Conducted 20 February 1985
From J. Samuel Cope, “Frye Looks Forward,” in his column “Between the Lines,” San Francisco Chronicle, 17 March 1985. The article has been reformatted to add speakers’ names. Frye had travelled to the west coast of the United States to deliver lectures at Berkeley, Santa Clara, and UCLA; his daybook for 1985 notes the interview with Sam Cope in Santa Clara.
COPE: These days we hear talk that television is ruining the attention spans of prospective readers and that the commercialized world of publishing inhibits the growth of serious literature. Whether this is true or not was a question posed recently to Northrop Frye, the eminent scholar and literary critic * * *. In the Bay Area recently, Frye was asked the Big Question: Does he believe literature in North America is headed for renewal or demise?
FRYE: I think I’m hopeful * * *. I know that when I travel on the subway in Toronto I see that people are reading books, sometimes quite long and difficult books. They are not entirely hypnotized by new media such as television. … Television doesn’t really affect the book-reading audience, it just siphons off the people who don’t really want to read anyway.
[Frye said that the concentration of power in major publishing houses is forcing a concentration of another sort among proponents of high culture.]
FRYE: As the publishing business becomes a form of mass culture, the genuine poets and novelists get out from under cover and organize what amounts to a resistance press. … Literature becomes a sort of counter-culture, and when it does I think that’s very healthy. Of course a cultural movement is partly regional. More and more movements in Canada keep sprouting out of what used to be called the boondocks.