| Summary: | The study of literature can be a discipline only insofar as it is capable of the systemization typical of other human sciences. The possibility of system poses two directions of research: (1) exploring what conditions make system possible; and (2) discovering what follows from the fact of system's possibility. Northrop Frye followed the second possibility. More recently, René Girard has staked out the first: the origin of all human system - in effect, what makes the human sciences possible. By following Frye's road not taken, the promise of his democratic paideia for all verbal culture is recovered. Literature is not constituted by building blocks called archetypes, but rather "minds" them, as it minds all other human action, but especially imitation, the most fundamental and potent action of all. The study of literature not only minds all rule-governed behavior, but is interested as well in the interference or feedback it produces in its novices, as well as the wish to "be like" other players. Finally, the infinite possibilities of all verbal culture must be reconciled to the specific historical limits and potentials of "English." University and postelementary curricula are based on a canon, even while that canon is being expanded to include the voiceless. The challenge to any model for a progressive education in literature is to unite elementary and postelementary practice across this divide between good imaginative writing and cultural monuments. The answer is to insist on a distinct knowledge base of literary studies - Shakespeare's "King Lear" is fundamental research in the shaping and misshaping of human soslidarity. (Thirty-eight notes are attached.) (Source: ERIC - RAE).
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