I am SO stupid!

Okay, so, title like that, you're thinking I'm gonna tell you how I missed a deadline because I wrote down the wrong date, or walked into a door and broke a toe or something, right?

Wrong - it's much more invidious than that. Stupid might not be quite the right word, but dense or slow might do just as well.

Over a year ago, I read this book Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. In it (or at least part of it), he argues that you can understand literature only by creating a theory of literature that arises from itself, not borrowed from other disciplines like psychoanalysis, history etc. (Well, part of his argument anyway) What he finds when he turns to literature to develop a theory is that literature falls into various "modes": tragic, comic, ironic, mythic and romantic. These are ways that the story gets told. For example, a tragedy written in romantic mode will have the god/supernatural hero die (e.g. Beowulf, Roland - yes, the one I'm writing about). Seemed pretty straightforward to me. Even used the book in, not one, but TWO papers last year. Always read other people's work that talked about Frye's "modes" as different from other writer's use of "genres".

Just now, as I was reading an excerpt from The Rise of the Novel, it finally dawned on me HOW modes are different from genres. A year after reading Frye. Only after reading someone else (who doesn't even mention Frye). After using his work in two papers. NOW I finally get it. DUH! How stupid is that? Modes are more about what happens, and genres about how it happens (not necessarily just structurally, but the details through which the author presents the story) - roughly speaking.

apology If that didn't make sense to you, it's okay. Hell, it took me a year to get it, and I was reading someone who knows how to write. It was just such an epiphanic moment, I had to write it down.