A Quote by Northrop Frye
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.
[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
Kafka often describes himself as a bloodless figure: a human being who doesn't really participate in the life of his fellow human beings, someone who doesn't actually live in the true sense of the word, but who consists rather of words and literature. In my view, that is, however, only half true. In a roundabout way through literature, which presupposes empathy and exact observation, he immerses himself again in the life of society; in a certain sense he comes back to it.
I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.
My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.
Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.
The literary game is the abyss of human society itself: interactive, playful and tragic. We can't live alone. For me, Robinson [Crusoe] is either a false myth or else he represents the denial of human society. We can't play by ourselves. In literature, it's even more complicated, because one has to play with an indeterminate number of players simultaneously and every game is different. The other player can abandon your game at any time...to go play chess.
When the husband and wife are healthy, and free from inherited weaknesses and diseases that might be transmitted with injury to their offspring the use of contraceptives is to be condemned.
One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity...
I used to like Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology. All mythology!
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.
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