The Genesis of Secrecy

The Genesis of Secrecy
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 1979
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780674345355

An examination of some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels.

An Appetite for Poetry

An Appetite for Poetry
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1448211298

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue – as all the best critics have done – of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident on every page of this collection of essays. In one group of essays he asks the reader to share his pleasure in a number of major writers – Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens. In another, he discusses ideas about problems in biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative in particular and the interpretation of secular literary texts in general. In them he gives clear accounts of questions relating to interpretation and the debate about canons. A key essay looks at the career of William Empson, a career lived between literature and criticism, between the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues which is characteristic of so much of the contemporary taste for theory. It is Empson's career, perhaps, which is the foundation for the polemical prologue to the book, where Kermode challenges those who doubt the possibility (and the necessity) of the cross-over between literature and criticism, and who argue that criticism is mere appreciation, mere connoisseurship, that theory has displaced criticism and has left literature in the dust, that theory is the avant-garde of critical thought. This piece defines the author's position in the debate about literature and value.

The Uses of Error

The Uses of Error
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1991
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674931527

This book is a record of Kermode's "error," his wandering through literature past and present. He notes that "in thirty-odd years I have written several hundred reviews, an example I would strongly urge the young not to follow." From these Kermode has selected the pieces he treasures most; they provide an example that will be difficult to follow.

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy
Author: Vijay Mishra
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350094412

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is the first book to draw extensively from material in the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University to uncover the makings of the British-Indian writer's modernist poetics. Simultaneously connecting Rushdie with radical non-Western humanism and an essentially English-European sensibility, and therefore questions about world literature, this book argues that a true understanding of the writer lies in uncovering his 'genesis of secrecy' through a close reading of his archive. Topics and materials explored include unpublished novels, plays and screenplays; the earlier versions and drafts of Midnight's Children and its adaptations; understanding Islam and The Satanic Verses; the influence of cinema; and Rushdie's turn to earlier archives as the secret codes of modernism. Through careful examination of Rushdie's archive, Vijay Mishra demonstrates how Rushdie combines a radically new form of English with a familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. Together, these present a contradictory orientalism that defines Rushdie's own humanism within the parameters of world literature.

Cain's Legacy

Cain's Legacy
Author: Jeanne Safer
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-01-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0465029442

Bonds between brothers and sisters are among the longest lasting and most emotionally significant of human relationships. But while 45 percent of adults struggle with serious sibling strife, few discuss it openly. Even fewer resolve it to their satisfaction.In Cain's Legacy, psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, a recognized authority on sibling psychology (and an estranged sister herself) illuminates this pervasive but hidden phenomenon. She explores the roots of inter-sibling woes, from siblicide in the book of Genesis to tensions in Frederique's family history. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with adult siblings struggling with conflicts over money, family businesses, aging parents, contentious wills, unhealed childhood wounds, and blocked communication, Safer provides compassionate guidance to brothers and sisters whose relationship is broken. She helps siblings overcome their paralysis and pain, revealing how they can come to terms with the one peer relationship they can never sever -- even if they never see each other again.A heartfelt look at a too-often avoided topic, Cain's Legacy is a sympathetic and clear-eyed guide to navigating the darkness separating us from our brothers and sisters.

Pieces of My Mind

Pieces of My Mind
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 636
Release: 2004-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1429931183

Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than a half-century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study of "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi-Boito's Otello. Important essays on Hawthorne, on Wallace Stevens, on problems in literary theory and analysis, on Auden, on "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," and three previously unpublished essays (including one on "Memory" and one on "Forgetting") fill out this rich and rewarding volume. Pieces of My Mind also contains recent considerations of the work of major modern writers--Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Tom Paulin, and others. Of Kermode's last book, Shakespeare's Language, Richard Howard wrote that it was "a triumph of inauguration and the crowning action of his splendid career of criticism. It is, and will doubtless remain, the first book one should read about Shakespeare's plays, and with those plays." Pieces of My Mind has equal authority and power, and it will be equally praised.

The Classic

The Classic
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 1983
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780674133983

Frank Kermode attempts to determine the criteria for classical literature through an analysis of the social and intellectual importance of great works of the past.

Shakespeare's Language

Shakespeare's Language
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2001-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0374527741

In this magnum opus, Britain's most distinguished scholar of 16th-century and 17th-century literature restores Shakespeare's poetic language to its rightful primacy.

The National Security Sublime

The National Security Sublime
Author: Matthew Potolsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2019-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429558988

Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.