The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction

Abstract

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.