Northrop FryeThinkers

1968 is a highly contagious epidemic of hysteria that simply has to be lived through until it stops. It will end as suddenly as it began, with nothing much accomplished or permanently changed.

Abstract expressionism is a genre which seems to express a violent reactionary anarchism, a repudiating not so much of the traditions as of the community of painting.

Abstract painting is distinguished from nonobjective painting in the same way that music is distinguished from mathematics.

The Absurd is a temporal, not a spatial feeling which refers primarily to the disappearance of the sense of continuity in our day.

Adolescence is represented by strong pressures toward introversion on the one hand, and rigid conformity to group action on the other.

Advertising is a socially approved form of drug culture: imaginary world, promises us magical powers within that world.

Advertising is distinguished from propaganda in that advertising implies a competitive market and an absence of monopoly... propaganda implies a centralizing of power.

Air is the power of making things visible, the medium of creative energy.

Alienation is minimal identity, a classical atom against the external world.

Allegory is joined to another, or to a myth, by a certain interpretation of meaning rather than by structure.

Allegory is not added by critical interpretation alone.

The Angel is a spiritual being because angels don't travel but just epiphanize in an interpenetrating space.