The educated imagination

In the 1962 Massey Lectures, Northrop Frye writes: "What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly or feel more sensitively or live a better life than we would without it? What is the function of the teacher and scholar or the person who calls himself, as I do, a literary critic? What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude? In my early days, I thought very little about such questions, not because I had any of the answers but because I assumed that anybody who asked them was naive. I think now that the simplest…