Evil Is Often Supposed To Be Without

A Truly Common Culture Is Not One In Which We All Think Alike, Or In Which We All Believe That Fairness Is Next To Godliness, But One In Which Everyone Is Allowed To Be In On The Project Of Cooperatively Shaping A Common Way Of Life.

Readers Are Less And Less Seen As Mere Non-writers, The Subhuman "other" Or Flawed Derivative Of The Author; The Lack Of A Pen Is No Longer A Shameful Mark Of Secondary Status But A Positively Enabling Space, Just As Within Every Writer Can Be Seen To Lurk, As A Repressed But Contaminating Antithesis, A Reader.

Poetry Is The Most Subtle Of The Literary Arts, And Students Grow More Ingenious By The Year At Avoiding It. If They Can Nip Around Milton, Duck Under Blake And Collapse Gratefully Into The Arms Of Jane Austen, A Lot Of Them Will.

What Was Needed Was A Literary Theory Which, While Preserving The Formalist Bent Of New Criticism, Its Dogged Attention To Literature As Aesthetic Object Rather Than Social Practice, Would Make Something A Good Deal More Systematic And 'scientific' Out Of All This. The Answer Arrived In 1957, In The Shape Of The Canadian Northrop Fryes Mighty 'totalization' Of All Literary Genres, Anatomy Of Criticism .

Because Subjects Like Literature And Art History Have No Obvious Material Pay-off, They Tend To Attract Those Who Look Askance At Capitalist Notions Of Utility. The Idea Of Doing Something Purely For The Delight Of It Has Always Rattled The Grey-bearded Guardians Of The State. Sheer Pointlessness Has Always Been A Deeply Subversive Affair.