The Practice of Reading

by Denis Donoghue

This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and written conditions of reading, and on such current forces as technology and computers that impinge on the very idea of reading. Finally he examines certain works of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth , Swift’s Gulliver's Travels , a passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude , a chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses , Yeats’s "Leda and the Swan" and "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian demonstrating what these texts have in common and how they must be differentiated through a sympathetic, imaginative, and informed reading.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Books About Books, Education

320 pages, 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.