The celebration of a Northrop Frye centennial cannot but be bittersweet, given the circumstances surrounding the literary humanities in the twentyfirst century. Everywhere, it seems, the areas of scholarly inquiry that Frye cherished are under attack at colleges and universities, by politicians eager to belittle what they consider impractical or irrelevant fields of study, by corporate interests aiming to maximize one sort of profitability, and by underfunded administrations desperate to balance budgets. The discipline to which Frye devoted so much loving labor, comparative literature, has been among those hardest hit by the prevailing movements to restrict or eliminate academic programs in the humanities. The University of Toronto’s 2010 decision to close the Centre for Comparative Literature, of which Frye was founding director, is perhaps symbolic of this larger pattern. Happily, that decision was reversed, at least temporarily, which may be a hopeful sign. In 2011, what Slavoj Žižek has referred to as “the year of dreaming dangerously,” an apparently utopian spirit animated a number of protests against perceived social, political, and economic injustices. Arguably, the resistance to the closure of comparative literature programs belongs in the same category with such movements as Occupy Wall Street or student protests in Quebec, California, and elsewhere. For, as Frye’s work makes clear, if only in sometimes subtle ways, the utopian impulse animates the study of literature.

In this chapter, I want to examine this aspect of Frye’s work by looking at his slender yet powerful 1964 book, The Educated Imagination, in the context of a critique of advanced industrial society associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and particularly with the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. A literary theorist perhaps best known for his analysis of the Bible’s “great code” and a Marxist philosopher and sociologist make for admittedly strange bedfellows, and yet both thinkers call attention to the need for a literary and aesthetic education as a means of combatting the alienated, almost mechanistic, “one-dimensional” condition in which members of modern, Western societies find themselves. Although both Frye and Marcuse were addressing the social and spiritual crises of the 1950s and 1960s, their work retains value today. Recent threats to programs in higher education, along with the worldwide financial crisis and the generalized anxieties that have accompanied it, have sparked spirited protests around the globe.