Frank Kermode was an eminent literary critic and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. At the time of his talk, he had written and edited 25 books of literary criticism, including books on Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence. Later in his career, he also wrote about the Bible, treating it as a literary text. After serving in WWII, he completed his postgraduate education at Liverpool University before lecturing at King’s College, Newcastle and Durham University. He later taught at Reading University, Manchester University, and Bristol University. In 1967, he was appointed to the Lord Northcliffe chair at University College London (UCL). In 1974, he moved to Cambridge University. After his retirement from Cambridge, he continued to lecture widely, especially in the US. In 1991, he was knighted. Even after retirement, he continued to write and in 2000 published one of his bestselling books, Shakespeare’s Language. Humanism was central to his life of critical endeavour, making him an ideal Dunning Trust lecturer.
In his lecture, Kermode addressed the origins of the term “post-modernism” and the idea of historical periodicity more broadly. Periodization was necessary, he said, in order to tidy history and give it shape, but in delineating periods and choosing which to study we tend to give them automatic valuation. Surveying a wide range of literature about the post-modern period, he argued that the term had quickly become a catch-all with a meaning so broad it was almost meaningless. In general, its proponents identified post-modernism with a push for fragmentation, in contrast to modernism’s desire for wholeness and meta-narratives. However, Kermode pointed out, such categories can shift significantly: the artist Marcel Duchamp was once regarded as an important manifestation of modernism, but by the 1980s was labelled a post-modernist. In fact, the fragmentariness so valued by post-modernism was a long-standing literary tradition, Kermode showed. He concluded that post-modernism was in fact tied up with the question of value: when fragmentariness is what you value, you may always find it in things you like and wish to preserve. The goal was to not fall into the trap of thinking that post-modernism described some kind of definite and terminal condition in human history.
Listen or read Kermode’s lecture below.