Cotrupi on Frye on Displacement

A quotation from Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process. Caterina Nella Cotrupi. pp. 84-85.

What Frye understands by this term [displacement] is the gradual tendency observable in literature over time to move away from the pole of fiction and make-believe towards that of plausibility and 'realism.' The changes entailed in this movement involve the transition from the realm of fulfilled desire, of imaginative freedom to conjure the most ideal and visionary projections, to one where anxieties and concerns with time, contingency, nature, and fact are so pressing as to contrive a veritable imaginative prison or hell. [...] so exaggerated that the plausible has been again left behind and the demonic side of the imagination makes its radical appearance through the nihilism of the most ironic and bleak satires and tragedies.
Captivating. The ordinary is somehow sandwiched between extremes. And the prose has us moving relentlessly.

And so for day 961
31.07.2009