The Practice of Reading by Denis Donoghue

by Denis Donoghue

In the theoretical Babel of contemporary literary criticism, the art of reading has sometimes found itself lost in the shuffle. This deeply unfashionable book makes a case for once again paying attention to the particulars of literary language. NYU professor Denis Donoghue makes no secret of his critical heroes: Messrs. Leavis, Blackmur, and Burke, among others, though he insists that "The moral of the story is not: Back to the New Criticism." Drawn from a number of essays and lectures that first appeared in other forums, the book is somewhat fractured, and in attacking the worst excesses of identity politics, it also knocks down some straw men. To take just one of the examples Donoghue offers, one need not refuse to read "Leda and the Swan," as one of his students did, in order to ask questions about its central metaphor. To do so is neither to eschew close attention to the poem's language nor to become a crusader for PC dogma.

The Practice of Reading reads best as a love poem to the joys and complexities of literary language, as when Donoghue explicates texts ranging from Shakespeare's Macbeth to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. These sample readings are unfailingly perceptive, imaginative, and fair, and his depth of reference is impressively broad. Donoghue's brand of aesthetic formalism is an approach just old- fashioned enough to find favor again. In any case, his extraordinarily lucid and elegant prose means that this book deserves an audience far wider than that of contemporary academicians--who are sure to hate it, anyway.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Books About Books, Education

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up in order to continue to learn what it means to be a "good reader"; to truly read a book and know that your reading of it is a valid understanding or appreciation for that work. Well Donoghue's The Practice of Reading, was both very useful and very useless in this endeavor. I do not come from a very literary background, so the world of literary criticism is very new to me, and quite frankly very scary.

That being said, this book did open my eyes to just how complicated, historical, and controversial my original question of being a good reader was. Donoghue divides his book up into two parts. Part 1 is an analysis of several different styles of literary criticism. Part 2 is a compilation of literary critiques the way he believes it should be done. I came to understand and appreciate Part 2 much more, specifically his handling of Shakespeare's Othello and McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Part 1 was a challenging read to the uninitiated (at least to this uninitiated). That being said, it was an important challenge. Donoghue is fairly polemic in his study of different forms of critique and he is vehemently against the injection of any ideological or political bent in an analysis of literature. He advances an "imaginative" yet "disinterested" reading of literature that would allow the reader to have a direct experience of the texts. This premise is explained much more throughly in the book.

I will close with an excerpt from a New York Times reviewer that sums up Donoghue's thesis nicely.

"Denis Donoghue proposes that we should teach English language and literature as if they were a foreign language and a foreign literature. Our problems, he says, arise from the assumption that our students know the language and are qualified to undertake a study of the literature, and 'if we taught English as a second language and a second literature, we would become more responsive to the mediating character of the literary language, the opacity of language as such: we would not assume that the language is transparent to our interests.'"

A worthy read, but not the smoothest when he delves into academic discourse on literary interpretations.

[Dean Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another good reminder of the virtue stuck between our ears that is activated when reading high art.