Denis Donoghue (1928–2021)

A stunning book. And I had no particular interest in Walter Pater, and still don’t, frankly. But Donoghue’s brilliant prose and his analysis of the significance of Pater in the development of Modernism kept me turning the pages. Exemplary use of close textual reading. A fine illustration of the difference between literary criticism and a letter to the editor about political ideologies we disagree with.

Denis Donoghue. The American Classics: A Personal Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

I do not often read literary criticism and am certainly not professionally qualified to write a knowledgeable and even-handed review of a book in that field. In reading this particular book, however, two rather imperative problems came to mind. These are questions which I will not try to answer, leaving that to those better able to do so, or less prejudiced than myself.

The first problem concerns show more the chapters on five of the iconic books of American literature: Moby-Dick, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Leaves of Grass. The question was: if one so very much dislikes and generally regards as poor stuff the structure, the content, the mode of expression, the characters, the underlying ideology (which our author identifies), and in fact the whole damn thing, why write about these books in the first place; and secondarily, how the dickens have they managed to retain their acknowledged position as “literature”? Now I admit that from time to time the author confesses a liking for the rhetoric and language of certain parts–-but only to reject them as indicative of the repudiated whole. Paradigmatically, of passages from Leaves of Grass he concludes that he “is not obliged to join his [Whitman’s] army” of “neither better nor worse fools than other people” who would like to imagine “what it would be to believe something that seems worth believing” (pp. 124-25).

The second problem comes along because, however vehemently I disagreed with the author about his theories and analyses of the books mentioned above, I do agree with his dissection, shall we call it, of the writings of Emerson, most particularly “The American Scholar.” This work and others by Emerson supporting the position there stated have always stuck me, not as a defense of the individual or his/her right to develop a sense of personal individuality, but rather as a beguilingly attractive but poorly reasoned and wordily disguised defense of an antisocial form of solipsism. But if I agree with the author on this, must I not carry his arguments over to what he says about Thoreau, to Hawthorne, to Melville, to Whitman, to Mark Twain? I do not think so, and circular though it may be, this is in part because I do not accept the author's arguments, and in part because I do not dislike these five books, which in turn creates a resistence to his arguments. But since I do accept what the author says in the one case, as well as his rebuttal against critics arguing contrarily, should I not give more weight to what he says in the other five cases?

So the second question is the perennial one of when, concerning what subject, and upon what grounds does a reader have a right to agree or disagree with the expert (assuming for the moment that in the field of literary criticism a literary critic is such)? I would suggest that you, as readers, take a look at this book and see what you think. It is easy to read, devoid of jargon, well reasoned, adequately footnoted, not overly long, quite interesting, opinionated enough to add a bit of spice,* and in my opinion, at least partially simply wrong in some of its conclusions. Read the book, and ask yourself, what are mine? After all, how much of a Philistine is the guy who points proudly at the picture on his wall and says, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like!"? Is the picture one of dogs playing poker, or something else?
Beauregard
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* How can you not like a writer who calls James Fenimore Cooper's books dead boring, quotes the whole of that supremely erotic poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, and has appropriately snide things to say about America's present foreign policy? show less

A dense, almost unreadable, academic biography (the author was a literature professor at NYU) of one of the 19th century's famous aesthetes--the progenitor of "art for arts sake"--but worth the read for a deeper understanding of what much of our contemporary sense of beauty stands on. However, he also understands the great pitfall of where art is today. He writes: "... disastrous has been the subjection of literature and art to the censorship of blatantly reductive attention in behalf of show more political, social, and moral rectitude." show less

This collection provides useful insights into the nature of reading. In doing so some great works of literature are discussed including McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Ulysses, Gulliver's Travels, and Othello. The criticism provides both a defense of and a model of excellent literary criticism.