Paul Fry

Professions :

Professor

Born :

October 28, 1944

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue.

tradition danger ideas

Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century.

vocabulary special fiction

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any... by Paul Fry

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.

naysayers fans kind

The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.

grasping accepting ideas

I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the category of "founder of discursivity" for the authors he likes. Slippery, perhaps, but you can see what he means.

tyrants likes mean

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

criticism principles may

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

criticism self thinking

I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be applied, hence becomes methodology without a hitch, but isn't necessarily practical at all.

deployment methodology may

I beg my reader to consider the "evidence" I provide for my case and perhaps feel persuaded as a result. Beyond that I make no claim.

cases results claims

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new... by Paul Fry

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

introducing poet insight

Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism to care about originality and suppose with a sometimes naive spontaneity that it's all that matters.

care matter doubt

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for g... by Paul Fry

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

originality granted matter

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak.

effort mean thinking

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem." by Paul Fry

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."

want

The mantra of the new historicists was "we have betrayed ourselves." Since their emergence, there have been more or less interesting paradigm shifts having mainly to do with Habermas and the increased focus on media studies, but the talismanic word has never ceased to be "history."

media focus interesting

The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriented academics in the late seventies and eighties.

rediscovery salad landscape

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.

reading mind fiction

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