Pleasure and Change

The issue of the canon has been debated in academic circles for over fifteen years. Pleasure and Change contains two lectures on this important subject-delivered as the Tanner lectures at Berkeley in November of 2001-by the distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode. Kermode bypasses the contentious and now somewhat tired ideological debates about the canon, instead exploring the two related and central notions of pleasure and change: how aesthetic pleasure plays into what we find valuable, and how this can change over time.