Northrop Frye wrote Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 as a prolegomena. He wanted to write about Spenser’s Faerie Queene but felt himself having to explain position after position until he discovered he was 10,000 feet in the air taking a broader look at the systematic study of literature. The books introduction is the prolegomena to the prolegomena.
In this essay, Frye asserts:
- Literary criticism matters. It’s not just parasitic.
- Literary criticism must be systematic and progressive.
- This systematic study shouldn’t care about: authorial intention, evaluation, and disciplinary cross-breeding. That is, criticism isn’t limited to what an author meant, whether or not the poem is good, or what the principles of some political or religious program say it should be.
Perhaps most interesting is Frye’s hypothetical “handbook of literature” (13) which simultaneously shows that literary criticism as a systematic study should be possible and that we are woefully ill-equipped to write it. Consequently, he describes a three-page handbook with lots of blank space.
Page 1: What is literature? (We can’t define it, Frye admits)
Page 2: What’s the difference between verse and prose? (We don’t have a proper explanation for this either)
Page 3: What are the primary categories of literature? (We haven’t progressed past Aristotle’s Poetics, Frye maintains)
We will never be able to write the book from inductive observation alone. Thus, “it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are” (16). But what would that “new ground” be?
There’s a lot here to agree with. Frye is really smart, and this book is justifiably regarded as a classic. On the other hand, Frye makes some grave errors that anyone working out a biblically-faithful foundations of literature.
- Frye’s approach is anthropological, and you can’t get anything systematic or progressive that’s also TRUE without beginning with God.
- Frye dismisses “value judgments” (e.g. Shakespeare is good, Shelley is bad) and preaches increased appreciation. The ethical dimension of literature is paramount. Our imaginations are either vain or redeemed, its products pure and good or tainted and evil. This is as true of readers as it is of writers.
- The Bible matters not just because it influenced the most works in Western Literature but because it alone can provide the ethical standards by which literary criticism–or any criticism–can have any meaning at all.
Where then should the study of literature begin? With the fact that God’s revealed word comes to us “in the rich and compact language of symbolism and art” (1, Jordan’s Through New Eyes). If we are to “rightly divide the word of truth” we must be able to read literature.
Experiments in Criticism 