the worlds best copy cat

"You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized." (pg. 21)

What Frye says in this quote is true; popular literature for any genre follows along a similar blueprint. We learn from our parents what their parents learned from their parents and so on, meaning that we have been strongly influenced by the past. As we get older we are influenced by even more, television, internet, what we see and what we hear and with that it gets harder to break the mould. In order for literature to take a new form we would have to take a very naive look at the world around us. I feel as though Frye is reiterating what he said in The Motive for Metaphor “literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress” (pg.9) but in a different context. In The Singing School he is saying that our current literature “provide[s] only content, they don’t provide new literary forms” (pg.22) mainly because the new writers have based their writing experiences on the previous literary scholars that have shaped the mould for literature and all we are left to do is add to it.