Not Entitled: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: A short, pithy and hilarious review of critic's life
Review: Kermode, who introduced the English-speaking world to French post-structuralist theory when he was teaching at the University of London, is far less interested in such effete and rarified (not to say, obtuse!) things than in relating his childhood, youth and early adulthood to the later course his life took. Born on the linguistically isolated island of Mann, his recollections of those early years suggested nothing of the extraordinary literary-critical future that awaited him. His service in the Royal Navy puts to rest the common conviction that anyone who served in that war must be a hero. On the contrary, he considered the whole outing a total waste of time (something that anyone who's served in the military will recogize as fundamentally correct!). A narrow measure of his prodigious critical output may be found in another AMAZON offering of Kermode's: _The Uses of Error_