… the literary critic, has died.
The New York Times.
… [H]e almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”
For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.
Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” …
August 18th, 2010 at 3:42PM
‘Shakespeare’s Language’ was probably the first book of literary criticism I bought for myself, knowing that it would both instruct and please. This is remarkably sad news.
August 18th, 2010 at 4:44PM
I agree, Richard. Yet what a curious character he was. His comment in his autobiography about his two failed marriages —
“I cannot say much more on this point about the 40 years in which I shared my bed with one woman or the other.”
— is astoundingly chilly.
August 18th, 2010 at 5:00PM
Well, there’s the problem!
August 18th, 2010 at 5:19PM
Yes, Mr Punch. Makes it sound as though he were constantly shifting.