Pieces of My Mind
Kermode, Frank & Bergonzi, Bernard
templative retreat, drenched more in sweat than in holy water. Lovely country churches dot the trail's haunting, quiet villages, but they are almost al-ways closed. Nonetheless, pilgrims of whatever...
...It is a note that pervades his engaging memoir, Not En-titled (1995), which extracts high comedy from his wartime service in the Royal Navy and his later career in the academy...
...He grew up on the Isle of Man, which, although it is visible in clear weather from the coast of northwest England, is not part of the United Kingdom, having a curious constitutional status as a dependency of the Crown (which makes it a favored haven for off-shore banking and other louche enterprises...
...and the Rev...
...LAW, PHILOSOPHY & CULTURE INITIATIVE presents His Eminence Cardinal e Dulles, S. J. Tuesday, March 16, 2004 simammsm...
...At about this time Kermode was also making brilliant and intricate analyses of famous novels, such as Wuthering Heights and Conrad's Under Western Eyes...
...The Genesis of Secrecy's final words are, "our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us...
...Monsignor Robert S. Sokolowski...
...The shift in attitude is evident in a more relaxed style of writing, and in the titles of his later books: after the portentous Sense of an Ending and The Genesis of Secrecy, there came the down-to-earth An Appetite for Poetry (1989), and the personal note of Pleasing Myself (a collection of reviews published in England in 2002), and the present Pieces of My Mind...
...and Monsignor Brian E. Ferme, all from The Catholic University of America Panelists: Cardinal Dulles, Fordham University...
...For information or to reserve a seat, contact Constantia Dedoulis, telephone 202-319-6081, e-mail dedoulis@law.edu or fax 202-319-4004...
...There is a similar wry sense of an ending in his note on the extract from The Genesis of Secrecy: "But then my interest faded, giving way to other preoccupations...
...The Evangelization of Culture and the Role of the Catholic University Edward J. Pryzbyla University Center Great Room A public lecture by Cardinal Dulles 4 p.m...
...Kermode has always preferred to develop his ideas in essays and lectures rather than in sustained monographs, and Pieces of My Mind contains a substantial and representative selection of them...
...Shakespeare appears in the present collection in a minutely attentive study of the presence of pairs and other doubled entities in Hamlet...
...They show how bewilderingly di-verse and numerous his interests are...
...In acknowledging that, one also has to say that such a career is probably no longer possible...
...2 p.m...
...The close attention to texts whose truth he could not accept seems to have left him dispirited...
...She starts too late in the morning and walks through the afternoon heat into the evening, exhausting herself...
...He took what he needed from them without ever becoming a disciple...
...Bernard Bergonzi's most recent book is A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford University Press...
...He began fifty years ago as a Shakespeare scholar, with a learned and still necessary edition of The Tempest...
...In The Genesis of Secrecy he examines the Gospels as examples of narrative...
...Now in his eighties, he lives in active retirement in Cambridge (England), still writing...
...there are extracts from both in the pre-sent collection...
...Throughout this distinguished progress, Kermode the Manxman has preserved a certain distance and difference from the English establishment and its habitual attitudes...
...James killed thousands of Moors in battle, one reason for the pilgrimage's popularity in the Middle Ages...
...Kermode has long been fascinated by the aesthetic movement of the fin de siecle before last, as is apparent in the first essay here, "Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev," and a later study of the development of Botticelli's reputation...
...Another is Wallace Stevens, on whom he has written a short book and who is S ANTONUCCI Commonweal 18 February 27, 2004 discussed in two of these essays...
...The book is full of in-sights, but Kermode's interest in secrets and hidden senses gives his exegesis a Gnostic flavor...
...I THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Columbus School of Law The Commonweal 2 9 February 27, 2004...
...In the early 1970s, like many of his contemporaries, he discovered the French structuralists and poststructuralists, notably Barthes and Derrida...
...The book's focus on the personal tends to downplay other dimensions of the camino, such as the history or politics (legend holds, anachronistically, that St...
...He also seems to have become more cheerful, believing that literature "must give plea-sure," to invoke a phrase from Wallace Stevens...
...In the late 1960s Kermode embarked on a long exploration of the nature of narrative...
