“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has… — 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… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“There may even be a real relation between certain kinds of effectiveness in literature and totalitarianism in politics. But although the fictions… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought--between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“In fact this desire for consonance in the apocalyptic data, and our tendency to be derisive about it, seem to me equally… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.'… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot. We need… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“here is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be considered, namely transition. I said a minute ago that one of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“IT is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the… — 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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
