The Anatomy of Criticism (book, Northrop Frye)

Polemical Introduction

Mr Webster on "polemical": "When polemic was borrowed into English from French polemique in the mid-17th century, it referred (as it still can) to a type of hostile attack on someone's ideas. The word traces back to Greek polemikos, which means 'warlike' or 'hostile' and in turn comes from the Greek noun polemos, meaning 'war.'"This book is an attempt at a summary of literary criticism--its characteristic techniques, theoretical foundations, and proper scope. It doesn't succeed at that attempt, but maybe it'll inspire a book that does succeed.

Literature is an art. Some say criticism is an art, which would make literary criticism an art based on another art, since literary criticism cannot do without literature. However, I believe that literature similarly cannot do without criticism. Literature and criticism are symbiotic arts.

One reason that art needs criticism: there's no other way to determine what's good. For instance, there is no correlation between the merits of art and its public reception. Without critics and their commitment to cultural memory, the public brutalizes culture, overlooking great works and promoting lesser works.

Another reason we need critics has to do with the nature of art as contrasted with ordinary forms of communication. When we speak ordinarily, we are directly addressing our listeners, using words to convey information. Art, however, is not heard but overheard. What matters is not what we say, but how we say it. Hence, we need critics to talk about what the artist cannot, by the very nature of art, talk about.

I mentioned the cultural memory of critics before. Well, I believe that criticism has to be based on what the whole of literature actually does.

Many scholars attempt criticism by taking another discipline and applying it to literature. However, such criticism (e.g., Marxist, liberal-humanist, Freudian, existentialist, etc.) is not truly literary criticism.

A literary critic reads literature, reads it as carefully as possible and reads as widely as possible, and then develops critical principles from those readings and not from other disciplines.

In order to make literary criticism useful and independent, we need to make it more systematic. It's true that there are many literary critics applying scientific techniques to the study of literature, but we cannot truly say that we are making progress in understanding literature the way that can say we've made progress in hard sciences like physics or chemistry. And the reason we haven't made such progress is that we haven't yet made a clear distinction between popular criticism and literary criticism.

Popular critics like Johnson and Hazlitt and Coleridge all develop their critical faculties by reading widely and reading carefully, but because they didn't develop a systematic approach to literature, we can say of them only that they are paragons of their particular eras in the history of taste. We are no closer to truly understanding, for instance, Shakespeare than they were.

A student of physics doesn't say that he is studying nature; he is studying physics, which is a body of knowledge concerning nature. In the same way, a student of literary criticism is not studying literature but a body of knowledge concerning literature. We need to discover the systemic principles of this body of knowledge in order to make literary criticism clearly worthwhile.

Criticism is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak.