Imagining the Coherence of the English Major.

I take as my point of departure a passage from that great work of structural poetics, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, of 1957: "Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar train ing of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up" (10-11). "Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows . . ."?I have been speculating about exactly what sort of claim this is. Is it really a universal claim that anyone, anywhere, and at any time, who has ever studied literature seriously knows this? Or does "everyone" mean the serious student of literature who Frye imagines might read this work of literary theory? Or could the claim be, rather, a covert stipulation of "seri ously studied"? Anyone who has seriously studied literature knows this, so that if you don't know it, you have been insufficiently serious, merely dilet tantish, in your study of literature. At any rate, Frye, a serious man, dis plays great confidence that there is a group of those who have seriously studied literature who know that this study is coherent and progressive and who have a sense of the unity of the subject. Do we know this still? Neither the current offerings of English departments nor recent writ ings about literature provide much evidence that we do, but perhaps we do know this still, at some level; or perhaps we know it only as repressed or