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Canon Fodder

When politics and literature meet, literature loses.

Aug 1, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 43 • By WILFRED M. MCCLAY
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The American Classics

A Personal Essay

by Denis Donoghue

Yale, 304 pp., $27

IT IS THE FIRST TASK of a reviewer to tell us whether a book is worth buying and reading. In the case of Denis Donoghue's new book on the American classics, the job is, alas, very easy. For readers in a hurry, here's the capsule judgment: Save your money and your time. A reading of this meandering, self-indulgent, intermittently strident, and consistently half-baked "personal essay" will do nothing to advance your knowledge of, appreciation of, or critical insight into the classic works of 19th-century American literature. It is not sufficiently provocative or stimulating to rise to the level of being annoying. It is of interest only as an example, and a very saddening one, of just how low the state of literary studies has sunk in our time, when one of our best literary scholars could be induced to publish such a strangely intemperate and rudderless book.

Indeed, Donoghue has long been one of the best we have, a prominent member of that tiny remnant in literary studies that still approaches texts with thoughtful and inquisitive respect, and still treats the act of close reading as an avenue to truth and beauty. The author of such wonderfully unfashionable works as Speaking of Beauty and The Practice of Reading, Donoghue has been a spokesman for the dignity and legitimacy of aesthetic experience. He has steered clear of the near-universal tendency to allow political or social considerations to crowd out the imperatives of the literary imagination, and has refused the tendency to treat the Western religious heritage as nothing more than crippling baggage.

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