“Brilliant…this book should encourage more literary critics to pick up their Bibles.”―Howard Eiland, Partisan Review The celebrated critic deciphers the cryptic passages and concealed meanings in literature sacred and profane. In a passage from the Gospel of Mark that has spawned more exegetical disputes than perhaps any other, the disciples question Jesus about why he so often speaks in parables. “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,” he replies, “but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand.” The ostensible meaning of this passage seems shockingly unchristian: the true sense of Jesus’s stories―their secret―is reserved for the elect, for the insiders. Outsiders be damned. In The Genesis of Secrecy , the prolific Frank Kermode draws upon this and other enigmatic passages in the Gospels to interrogate the fraught relationship between proclaimed meaning and concealed mystery, both in the New Testament and in modern secular literature. A resolute outsider to the rules and canons of Biblical exegesis, he asks how it is that textual dislocations or contradictory narrative elements are imbued with the grandeur of secret meaning. Departing from the Bible, he also asks what the art of interpretation looks like in a secular world, when the lines separating heresy from orthodoxy have become increasingly blurred. Moving effortlessly between Scripture, philosophical hermeneutics, narrative theory, and twentieth-century literature from Joyce to Pynchon, Kermode concludes, pessimistically, that esoteric truths of the text are glimpsed but never finally revealed. Divination begets further divination. Secrecy remains “the source of the interpreter’s pleasures, but also of his necessary disappointment.” “Of all his books, [this is] the one that sheds the fullest light on his critical ideals and philosophy, and was also the most ambitious and controversial…Kermode’s insight was that interpretation is always a way of telling a new story. The comparison of secular and sacred interpretation of narrative was shocking to many…The importance of The Genesis of Secrecy is that it expresses Kermode’s profound distrust of any system of reading that is coercive.” ― Charles Rosen , New York Review of Books “ The Genesis of Secrecy is important partly because of its method and partly because of its subject matter. The texts Kermode uses to illustrate ‘the interpretation of narrative’ are the most familiar and important in Western civilization: The Gospels, according to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. And the method is a disarming and delicate blend of the best work done recently in narrative theory by semiotic and post-structuralist critics, fortified by an impressive but unobtrusive acquaintance with biblical scholarship and hermeneutics.” ― Washington Post Book World “The thesis is well wrought, the scholarship varied and well-distributed, and the examples clear and deft.” ― Kirkus Reviews “You will best appreciate how good this book is, how rare its combined precision, lucidity and compactness are, if you have already done some penitential reading in biblical commentary or avant-garde hermeneutics. A lot more happens per word in The Genesis of Secrecy than is usual in hermeneutics, or any other kind of writing. It rouses you to play its own game with it, to search out its own secret passages, its hidden plot against us.” ― George Stade , New York Times Book Review “Elegant and suggestive...Kermode’s own readings here in the Gospels and in selected modern novels are often brilliant...this book should encourage more literary critics to pick up their Bibles.” ― Howard Eiland , Partisan Review “ The Genesis of Secrecy does not disappoint. It is...elegant, incisive, expert and original.” ― New Statesman “Impressive...[Kermode] has begun an important exploration in The Genesis of Secrecy , and if his next book is as absorbing, it will be worth the making.” ― Stephen Medcalf , Times Higher Education Supplement Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British literary critic and the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Sense of an Ending , a defining work of fiction theory. A regular contributor to London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books , Kermode was knighted in 1991. He was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at University of Cambridge. Used Book in Good Condition