Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life

Bibliographic Data

ID7932037
AuthorsJean E Kennard (corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume13
Issue1
Pages69
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/468643
OpenAlexW2329482502
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited2

I MUST have reread Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism-or at least many parts of it-several times since the first reading fifteen years ago. Yet despite this familiarity, when I looked at it again this spring, I found myself uncomfortable with a couple of sentences which had never troubled me before: All humor demands agreement that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating her husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny. To introduce a comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress the reader, because it would mean learning a new convention.' My objection had nothing to do with Frye's basic concept of a convention as an agreement which allows art to communicate. I agreed with this definition which he had developed more fully earlier: The contract agreed on by the reader before he can start reading is the same thing as a convention.2 I was also in sympathy with a critical approach based upon the response of the reader. Nor did my objection concern the question of humor, which, it is perhaps worth noting, I was quite able to ignore even though it was Frye's primary focus. My distress as a reader was with his example. I was uncomfortable with a discussion of wife beating as an even potentially acceptable source of humor. To talk about it as a new convention seemed insen

Art · Convention · Political science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Short Stories in Global Literature

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