Abstract

My own contribution relates to twentieth-century literature, where "spatialization" enters so fundamentally into the very structure of language and the organization of narrative units that, as [Frank] Kermode is forced to concede, "Frank says quite rightly that a good deal of modern literature is designed to be apprehended thus." His deals with the literature of the past, where "spatialization" was still the tendency which had by no means yet emerged in as radical a manner as in modernity. Both may be seen, and should be seen, as part of a unified theory which has the inestimable advantage of linking experimental modernism with the past in an unbroken continuity, and in viewing the present, not as a break, but rather as a limit-case, an intensification and accentuation of potentialities present in literature almost from the start. One of Kermode's essential aims, in The Sense of an Ending, was precisely to argue in favor of continuity and to reject the schismatic notion that a clean break with the past was either desirable or possible. It seems to me that he succeeded better than he knew, and that in polemicizing with spatial form" he merely perpetuates a schism which the deeper thrust of his own ideas has done much to reveal as nugatory and obsolete. Joseph Frank is professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University. His many important contributions include The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature and Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, for which he received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA