“Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.” — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised;… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“Having compared the novel-reader with an infant and a primitive, one can go further and call him a psychopath; and this I shall shortly… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
“The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought--between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the perfect possession… — Frank Kermode Copy Share
