Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Probably the first time anyone used "ectoplasmic" in a literary book review

I just found this and thought it was cool:

"...in 1922, the year that Proust died with his great mythical Recherche complete, the appearance of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the more ectoplasmic Fantasia of the Unconscious startled the literary public also into realizing the importance of myth.  It was the next year that Cassirer began to bring the problem into systematic philosophy, and in the thirty years since then the word myth has continued to produce that uninterrupted flow of talk which is generally called, and sometimes accompanies, a steady advance in thinking."

(Northrop Frye, 1953 review of Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, trans. Ralph Manheim.  Included in Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays, edited and with an introduction by Robert D Denham.)

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