...He pursued it in The Sense of an Ending (1967) and The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), lectures delivered at, respectively, Bryn Mawr and Harvard...
...One reason is that despite all the pitfalls—the exhaustion, the uncertainty of where you will stay the next night, or even the fabled wolves—it somehow works out...
...Only one room left, and it is mine," she writes of her late arrival at a refugio, an inexpensive pilgrims' hostel in a remote village...
...This is not just because writers of his learning and acuity do not appear very often, but because the restrictive (and publicity-conscious) professionalism that dominates the academy on both sides of the Atlantic means that brainy young academics who would like to range as widely as Kermode would be severely discouraged from doing any such thing...
...there is a glittering density in the presentation...
...By the late eighties he seems to have felt that he had taken the investigation of narrative as far as it could go and that it was time to break away from the demanding narrowness of the academy (from which he had in any case recently retired) and to draw closer to general readers, as he does in his extensive literary journalism, some of it included in the last part of this collection...
...She misses a lot by being aloof from the other pilgrims...
...Francis J. Moloney, S.B.D...
...OUR BEST CRITIC Pieces of My Mind Writings 19;8—2002 Ii1ink 1<rrmncod, Bernard Bergonzi it Frank Kermode is the outstanding British literary scholar of his generation, and one of the few with an international reputation, but he is not properly speaking an Englishman...
...Nonetheless, pilgrims of whatever religious belief often find the hike to be one of the most spiritually meaningful events of their lives...
...Kermode always writes elegantly, but in these lectures he makes few concessions to his listeners...
...But historical data can be found elsewhere...
...both of them have an oblique relation to Yeats, who is one of Kermode's poetic points of reference...
...Bryan Hehir, Catholic Charities Free and open to the public...
...Problems of Faith and Culture in Interdisciplinary Perspective Columbus School of Law, Walter A. Slowinski Moot Court Room Colloquium and panel discussion Colloquium: The Rev...
...an early Protestant upbringing had made him very familiar with it, though he insisted that he was not a believer...
...This interest was most fully expressed in Shakespeare's Language (2000), a widely praised book which is likely to remain his most popular...
...For starters, she herself packs too much, bringing along the manuscript of a novel-inprogress—heavy reading, no matter how well written, after she has carried it a mere twenty miles...
...Kermode's long and splendid career as scholar, critic, and reviewer is some-thing to be grateful for...
...Harrison concentrates on her descriptive and reflective strengths, making this a welcome addition to a thousand years of literature on the camino...
...He also began a long period of preoccupation with the Bible and its narrative modes...
...William J. Wagner...
...Harrison draws her account from three separate trips on the camino, the most recent with her twelve-year-old daughter, who dubbed it their "not-exactly-avacation...
...Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College/LUNY...
...The rueful, self-deprecatory note is characteristic of Kermode...
...How often will this be true, my luck that feels like grace, like God was there all along, holding off the wolves and saving my bed...
...While Harrison is sure-footed on the terrain of her interior journey and her relationship with her daughter, hers is not the book to read if you want to know about the camino's history or how to make the pilgrimage...
...Kermode's basic assumptions are that if one is interested in literature one needs to take in much of it, and that a serious interest in literature involves an extensive concern with other things...
...If he has been happy to make a life and career in England, he is also at home in the United States...
...for all his celebrity, he has never felt any inclination to play the pontiff...
...After his schooldays on the island, Kermode attended the nearest mainland university, at Liverpool, and launched on an academic career that eventually took him to chairs at Manchester, Bristol, London, Cambridge, Columbia, and Harvard...
...M. Cathleen Kaveny, University of Notre Dame...
...They show a powerful and complicated mind at work, though some of his basic ideas are simple: in The Sense of an Ending he points out that though a clock makes only the one sound, "tick," we, in our love of stories and plots, hear it as "tick-tock...
...In a note in the present collection he disarmingly remarks that the Conrad essay, originally a lecture at a high-powered conference on narrative in Chicago, is "probably the most arduous in the book....My lecture could be called aridly academic, but I include it as a reminder that in the seventies I spent much time devotedly doing this kind of thing...
...As Harrison explains, this does not seem to be mere coincidence...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
