I'll say it wasn't my intention to throw down the gauntlet(tropologically speaking), but if that's what I've done... way for the class to start.

Northrop Frye is(to use the venerable, knowlegadable and oh so egotistical Harold Bloom's phrasing) an ecstatic critic, who seeks to stand outside of literature as literature makes him stand outside himself. Just like it made Don Quixote stand outside himself, and set up a paradigm for what he could make of himself: No longer an impoversished gentleman, but a knight errant battling cruelty and injustice.

Frye also was inspired by Dante's levels of perception.
1. the literal
2. the ontological
3. the moral
4. the anagogical

This fourth and most hallowed level(recognition that comes when everything comes together) was represented for Dante by a rose.

All of this seems to suggest a possiblty for what healthy, authentic criticism could be. Not the petty things Northrop Frye would refer to as "value judgements", but intermidearies between art and those who come to it, like the sea and the singer in Idea of Order at Key West.

Or something like that.