Frank Kermode
Published on August 20th, 2010 @ 09:12:05 am , using 395 words
I recently published a piece for LRB on Pynchon. Frank Kermode always wrote well in those pages and had a breadth of interests that I always found admirable. He was one of those great essayists that use literature as a jumping off point for his texts...Here is an appreciation of him from NY Times:
Editorial | Appreciations
Frank Kermode
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 19, 2010
I met Frank Kermode, who died Tuesday at age 90, more than 20 years ago over coffee at Columbia University, where he was teaching. I had come to propose writing a profile about him, a project that went nowhere mainly because the magazine I had hoped to write for didn’t write about literary critics in those days. Kermode didn’t dismiss the idea, and so I heard, that afternoon, about the Isle of Man, where he was born in “a herringless winter,” as he later wrote.
I wanted to write about Kermode because I admired him. In my years in academia, I had watched the study of literature go down any number of rabbit holes — chasing after theory and ideology and system. The very point of reading and talking about what we read seemed to have been lost in a kind of strangulating self-seriousness and alienation. That’s where Kermode came in.
He was drawn to the entanglements of the text and its rational mysteries rather than some scaffold of theory. In his many books and essays, he protected the reader’s freedom to be interested in whatever was interesting. That meant writing a prose that was never wholly academic and over the years became more and more open to the intersection of literature and the lives we’re actually living.
Kermode will be remembered for many books, including “The Sense of an Ending” (1967), “The Classic” (1975), and “Shakespeare’s Language” (2000). He’ll also be remembered for the engaging literary essays, disguised as reviews, he wrote for the London Review of Books in his later years. He was the most agile of readers, and he reminded us constantly that readers, like poems and novels, hate to be pinned down.
In a review published in 2001, Kermode — a lifelong Shakespearean — sums up one of the reasons he loved Shakespeare: “To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character.” That was Kermode’s achievement, too.
Editorial | Appreciations
Frank Kermode
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 19, 2010
I met Frank Kermode, who died Tuesday at age 90, more than 20 years ago over coffee at Columbia University, where he was teaching. I had come to propose writing a profile about him, a project that went nowhere mainly because the magazine I had hoped to write for didn’t write about literary critics in those days. Kermode didn’t dismiss the idea, and so I heard, that afternoon, about the Isle of Man, where he was born in “a herringless winter,” as he later wrote.
I wanted to write about Kermode because I admired him. In my years in academia, I had watched the study of literature go down any number of rabbit holes — chasing after theory and ideology and system. The very point of reading and talking about what we read seemed to have been lost in a kind of strangulating self-seriousness and alienation. That’s where Kermode came in.
He was drawn to the entanglements of the text and its rational mysteries rather than some scaffold of theory. In his many books and essays, he protected the reader’s freedom to be interested in whatever was interesting. That meant writing a prose that was never wholly academic and over the years became more and more open to the intersection of literature and the lives we’re actually living.
Kermode will be remembered for many books, including “The Sense of an Ending” (1967), “The Classic” (1975), and “Shakespeare’s Language” (2000). He’ll also be remembered for the engaging literary essays, disguised as reviews, he wrote for the London Review of Books in his later years. He was the most agile of readers, and he reminded us constantly that readers, like poems and novels, hate to be pinned down.
In a review published in 2001, Kermode — a lifelong Shakespearean — sums up one of the reasons he loved Shakespeare: “To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character.” That was Kermode’s achievement, too.
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