Цитаты из книги The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky there is no evidence of any theoretical stand at all, simply rich originality within or without, as it chances,…

Apocalypse depends on a concord of imaginatively recorded past and imaginatively predicted future, achieved on behalf of us, who remain 'in the middest.' Its predictions, though figurative, can be taken literally, and as the future moves in on us we may expect it to conform with the figures. Many difficulties arise from…

It has been my argument that there must be a link between the forms of literature and other ways in which, to quote Erich Auerbach, 'we try to give some kind of order and design to the past, the present and the future.' One of these ways is crisis.

And books are indeed world-models. St. Augustine found that the best model he could find for our experience of past, present, and future was the recitation of a psalm. Thus he anticipated all the modern critics who wonder how it can be that a book can simultaneously be present like a picture (though in a way a picture has…

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant…

In their general character our fictions have certainly moved away from the simplicity of the paradigm; they have become more 'open.' But they still have, and so far as one is capable of prediction must continue to have, a real relation to simpler fictions about the world. Apocalypse is a radical instance of such fictions…

Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the scepticism of the clerks, it is--even when ironized, even when denied--an essential element in the arts, a permanent feature of a permanent…

In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky there is no evidence of any theoretical stand at all, simply rich originality within or without, as it chances,…

The story that proceeded very simply to its obviously predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama. Peripeteia, which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric, is present in every story of the least structural sophistication. Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a…