Popular art tends to eschew innovation. For this reason, Frye rejects that criticism is either unnecessary or parasitic. And note that his beginning theme recalls the Matthew Arnold essay to which his title alludes. Frye distinguishes between the critic proper and the critical reader. So paradoxically, the true literary critic does not exist.
Literary criticism lacks a theory or system proper to literature itself.
In the terms associated with Thomas Kuhn, literary criticism is pre-paradigmatic. Frye therefore argue that if literary criticism wants to make a meaningful contribution to human knowledge, it requires the elaboration of systematic conceptual paradigm proper to it alone. The elements or materials of such a paradigm would be what he calls the masterpieces of literature, which are, he asserts, qualitatively different from all the other books in the world. Frye recommends that the critic conduct an inductive survey of the field of literature and attempt to determine what distinguishes the literary text from all other books in the world. Literature is not mimetic, if mimesis involves a parasitic relation with an ontologically prior reality.