Frank Kermode, funky covers and the canon

August 19, 2010 at 2:23 pm (Art and design, intellectuals, Jim D, literature)

As a young undergraduate in the 1970′s I desperately wanted to get to grips with literary theory, and especially “structuralism” and “deconstruction.” Don’t ask why. Anyway, no-one I knew could adequately explain these concepts to me, but I discovered the Fontana “Modern Masters” series, which provided some excellent, comprehensible introductions to the likes of Barthes, Chomsky, Marcuse and Levi-Strauss. The series also included political figures like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, as well as various rather randomly selected artistic, literary and scientific ”modern masters” including Le Corbusier, Einstein and Joyce. It was all invaluable stuff for impressing people at student parties. The general editor of the series was Frank Kermode, who died on Tueday aged 90. I owe him more than I can say.

Anyway, I bought almost all the “Modern Masters” and wish now that I’d kept them, not least for their funky cover-art:

Website design and text © James Pardey 2009, all rights reserved, e-mail: arts@fontanamodernmasters.org

I was pleased to read in several of the obituaries, that despite his championing of literary theory in the 1970s and 80s, Kermode came to dislike the more pretentious and self-important of the ‘theorists’, “who seem largely to have lost interest in literature as such.” He remained, to the end, an unfashionably staunch defender of of the literary canon, and in particular, of Shakespeare. In his book Forms of Attention (1985) he issued what amounts to a warning about threats to the canon, and a call to its defence:

“Canons, which negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion, which are instruments of survival built to be time-proof, not reason-proof, are of course deconstructible; if people think there should not be such things, they may very well find the means to destroy them. Their defense cannot any longer be undertaken by central institutional power; they cannot any longer be compulsory, though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment, can manage without them.”