Frye's Polemical Introduction

Frye’s Polemical Introduction materializes what we have been hinting at through our discussions on literature. The part of this essay that I want to focus on is on page 4 “Consequently there is no way of preventing the critic from being for better or worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural education.” In class some of us came to the conclusion that at the end of it all, Literature could not be anything and everything, there had to be some rules, and a question that came up was who set these rules. This quote answers that by saying that regardless of our views on the jobs that critics do, they are the ones that define what literature is by accepting some works, and rejecting others as Literary.