A nice tribute to Frank Kermode by Verlyn Klinkenborg as an Op Ed in today's
NY Times -
I wanted to write about Kermode because I admired him. In my years in academia, I had watched the study of literature go down any number of rabbit holes — chasing after theory and ideology and system. The very point of reading and talking about what we read seemed to have been lost in a kind of strangulating self-seriousness and alienation. That's where Kermode came in.
He was drawn to the entanglements of the text and its rational mysteries rather than some scaffold of theory. In his many books and essays, he protected the reader's freedom to be interested in whatever was interesting. That meant writing a prose that was never wholly academic and over the years became more and more open to the intersection of literature and the lives we're actually living. ....
In a review published in 2001, Kermode — a lifelong Shakespearean — sums up one of the reasons he loved Shakespeare: "To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character". That was Kermode's achievement, too.
And from Timothy Garton Ash, in the
NYRB blog, on Tony Judt -
The poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books used to live. Tony Judt was a man for whom books lived, as well as people. His mind, like his apartment on Washington Square, was full of books — and they walked with him, arguing, to the very end.
Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too. As a historian, one of his most distinctive achievements was to integrate the intellectual and political history of twentieth-century Europe—revealing the multiple, sometimes unintended interactions over time of ideas and realities, thoughts and deeds, books and people.
