even to children.
Why can't we talk about literature in the same way? Does putting it in terms of structure/formula
necessarily reduce literature or cause it to lose some of its mystery?
"The aim is to give a rational account of some of the structural principles of Western Literature in the context of its Classical and Christian heritage" (Frye 133).

Vico and his Ages of man - understanding history through images from literature
Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history.

Hoaxes: fiction presented as fact - verisimilitude.

What would literature look like if it returned to Vico's Language of the Gods?