It is easy to see how Jewish Cabalists, Christian Gnostics and Muslim Sufs have more in common with each other than with their parent religions – ans also to see why the orthodox ‘establishments’ of…
Category: Florilegium
Frank Kermode goes all mushy
Much of what I have said will be disallowed by defenders of a hermeneutics more conservative than mine; and, doubtless with scorn, by a flourishing radical party, which would not admit that its investigations are…
Frank Kermode on a curious atavism
The scholarly tradition that cultivated seriously this form of attention was the Jewish; and from our point of view its most influential representative was Spinoza. When he drew up his rules of scriptural interpretation in…
Frank Kermode on followability
Nor is it merely that we are more likely to remember a plotted narrative; we are also less likely to ask awkward questions about it. This is why historians as well novelists (traditionally) place such…
Frank Kermode on historiographical narratives
Let me now quote a historical, or pseudo-historical, narrative of a very different kind. It purports to describe an engagement between an American and a Russian warship off the coast of California: “What happened on…
Frank Kermode on the Hermeneutic model of historical explanation
The models of historical explanation offered by Hayden White (Metahistory, Baltimore, 1973) are Formist, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contextualist; but none of them, so far as I can see, will work with the text [the New…
Read more of Frank Kermode on the Hermeneutic model of historical explanation
Frank Kermode on the oracular in narratives
Yet all narratives are capable of darkness, the oracular is always there or thereabouts, accessible if only by a sensory failure; and much writing we think of as peculiarly modern is in part a rediscovery…
Frank Kermode on the R-word
Now interpretation abhors the random, which is one reason why, in the most modern school of criticism, it has become a dirty word, a term of censure. – The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation…
Edwin A. Abbott on gender doublespeak
For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental existence. With Women, we speak of “love,” “duty,” “right,” “wrong,” “pity,”…
Wolfram Eilenberger on Heidegger (& Cassirer) and the uncanny
“The eight days I spent with you remain constantly with me,” Heidegger wrote to his new friend in November. “The suddenness, the apparent uneventfulness of those days, the sureness of the ‘style’ with which one…
Read more of Wolfram Eilenberger on Heidegger (& Cassirer) and the uncanny