The Educated Imagination

One of Frye’s favorite critics, Oscar Wilde, observed, “All bad art is the result of good intentions.”

I think Frye makes it clear enough that all bad criticism arises from the same impulse.  Literature, for example, does not possess intention in any ideological sense, despite the fact that most “literary” critics have more or less assumed that it does.  What literature possesses is concern, which is not intentional but prophetic.  The fatalism of ideological criticism is its failure.

That is all.

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