On Stock Responses

Northrop Frye
The Well-Tempered Critic

Again, stock response cannot read a poem, but can only react to the content of a poem, which it judges as inspiring or boring or shocking according to its moral anxieties. Stock response is apt to hanker after some form of censorship, for it cannot understand that works of literature can only be good or bad in their own categories, and that no subject-matter or vocabulary is inherently bad.

And would you judge this book by its cover?

Balanced? N'est-ce pas?

And so for day 2417
26.07.2013