After class on Friday, someone pointed out that we had never quite gotten around to answering the question of how Frye's "literature of process" is related to sensibility. Though Frye starts out by claiming that the later C18 is "the age of sensibility," he expects us, his learned readers, to draw the connections between "sensibility" and "process."
What are those connections? Frye tells us that Tristram Sterne is the ultimate "novel of process," and it's located squarely within his "age of sensibility." Respond to this post by suggesting how something from the Sterne excerpts helps to bring these terms together.
Feel free to respond, too, with expressions of lingering puzzlement about what these terms mean, particularly if you can use evidence from our reading to date to illuminate your confusion.
Deadline: Monday (2/9), 10am.
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On page 145, Frye says "So it seems that our age ought to feel a close kinship with the prose fiction of the age of sensibility, when the sense of literature as process was brought to a peculiarly exquisite perfection by Sterne.... when we turn to Tristram Shandy we not only read the book but watch the author at work writing it."
His definition of literature of process seems to be the reader being swept along in the author's process of writing, not just in the generic plot itself. The connection between literature of process and sensibility, then, is that literature of process was "perfected", according to Frye, during the time when sensibility was a prominent feature in literature. Which would basically mean literature of process and sensibility are associated together by merely coinciding by chance.
The connection is confusing, maybe because it seems ridiculously simple... so simple that it has to be more than just forms of writing coinciding at one point in time. I keep looking for there to be a more complex connection, but maybe it is that simple?
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