Those Who Sentimentally Indulge Humanity Do It

Those Who Sentimentally Indulge Humanity Do It No Favours.

In Conscious Life, We Achieve Some Sense Of Ourselves As Reasonably Unified, Coherent Selves, And Without This Action Would Be Impossible. But All This Is Merely At The 'imaginary' Level Of The Ego, Which Is No More Than The Tip Of The Iceberg Of The Human Subject Known To Psychoanalysis. The Ego Is Function Or Effect Of A Subject Which Is Always Dispersed, Never Identical With Itself, Strung Out Along The Chains Of The Discourses Which Constitute It.

Schizophrenic Language Has In This Sense An Interesting Resemblance To Poetry.

The German Philosopher Walter Benjamin Had The Curious Notion That We Could Change The Past. For Most Of Us, The Past Is Fixed While The Future Is Open.

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 .