Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism Vs.The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms

HELLO!

Today we compare the classic in literary criticism Anatomy of Criticism, written by Northrop Frye, a man considered a genius by PhDs in English, to The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition), written by Murfin and Ray, two dudes (I think). Then we will pretend that this post is gaming-related.

Although the authors Murfin and Ray have names that sound like fish species, their book is better. It's better than the "classic" Anatomy of Criticism. And to not incite the rage of the literature world I will say fire-putting-outing remarks, such as, "You don't need to be angry, because you will never visit this site," and "I am talking about games criticism."

How is it that the Ray Fin book is better? Well, it is better by giving you its literary words, defining them, and then giving examples of them from the various arts. Frye's book, however, goes on a near stream of consciousness in which he analyses a ton of literature yet gives me, the games journalist wannabe, nothing with which I can analyze a story. To demonstrate this, I will select a passage from random, first from Frye's book: "The conception of art as having a relation to reality which is neither direct nor negative, but potential, finally resolves the dichotomy between delight and instruction, the style and the message. 'Delight' is not readily distinguishable from pleasure, and hence opens the way to that aesthetic hedonism we glanced at in the introduction, the failure to distinguish personal and impersonal (snoooooore)."

....Oh! Sorry. I fell asleep for a moment. What just happened? Oh right, the Frye quote. Okay. Well...what's its problem (it being a representative of pretty much the entire book)?

Its problem is that it doesn't organize itself very well into all the terms and ideas it wants to tell. While the Bedford Fish book starts each section with the idea in bold, and then defines the idea and gives an example of it, the Frye book often gives you an example and says what literary terms could be ascribed to it, and then the author moves on. Thus what happens in Frye is that the learning becomes little. And when I say little I mean nothing.

But with the Fish, it becomes a lot of learning, about critical terms, with which I can use to critique things. To prove that the Bedford book does what I say it does, here's a random example from it: "anagnorisis: A term used by Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 330 B.C.) to refer to the moment in a drama when the protagnoist "discovers" something that either leads to or explains a reversal of fortune -- that is, the protagonist gains some crucial knowledge that he or she did not have. In a tragedy, the revelation is usually closely associated with the protagonist's downfall, whereas in a comedy it usually signals his or her success."

BAM!

And then they site examples from Oedipus Rex, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense.

With this not-famous-in-the-literature-world book, I can get tools that allow me to analyze almost any new narrative (including game ones). With the famous one, I can say something like, "Uh, Northrop Frye (he was a Genius!) said something about how....uh...poems are emotional sometimes?"

Not to say that Frye's book is useless to LITERATURE people who totally failed to notice themes in the canon they read. But that opens up a depressing conversation about being a PhD student in Literature. Games are more interesting.