Frye and the Organization of Literature

“As literature is not itself an organized structure of knowledge, the critic has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for ideas…it is clear that the absence of systematic criticism has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines have moved in.”  - Northrop Frye

 

I can think of all sorts of examples of philosophical schools colonizing literary studies: feminism, Marxism, post-modernism, just off the top of my head. To push these theories off to the side (perhaps not all the way out, since philosophy and history are the context of literature), people would have to study literature from the inside outwards.

 

But I wonder how much one can understand music by studying acoustics, how much one can understand painting by studying the chemistry of paint, so how much can we understand literature by understanding words?  Is the proper study of literature really just linguistics? Or would linguistics be to literary studies what neuro-science is to psychology?

 

If you subscribe to the idea of narrative psychology, the idea that your identity is a narrative we have formed out of our memories, that we turn our memories into stories with a theme (the meaning of life) and a main character (you), the perhaps literature is what happens when your brain becomes so good at creating narratives that it goes hog wild, and yet compartmentalizes them to keep you from going crazy (conspiracy theorists might actually be using a similar skill set as novelists). Nor would it surprise me if mythologies have more in common with literature than with history.

 

So if we wanted to make literary studies more scientific, then studying narrative psychology would be a good start.