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…
Tag: conspirologic
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…
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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…
A possible equation
Sl/weeping
Изъ одной изъ лучшихъ извѣстныхъ мнѣ книгъ о колоніализмѣ: His fear gave him stimulus to pull away from the dream. He must have dozed off, he thought groggily. The play had already begun. He was…
Предѣлъ оптики
— А вы знаете, что ПОДЪ? А вы знаете, что МО? А вы знаете, что РЕМЪ? Что подъ моремъ-океаномъ Часовой стоитъ съ ружьемъ? — Ну! Ну! Ну! Ну! Врешь! Врешь! Врешь! Врешь! Ну, съ дубинкой,…