Header image: KF in Dall-E
[1984] The Scholar in Society: Northrop Frye in Conversation https://www.nfb.ca/film/scholar_in_society/
- Uni “to provide me with a community where the intellect and the imagination have a continuous role to play, so that he gets some idea of what life could be like if the intellect and imagination we always functional in human society”
- 01:35 – uni is detachment (from partisanship), without withdrawal, from society
- 03:00 – “Education is not a preparation for life because life won’t stay around to get prepared for…To the extent that it’s a preparatifon for anything, it’s a preparation for an anti-climax, with how to live with a lower rate of intellectual intensity”
- “education” is such a versatile word
- “the willingness to acquire the habit of reading”
- “pastoral myth” – “back to basics”
- 08:15 The use of passive reading and writing by society v the use of reading and writing in the university as instruments of freedom
- 08:27 There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language
- 1984; NewSpeak “turns language into something automatic, like a squirrels chatter, so that you can use it without being a conscious being”
- Not coming from the speaker’s mind at all; just echoes of whatever he has picked up
KF: Not do you agree with this but why do you agree/disagree (what do you think?)
- 12:17 “A democracy cannot function without articulate citizens.” (anti-intellectual current)
- 13:10 The battle is always on the point of being lost; the point is that it never stops
- 14:20 If you’re brought up in an evangelical background, to think of it very largely about inhibitions; distrusting your own impulse
- 16:00 Writing/teaching: my writing becomes obscure unless I’ve tried to explain it to an audience.
- 16:35 You can really only teach by parable (Jesus knew this)
- 18:42 – Books; the world’s most patient medium
- 19:10 Book as linear medium – McLuhan
- Different to simultaneous media
- 20:31 The loss of a sense of continuity of time
- Continuity of institutions used to be of major significance; 20C sees them as part of a dissolving pagent – the uni is the only thing left (of continuity)
- 21:55 Uni yields a kind of spiritual authority
- 22:25 mythological conditioning
- 26:12 The importance of cultural tradition
- Senility is same in society as in the individual: if you lose your sense of tradition, you are simply floating (KF: unmoored)