John Fraser (critic)

John Fraser is a critic, literary theorist, and cultural analyst, who has been concerned in a variety of ways with relationships between energy and order.

Biographical Details

Fraser was born in Church End Finchley, North London, in 1928. In 1948, after two years of National Service as a clerk in the Royal Air Force, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as an Exhibitioner (junior scholar), where he read English.

After graduation, he taught at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa for two years, and then moved to the States, where he took the [http://barzun100.blogspot.com/2007/02/barzun-trilling-seminar.html Barzun-Trilling] seminar at Columbia, afterwards teaching for two years in Florida. In 1961 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, with a dissertation on George Sturt, rural labouring life, and the rhetoric of sociological presentation, and a minor in Philosophy, including classes from Wilfred Sellars, and Alan Donagan.

That year, he and the Minnesota artist [http://www.thistledance.com/art_Fraser.html Carol Hoorn Fraser] , whom he had married in 1956, moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he taught at Dalhousie University, retiring as George Munro Professor of English.

During his academic career he published three books and numerous scholarly articles. At Minnesota he co-founded and co-edited with Thomas J. Roberts, George Levine, and others the quarterly journal "GSE" ("The Graduate Student of English"), 1957–60.

In 1990 he gave the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, following in the footsteps of Northrop Frye, Hugh Kenner, and others. Subsequently he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

After Carol Fraser's death in 1991 he co-curated a show of her work, "A Visionary Gaze" (1993), and engaged in extensive archival work on her art and life.

In 1999 he started a website, [http://www.jottings.ca Jottings.ca] . It began as a venue for his writings about Carol but kept growing and now includes the equivalent of several print books.

A reviewer called "America and the Patterns of Chivalry" “a brilliant and utterly absorbing work” and said that “There are not many learned books which have the unputdownable quality of a thriller; this is one of them.” [Edward Wagenknecht, Yearbook of English Studies, 1986] A reviewer of "Violence in the Arts" spoke of Fraser’s “extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches.” [Charles Marowitz, Spectator, April 1974]

The series in which "The Name of Action" appeared was “established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press’s most outstanding monographs.” (from the inside-cover publisher's blurb)

Published Works:

Print Books

* "Violence in the Arts" (Cambridge, CUP, 1974); illustrated pb 1976 ISBN 0 521 20331 7 hc /ISBN 0 521 29029 5 pb

* "America and the Patterns of Chivalry" (NY, Cambridge UP, 1982) ISBN 0 521 24183 9

* "The Name of Action: Critical Essays" (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1984) ISBN 0 521 27745 0 pb [Shakespeare, Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Bronte, Stephen Crane, B. Traven, Pauline Réage, Yvor Winters, Northrop Frye, Swift, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, George Sturt, Eugène Atget, the organic community] .

Web-books

(All are located at www.jottings.ca. Sections of each book are listed in square brackets after the title and date.)

* [http://www.jottings.ca/carol/site.html "Carol Hoorn Fraser"] (2001)

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/preface.html "Nihilism, Modernism, and Value"] (1990/2001) [Substantiality / Cold White Peaks / Being There Together] Alexander Lectures

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/truth.html "Language, Truth, and Consequences"] (2001) [In Defence of Language / Playing for Real: Discourse and Authority / Communication, Communion, Communality / Mind-Forged Manacles]

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_main.html "Thrillers"] (2002) [The Best Thriller / A Philosophical Thriller / Writer at Work / Quickies / Reading Thrillers / Back-Ups]

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/index.html "Voices in the Cave of Being"] (2004) [Preliminary / Poetry and the Headmaster’s Wife / Among the Monuments / Powers of Style / Personals / A New Book of Verse / Language and Being / Other Rooms / Resources]

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/kelly/contents.html "Found Pages; the Remarkable Harold Ernest Kelly"] (2006) [Introductory / BioBiblio / Violence, Inc. / Sidebars / Notes / Concluding / Supplementary / Backgrounds]

elected articles

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/descartes.html “Descartes’ Discourse on Method; a Look at Its Rhetoric,”] GSE, 2 (1959); Jottings>Language, Truth, and Consequences>Preface> III

* “Modern Poetics: Twentieth-Century American and British”, Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton NJ, Princeton UP, 1964)

* “The Name of Action: Nelly Dean and Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 20 (1965); in The Name of Action (NA)

* “A Dangerous Book?—The Story of O,” Western Humanities Review, 20 (1966); (NA )

* “In Defence of Culture: Huckleberry Finn,” Oxford Review (1967) (NA); tweaked and reformatted as [http://www.jottings.ca/john/ATH_romance.html “‘Civilization’ and Romance in Huckleberry Finn” (2008)] ; Jottings>America and the Chivalric.

