So does that mean nothing is new?

In Frye’s second lecture, the idea that fascinated me the most was Frye’s idea that “A writer’s desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature,” (P.19). This part of his lecture caught my attention because it made me ask the question “So then is no literature original?” Here Frye is saying that all literature has a background, a pedigree as he describes it, and I agree with him. Literature was created from experiences but with some imagination involved. But I was shocked when he stated that a writer will imitate whatever he reads which will give him a “convention” and after writing with the convention for some time, he will develop “his own distinctive sense of form.” I was shocked mainly due to the fact that I had never thought about literature in that sense. I never thought of literature as having a general shape that doesn’t change (to an extent) in whatever time period or culture it’s being written in. Initially I disagreed with Frye and couldn’t understand how he thought a writer needed previous literature to have a desire to write and how literature is conventionalized. One could argue that a writer can have a desire to write because of an experience they had but the base of their writing or ideas will come from literature they have read. Or one could say that poems are not all the same or conventionalized, or that mythologies are never alike but the truth is, in a sense they are. Frye has change my opinion and I now feel that the base to most kinds of literature did in fact come from a broad, central idea that already existed.