ABSTRACT
During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Frye was asked to lecture on historical events he was living through. These events culminated in the student protests at North American universities. In the 1950s the cries of ‘Blake-light tragedies’ belonged mainly to the beat generation, but by the 1960s the revolution had spread to the campuses and drew to its cause a body of students. Ginsberg’s Howl was published a year•before Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, and both men had their own ideas of Blakean apocalypse, from translations of Moloch to those of eternity in time. Frye’s idea of a regained paradise differed from the prophets of alternative ways of life and counterculture. What became the generation of 1968 are the heirs to the beat generation and became important proponents of the counterculture as it was translated into the academy in the forms of cultural critique or post-structuralism. This is the generation that, increasingly, turned away from ‘humanism’ and the values that Frye expounded, from modernism to post-modernism. It was a generation that included many who admired Frye’s brilliance but who could not follow him down the critical path that he illuminated with his wit and learning. Where he sought unity and meaning, they sought disintegration and indeterminacy; where he created a system and a grand narrative,
they opted for petits récits. The professorial heroes of 1968, if that is not too much of an oxymoron, were not always too different in age from Frye (born 1912). Jacques Lacan was born in 1901, Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1908, Roland Barthes in 1915, Louis Althusser in 1918 and Paul de Man in 1919. Even Michel Foucault (1926) and Jacques Derrida (1930) were well advanced in their careers in 1968. The late structuralist and poststructuralist revolution in literary studies, which has challenged Frye’s poetics since the late 1960s, has led to a new generation of political or oppositional critics, many of whom were born during the 1940s and who advanced the causes of feminism, subaltern studies, post-colonialism, new historicism and cultural materialism, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore among them. For most of the theorists and critics working in these new ‘schools’, politics, ideology and literature are inseparable. This is the generation who studied in the universities during the 1960s. Frye placed myth as something enduring behind transitory ideology, but many in the 1960s and after have a hard time believing in the transcendental and transhistorical. Here is one of the major differences between Frye and the post-structuralist/postmodernist movement that I have been characterizing.
