ABSTRACT
Paul Alpers has been and continues to be a leading formalist critic. His book The Poetry of the Faerie Queen was an important example of reader-response criticism. The author analyzes the meaning and argues for the importance of the critical term 'mode'. The first is the musical term 'mode', which in both Greek and Church music refers to a diatonic scale that is selected out of a larger set of possibilities. In treatment of mode, plot and thought, Aristotle's mythos and dianoia, are regarded as separate, antithetical, and ultimate categories. Adam's decision to join Eve in her fall is perhaps the most difficult interpretive problem in a poem full of such problems. To find elitist or hieratic views implicit in Frye seems to me relevant to our current educational dilemmas because they have much to do with Frye's influence. A theologian follows the Biblical story as an ordinary narrative, with God as plot-maker and Adam and Eve as responsible agents.
