Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student
     of it says that he is learning physics, not nature.  Art, like nature,
     has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is
     criticism.  It is therefore impossible to "learn literature":  one
     learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively,
     is the criticism of literature.  Similarly, the difficulty often felt
     in "teaching literature" arises from the fact that it cannot be done;
     the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught.
     Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study: the
     fact that it considers words, as we have seen, makes us confuse it
     with the talking verbal disciplines.  The libraries reflect our
     confusion by cataloguing criticism as one of the subdivisions of
     literature.  Criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action
     and philisophy to wisdom:  a verbal imitation of a human productive
     power which in itself does not speak.

                                        -Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
                                         (New York:  Atheneum, 1966, pp. 11-12)
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