Editing Northrop Frye (section)

===Criticism as a science===
As A. C. Hamilton outlines in ''Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism'', Frye's assumption of coherence for literary 
criticism carries important implications. Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, independent of literature. Claiming with [[John Stuart Mill]] that "the artist… is not heard but overheard," Frye insists that
{{Quote | The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with (''Anatomy'' 5).}}

This "declaration of independence" (Hart xv) is necessarily a measured one for Frye. For coherence requires that the autonomy of criticism, the need to eradicate its conception as "a parasitic form of literary expression,… a second-hand imitation of creative power" (''Anatomy'' 3), sits in dynamic tension with the need to establish integrity for it as a discipline. For Frye, this kind of coherent, critical integrity involves claiming a body of knowledge for criticism that, while independent of literature, is yet constrained by it: "If criticism exists," he declares, "it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field" itself (''Anatomy'' 7).