Search results for ""Author Michael Dolzani""

Myth criticism flourished in the mid-twentieth century under the powerful influence of Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. It asserted the need to identify common, unifying patterns in literature, arts, and religion. Although it was eclipsed by postmodern theories that asserted difference and conflict, those theories proved incapable of inspiring solidarity or guiding social action. The Productions of Time argues for a return to myth criticism in order to refine and extend its vision.With the aim of rehabilitating myth criticism for our time, Michael Dolzani sketches an anatomy of the imagination as demonstrated in the total body of its productions, including literature, mythology, the arts, popular culture, and religious and political texts. Dolzani situates a vast panoply of images, character types, plot structures, themes, and genres to better understand their purposes, their recurrences across broad spans of history, and their interrelations. Illustrating the relationship between mythology and history, The Productions of Time proposes a symbolic language as a way of enabling dialogue across ideological and individual differences.Arguing for the ethical and intellectual necessity of conceiving a unifying pattern that transcends differences, The Productions of Time demonstrates that imagination is part of the human inheritance, common to all, not just to poets and mystics.

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This thirteenth and final volume of previously unpublished writings by Northrop Frye gathers together autobiographical reflections, short stories, an unfinished novel, and commentary on a wide range of topics from Canadian culture to religion. Drawn from holdings in the Frye archives - holograph notebooks, typed notes, and typescripts - these writings have been largely inaccessible to Frye scholars until now. Some of the contents of this volume, Frye's early fiction, for example, will come as a surprise to those acquainted primarily with his published criticism. All of his fables and dialogues are included here, as are a half-dozen sets of notes in which he speculates on forms of fiction and various literary projects he planned to one day undertake. These miscellaneous writings offer further evidence of Frye's fertile mind, quick wit, expansive imagination, and eloquence. Frye always claimed that the process of writing was for him a search for proper formulas through which to communicate. The material in this volume, which seldom fails to instruct and delight, discloses the process of that search.

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