FRYE PRINCIPAL DEFINITION CODE
FRYE PRINCIPAL DEFINITION SERIES

Let me comment briefly on the former consideration, and then I shall go on to discuss in detail t he account Frye renders of the.What is the principle of sparse coding? Explain its relation to other coding schemes such as dense codes or grandmother cells, and give examples of each in the nervous system. This assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two directions-from the point of view of literary theory and in regard to the descriptive claim about the nature of the Bible. He immediately goes on to propose that the Bible is just such a structure, and he cites the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. In The Great Code, he offers what he calls a provisional definition of the literary as 'a verbal structure existing for its own sake' (57). This conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to Frye's polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature, a controlling idea in Anatomy of Criticism, Fables of Identity, and elsewhere in his writing. ythology is n ot a direct response to the natural environment it is part of the imaginative insulation that separates us from that environment' (37). It is, we should note, the internal coherence of culture through the complex reiterations of verbal experience that literature articulates, and not a response to the natural world or to history: 'he real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature. It is myth, he argues, that marks the contours of a culture: 'A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared allusion and verbal experience in time, and so mythology helps to create cultural history' (34).

His uncompromising conception of mythology as the very heart of literature is grounded here in an account of the Bible as the origin of what he repeatedly calls the 'mythological universe' of Western literature.

FRYE PRINCIPAL DEFINITION CODE

The Great Code may well be the most deeply instructive of Northrop Frye's books, though the object of instruction is less the Bible itself than the nature and source of Frye's enterprise as a critic. In particular, his readings revive a form of Christian supersessionism that detaches the Hebrew Scriptures from the shifting complications of their densely particular realizations. His claims are questionable from the point of view of both literary theory and biblical scholarship, and they lead him systematically to misrepresent biblical texts.

FRYE PRINCIPAL DEFINITION SERIES

The Bible, as a text in which metaphor and other kinds of figuration predominate, is just such a structure and, as such, has served as the origin of Western literature's 'mythological universe.' Arguing from this far-reaching claim, Frye offers a series of schemata that seek to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. According to Frye, a literary work is 'a verbal structure existing for its own sake.' It has a self-referential character. Northrop Frye's first book on the Bible and literature, The Great Code, discloses more about the nature of Frye's literary criticism than it does about the Bible itself.

Frye principal definition