Kosár
This significant exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis brings highly concentrated insights to bear upon some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Mr. Kermode ranges through the works of writers from Plato to Sorokin, from Homer to Robbe-Grillet, from St. Augustine to William Burroughs, showing how men have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.
Professor Kermode first sketches his theoretical position. He then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. In the last half of the book he deals perceptively with modern literature-with "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot and Joyce, as well as with contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the differences between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue for the Absurd, Mr. Kermode is distinctively lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.
