Anatomy of Criticism

"Evil may yet be good to have been and yet remain evil." That's how I feel about having read this book.

If you hover over the stars of Goodread's rating system, each rating is described in terms of how much one "likes" a given book. These descriptions are inadequate. I chose 3 stars for this book not because I liked it – in truth, much of it I despised while reading it, insofar as it evoked any emotion from me – but because I did find some useful portions within the somewhat absurdly complex system ... ahem, "anatomy" ... that Frye creates.

As has been my wont with works upon which I don't feel wholly equipped to offer meaningful commentary, I will simply provide below some enjoyable, or at least useful, quotes from the book itself.

p. 33: In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.

p. 74: Literary meaning may best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by the word "imaginative."

p. 82: Aristotle speaks of mimesis praxeos, an imitation of action, and it appears that he identifies this mimesis praxeos with mythos.... Human action (praxis) is primarily imitated by histories, or verbal structures that describes specific and particular actions. A mythos is a secondary imitation of an action, which means, not that it is at two removes from reality, but that it describes typical actions, being more philosophical than history. Human thought (theoria) is primarily imitated by discursive writing, which makes specific and particular predictions. A dianoia is a secondary imitation of thought, a mimesis logos, concerned with typical thought, with the images, metaphors, diagrams, and verbal ambiguities out of which specific ideas develop.

p. 243: The present book employs a diagrammatic framework that has been used in poetics ever since Plato's time. This is the division of "the good" into three main areas, of which the world of art, beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these faculties into law, beauty, and truth. Poe gives his version of the diagram (right to left) as Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense.... Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream, and have finally displayed it as Aristotle's ethos, human nature and the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia, which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.

p. 347: The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art, again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history.