In its original form as the 1973 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent, this must have been exhausting. One suspects that it's a great deal more manageable as a book. The subject may be inadequately described as the attitudes various literary epochs have held toward their formative pasts. Until rather recently the classics of other ages constituted a stable set of data in educated minds, although not everyone went as far as Eliot in proclaiming Europe still fundamentally a Roman province to be judged according to Roman-Christian canons. Beginning with Eliot's "imperialist" model, Kermode shows how it gradually strains at the seams when required to accommodate not only Virgil, Dante, and the Elizabethans but the more recalcitrant Milton, ambiguous Marvell, and urbanely unheroic or a-heroic English Augustans. With a provocative break in method, Kermode then abandons the Eliot framework to analyze the roles of past and present in the novels of Hawthorne. In Hawthorne's world, meanings do not stay where an observer has put them: in time ambiguity becomes instability; species are confusingly represented by anomalous individuals; progress and degeneration compete as historical processes. Such is the vision Kermode finds behind Hawthorne's deliberately perplexing narratives, and it points the way to an epoch in which criticism cannot rely on objectively "real" meanings to evaluate literary classics. Kermode concludes—by way of some rather annoying meanderings on Wuthering Heights—that in our day the genuine "classic" literary value must be a loosely structured, multi-significant inclusiveness, an ability to encompass a broad variety of interpretations. One is grateful for dozens of individual literary insights (the Hawthorne chapter alone is worth the price of the book), but Kermode employs a lot of grandiose machinery to formulate a conclusion which most students of literature have heard expressed more simply.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0674133986
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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