A Short Interview With Frank Kermode

From Amazon, here is an interesting interview with Sir Frank about his then new work, Shakespeare's Language. Kermode is just one of the elder statesmen of literary criticism who bemoan recent developments in the history of the graduate school in literature. And, damn it, I think he's right on. Shakespeare's Lanaguage is a damn good book.

Also of interest: this link will take you a list of pieces by Kermode for The London Review Of Books on the likes of Auden, Empson, John Updike, V. S. Naipaul, and Martin Amis. Check out, too, this article on writing about Shakespeare, in which he asserts, I think, quite rightly:

...it seems to me wrong to seek to advance your career by professing to be concerned with Shakespeare, while actually writing about what happens to interest you more, forcing a limited set of new interests onto the old topic, using that topic as an excuse to write about these more fashionable concerns. It is true that this approach is now more likely to win institutional approbation, for the institution authorises this evasiveness and firmly supports a historicism which excludes attempts to differentiate between writing that was once regarded as literary, of aesthetic value, and all other contemporary documents.

Indeed. Kermode's attention in the later stages of the article on selected passages is well worth the read for the literarily inclined. He has a fine ear, if a speculative one at times; but he provides in sum a valuable way of considering Shakespeare so as to avoid a lot of the idiotic trappings of modes of criticism that might be described as 'tyrannous in their genius.' I'm seriously thinking of compelling my students to read Kermode's essay, especially considering most of them, by the nature of the course pending this year, if only to provide some much-needed tonic to the course's over-arching generality and thematicism.