Closure/Dis-Closure: Entry in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory

Abstract

Perhaps the notion of literary closure, or the sense of an ending (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase), originated with Aristotle's statement in the Poetics that a poetic work should be 'whole' and 'complete.' However, the term closure emerged in the early 20th century from the discourse of Gestalt psychologists such as Kurt Koffka who, in Principles of Gestalt Psychology 0935, examined the nature and significance of the human tendency to perceive wholeness. In The Sense of an Ending (1966), the literary critic Frank Kermode suggested that creating endings is a human tendency, life's fictions. As one example of this human desire to impose order, Kermode pointed to the long history of disconfirmed apocalyptic predictions.