I thought that I was somewhat well read but now I'm realizing that I'm going to have to go back and reread a lot of books.  I wish Frye's Secular Scripture was the text for my literary criticism class.  Even though I'm an English major, I don't really care for much English lit.  I prefer the Romans, French and the Russians.
However, as Frye is pointing out that no matter how great we think a writer is at telling stories, he/she is simply retelling a myth or heaven forbid displacing something out of the bible.  Reading the bible isn't high on my list, though I see how it is necessary to understand ALL literature.
This past summer I did an internship at a paper in North Dakota.  I thought of it as more as telling stories rather than the cold hard facts.  I stuck it to the oil companies on a couple of stories and really watched my language.  Frye says, "The development of writing throws a heavy emphasis on the descriptive aspect of words, and consequently a writing culture tends to identify truth more and more completely with truth of verbal correspondence."
My first thought to this was what's the truth then and who's doing the talking.  When I took mythologies from Prospero I thought being a mythic detective was a clever catch phrase.  Yet in everyone's displacement stories myth is clearly alive and well today.  So as I think Gerrit said in class going back is going forward.  Only perhaps we don't have to go anywhere at all.
I think Campbell said that what was considered virtuous hundreds of years ago is now considered vice.  Frye talks about sex and violence as a part of romance but not romance in itself, I think I get that.  Frye defines literature as an aspect of the human compulsion to create in the face of chaos.
For whatever reason, this makes me think of Voltaire's Candide.  The first time I read it, I thought well that's kind of funny.  Then when I read a little bit about what was going on in 18th century France and reread Candide, I quickly realized why he was exiled from France.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in life we have a choice to enter chaos and do physical destruction, or we can read or write about so we don't do fucked up things and experience true pain.