Frank Kermode

From Philosopedia

(John) Frank Kermode [Sir] (29 November 1919 - 17 August 2010)

Frank Kermode, who became a distinguished critic, was born on the Isle of Man, was educated at Douglas High School and Liverpool University.

During World War II, he served six years in the Royal Navy, mostly in Iceland. From 1967 to 1974, he was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, chairing a series of graduate seminars that became known for introducing contemporary French critical theory to Britain.

In 1974 he became King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, resigning in 1982 partly because of an acrimonious tenure debate surrounding Colin MacCabe. He then became Julian Clarence Levi Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University and from 1975 to 1976 Kermode the Norton professor at Harvard University.

In 1991, acclaimed as Britain's foremost literary critic, Kermode was knighted.

At the age of 90, Kermode died at his home in Cambridge, England.

Obituary in The Guardian (18 August 2010)

Widely acclaimed as Britain's foremost literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode died yesterday in Cambridge at the age of 90.

The London Review of Books, for which the critic and scholar wrote more than 200 pieces, announced his death this morning. Kermode inspired the founding of the magazine in 1979, after writing an article in the Observer calling for a new literary magazine.

Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991, the first literary critic to be so honoured since William Empson.

A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning EM Forster.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats.

Samson published Kermode's most recent book, Concerning EM Forster, last year. Forster, who also died aged 90, gave the Clark lectures at Cambridge in 1927, which led to his seminal book of literary criticism, Aspects of the Novel. Kermode delivered the Clark lectures 80 years later, in 2007, and worked with Samson to turn them into a book. The pair had been discussing a further title, about T. S. Eliot, following a lecture Kermode gave at the British library, but "now this will never happen, sadly", said Samson.

He called the literary critic "a one-off". "He's probably the greatest literary conversationalist I've ever known - it wasn't just the lectures and the monographs and the books, it's the fact that just talking about a writer he'd say incredibly pithy, intelligent things which would prompt you to go and read them again," he said. "He knew he had exceptional gifts, but there was a modest manner about him. He knew he was smarter than everyone else, but he was this pipe-smoking, beguiling man who listened to what you had to say. . . . It's the wreath of pipe smoke, and the benign smile and wisdom, which I'm really going to miss."

The range of Kermode's gaze is shown by his book //Pleasing Myself//, which pulls together his literary journalism, reviewing everything from Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf to Philip Roth's "splendidly wicked" Sabbath's Theater.

He fundamentally changed the study of English literature in the 1960s by introducing French theory by post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and post-Freudians such as Jacques Lacan, into what Sutherland described as "the torpid bloodstream of British academic discourse". Speaking to Sutherland in 2006, Kermode admitted that the move had "attracted quite a lot of opprobrium".

Although he later moved away from theory, he told Sutherland that the time considering it was not wasted. "One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things," he said. "You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering."

Kermode was also an acclaimed reviewer. John Updike said that his conclusions seem "inarguable � indeed just what we would have argued, had we troubled to know all that, or goaded ourselves to read this closely", while Philip Roth admitted that although he dislikes reading reviews, "if Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read it".

The American writer will no doubt have been pleased by a 2008 review of his novel Indignation in the LRB, in which Kermode wrote that "he is a writer of quite extraordinary skill and courage; and he takes on bigger enemies in every book he writes".

His most recent article for the London Review of Books was published in May this year � a review of Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Speaking to the Guardian in December last year, Kermode said that it was "pure chance that one isn't either dead or useless; I don't think either of those things is true, yet, of me".

Works

English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell (1952), editor

The Tempest (1954) editor

Seventeenth Century Songs, Now First Printed from a Bodleian Manuscript (1956) with John P. Cutts

John Donne (1957)

The Romantic Image (1957)

The Living Milton (1960) editor, essays

Wallace Stevens (1961)

Puzzles And Epiphanies, Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 (1962)

Discussions of John Donne (1962) editor

Spenser and the Allegorists (1962)

The Patience of Shakespeare (1964)

The Integrity of Yeats (1964) with Denis Donoghue, Norman Jeffares, T. R. Henn

Spenser (1965) editor

On Shakespeare's Learning (1965)

Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism (1965)

Shakespeare: The Final Plays (1965)

The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality (1966) with Monroe C. Beardsley, Barry Bingham, Northrop Frye

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) revised 2003

The Selected Poetry of Marvell (1967) editor

Continuities (1968)

King Lear; a Casebook (1969) editor

The Metaphysical Poets (1969)

On Poetry and Poets by T. S. Eliot (1969) editor

Modern Essays (1970)

Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (1971)

The Oxford Reader:Varieties of Contemporary Discourse (1971) with Richard Poirier

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages Through the 18th Century (1973) editor with John Hollander, two volumes

D. H. Lawrence (1973)

English Renaissance Literature, Introductory Lectures (1974), with Stephen Fender and Kenneth Palmer

The Classic: literary images of permanence and change (1975)

Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (1975) editor

The Genesis of Secrecy: on the Interpretation of Narrative (1979), Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

The Poems Of John Donne (1979)

The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction (1983)

William Wordsworth (1984) editor

Forms of Attention (1985)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1985)

The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987) with Robert Alter

History and Value (1988), Clarendon Lectures and Northcliffe Lectures 1987

An Appetite for Poetry. Essays in Literary Interpretation (1989)

Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens (1989) editor, with Joan Richardson

Andrew Marvell (1990) editor, with Keith Walker

Poetry, Narrative, History (1990)

The Uses of Error (1991) essays

An Unmentionable Man, (Enitharmon Press 1994) with Edward Upward

Not Entitled (1995), memoir

Francis Bacon (1996)

A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Writers (1996) editor with Peter Parker

Oxford Book of Letters (1996) editor, with Anita Kermode

The Mind Has Mountains (1999) editor, with Anthony Holden

Edward Upward: A Bibliography 1920-2000, (Enitharmon Press, 2000) with Alan Walker

Shakespeare's Language (2000)

Pleasing Myself: from Beowulf to Philip Roth (2002)

Pieces of My Mind: Writings 1958-2002 (2003) essays

The Age of Shakespeare (2004)

Life.After.Theory (2004) with Jacques Derrida, Toril Moi and Christopher Norris

Pleasure, Change, and Canon (2004) with Robert Alter

Kermode, Frank (2005), The Duchess of Malfi: seven masterpieces of Jacobean drama (annotated ed.), Modern Library

Kermode, Frank (2009), Concerning E. M. Forster, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Kermode, Frank (2009), Bury place papers: essays from the London Review of Books, London Review of Books