* “Northrop Frye and Evaluation,” Cambridge Quarterly, 11 (1967); (NA)

* “Prospero’s Book: The Tempest Revisited,” [secularity, power, and justice] Critical Review (1968); (NA)

* “The Erotic and Censorship,” Oxford Review (1968)

* “Atget and the City,” Cambridge Quarterly, 3 (1968), Studio International (1971); Pnina R. Petruck, ed., The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (1979) [condensed] ; (NA)

* “Winters’ Summa,” review-article on Yvor Winters’ Forms of Discovery, Southern Review, 7 (1969)

* “Photography and the City,” Yale Review, 59 (1970)

* “Yvor Winters: the Perils of Mind,” Centennial Review, 14 (1970); (NA)

* “Leavis and Winters: Professional Manners,” Cambridge Quarterly, 5 (1970)

* “Stretches and Languages; a Contribution to Critical Theory,” College English, 32 (1971)

* “Evaluation and English Studies,” College English, 35 (1973)

* “Rereading Traven’s The Death Shio,” Southern Review , 9 (1973); (NA)

* “Reflections on the Organic Community,” Human World (1974); (NA)

* “Heroic Order in the Poetry of J.V. Cunningham,” Southern Revie, 23 (1987)

* “Playing for Real; Discourse and Authority,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 56 (1987); Jottings>Language, Truth, and Consequences

* “Crane, Norris, and London,” American Literature, vol.9 of New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988)

* “Borges and the Chivalric,” Selected Papers in Medievalism; Volumes I and II, 1986 and 1987, ed. Janet E. Goebel and Rebecca Cochran, Indiana PA, Indiana U of Pennsylvania, 1988

* “Jorge Luis Borges, Alive in His Labyrinth,” Criticism, 31 (1989)

* “In Defense of Language; If It Needs It,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 59 (1989); Jottings>Language, Truth, and Consequences

* “Mind-Forged Manacles; Reply to a Questionaire,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 58 (1990); Jottings>Language, Truth, and Consequences

* “Watching Horror Movies,” University of Michigan Quarterly, 29 (1990)

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_phil.html “A Philosophical Thriller: Charles Williams’ Dead Calm”] (2002) Jottings>Thrillers

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/vision.html “Vision and Analogy”] (2003) Jottings>Voices in the Cave of Being>Other Rooms

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/referentiality.html “Referentiality and Stanley Fish”] (2004); Jottings>Saying Simply

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/cogitations.html “Snooker, Pool, and Determinism”] (2005); Jottings>Cogitations

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/cogitations2.html “Poetry and Knowledge—again…and again…and again”] (2006); Jottings>Cogitations

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/ATH.html “America, Truth, and Honor”] (chapter 11 and amplified notes, plus excerpts, from America and the Patterns of Chivalry) (2008); Jottings>America and the Chivalric

Miscellaneous

* Co-editor of GSE: The Graduate Student of English: a Quarterly Journal, 12 issues (1957–60)

* With Leighton Davis, A Visionary Gaze: In Memoriam Carol Hoorn Fraser 1930-1991 Halifax, NS, Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, 1993, exhibition catalogue, ISBN 1 89573 12 6

* “The New Prohibitionism,” brief submitted to federal Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, 1984

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/newbk_crit.html "A New Book of Verse"] (web anthology), 2003–2007

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/poems.html Poetry Recordings] (by students), 2004

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/throwaways/PrefaceFolder/Prefatory.html Moments: Photographs 1957–66, 1995–99] (2004); Jottings>Visuals

* [http://www.jottings.ca/john/scribblings.html “Alice in Web Land: Notes towards a Modest Fiction”] (2005): Jottings>Scribblings

Notes