Not Entitled: A Memoir - Hardcover

Kermode, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374181039 ISBN 13: 9780374181031

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1995

Synopsis

Frank Kermode has been known for decades as one of the great critics of English literature. Now his subtly nuanced attention turns to a different kind of text: the experiences of his own life.
Throughout his luminous, witty memoir, Kermode touches on deeper, lighter, ineffable issues of autobiography, and he does so with his characteristic grace and precision. In Not Entitled, the miraculous connections between life and literature, between the world and the word, are transformed and ennobled.

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Reviews

In this enchanting, episodic memoir, Kermode chronicles the unusual course of events that carried him from a parochial childhood on the Isle of Man to international recognition as a literary critic. A modest, at times dolefully confessional raconteur, Kermode elides most details about his marriages and children, focusing instead upon his own perpetual feelings of dislocation and his lack of "entitlement" to cultural and familial attainments. Raised in a world of tenements, gaslights and ancient prejudices, the sensitive Kermode joined the navy at the outset of WWII, serving as clerk to a series of "mad captains" (including two Sisyphian years in Iceland building a naval defense that was never completed). Kermode next drifted into graduate school, later teaching at Reading, Bristol and University College of London, eventually becoming King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge, a post he resigned during a much-publicized controversy over post-structuralism during the early 1980s. Kermode also details the flap over his editorship of the cultural journal Encounter, which he left on principle in 1967 when it was revealed to be CIA-funded. And, through a marvelous prism of literary and cultural observations, Kermode, whose most famous book is The Sense of an Ending, affectingly ponders his own sense of mortality.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kermode, scholar, critic, and teacher of English literature for nearly 50 years, has written a perceptive autobiography that is dry in wit, sharp in detail, but oddly distanced from its subject. The work is thematically divided into three parts: the first section covers Kermode's childhood and youth on the British Isle of Man, a unique but circumscribed world from which he escaped via scholarship to Liverpool University in 1938. After only a few terms, war intervened, and Kermode enlisted in the Royal Navy. The second part, his life with "my mad captains" and others, is by far the best of the book and should be required reading for those who consider war glamorous or heroic. Kermode's academic career, professional life, and thoughts on the intellectual wars over critical methods form a final third. Although the earlier chapters are of general interest, the last part requires more interest in, and knowledge of, politics and personalities in English academia than most American readers may possess. A quirky and beautifully written work; for specialized collections.
-?Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The designation "man of letters" could easily have been coined for Kermode, the distinguished critic who recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. In this splendid memoir composed of elegant, subtly dexterous prose, Kermode demonstrates a way with language that shows just why he has been the recipient of numerous literary honors. Kermode, who was born on the Isle of Man, muses on his youthful isolation and the attentive concerns of parents for their only child. University studies, a stint in the Royal Navy during World War II, initial writing endeavors, and his academic career are all subjected to incisive and trenchant reflection. Most fascinating of all are Kermode's revelations regarding what he eventually learned of the CIA's financing of Encounter magazine while he served as literary editor. Alice Joyce

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374181039
• ISBN 13: 9780374181031
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 263