Reading America:

...Maybe a description that he tags on a book of Au-den's essays he reviews here describes Reading America too: "a commonplace book, and a good one...

...But such fare - like the literature it examines, lyrical, risk-taking, expansive, tramping to the inner and outer wilderness - can also emerge from English departments, as Leslie Fiedler and his energetically Freudian conjurings about Huck on the raft and the rest has shown so well.as shown so well...

...Reading a book of this sort gives anyone occasion to think of American literature in larger terms...

...Though Reading America announces itself as a project quite ambitious by its very title, Donoghue also explains in the introduction that it is simply a gathering of pieces that haven't previously been published in his other books on American literature...

...And the testy, high-tech approach that the French like for their literary theorizing, and surely for the architecture of the Pompidou Center too, doesn't strike the right note either...

...Arguments usually seemed to involve questions like whether graded final papers left on the linoleum outside profes-sors' office doors for students to pick up should remain there ad infinitum, as the cleaning people perpetually dry-mopped around them, or simply be disposed of after a semester...

...Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature and the "wild" criticism of Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael...

...Peter LaSalle Time was when it was tough to find real issues arising in university English departments...

...But I always admired Denis Donoghue for his open-minded move to fairly examine all these new theories in his book Ferocious Alphabets, which appeared in 1981, and say that in the end he had to take his stand and argue for the specialness of the author's vision, one of the true indicators of our essential humanity:"I detest the current ideology which refers, gloatingly, to the death of the author, the obsolescence of self, the end of man, and so forth...

...Finally, concerning the business of criticism in its application to American literature in particular, I, for one, believe that it is a different ilk of analysis that has always done true justice to the writing...

...Armed with complicated ideas on language and reading that had the ring of theoretical physics and that were imported, naturally, from France, this new breed got to the point where they started announcing that the critic's response to the text was more important than the original work itself...

...He then goes on to examine how the other three hundred do contribute an extra, certainly haunting, dimension...

...To my taste, his strength in this book is not in the essay but in the shorter form of the review...

...And if I had to come up with a specific large term that might encompass it, more than less, I would settle on "wild...

...Even Henry James, whose lump of a figure always looked utterly correct in those high starched collars of the photographs, was wild, or at least a good portion of his best work probed what happened, for better or worse, when a basic American wildness found itself in the china closet of the European scene...

...The structure of these essays may be loose, but Donoghue says in his introduction that he no longer wishes to make certain authors "obey" preconceived formulae, a shortcoming he detects in some of his own earlier work...

...Donoghue's work, as good as it is, is limited by its genteel traditions...

...it also suggests a closely related word, "wilderness," which somehow accurately echoes the scope of both the subject and the endeavor in so much American writing...

...At one point in a review of a book on the poet H.D., he expresses his affection for her verse point-blank, something I find commendable:"What I love in the latter poems is their voice, sign of self-possession often in fear of losing itself, in fear but not in despair.'' And in a consideration of John Ashbery's Shadow Train, he levels with the reader from the start: "Of these eight hundred lines, I estimate that I can make sense out of five hundred...

...Dickinson wandered through the inner wilderness, Whitman the outer...

...For example, on Dickinson, he summarizes the work of the major biographers and the contributions of the major critics, as he also lets himself go for a while on several particular tacks that intrigue him...

...Transcendental-ists like Emerson and Thoreau were wild...

...Which is to suggest, there is solid material here, but solidity without special intent or movement, and Donoghue's opening apology of sorts would lead me to believe he doesn't rank it among his major efforts...

...I like it because it not only conveys the energetic, unruly essence (often an uncivil disobedience) that distinguishes most of our literature from, let's say, that of France on the whole or England on the whole...

...As a reviewer, strangely, he seems less timid to present overall conclusions, which are, however, always arrived at via his characteristic honesty and fairness...

...Of course, others have said the same...

...one is Harold Bloom's distinction between "subjective" and "confessional" poetry, and that spurs him to toss in a bit of sound observation on Wallace Stevens, too...

...Try "wild" or "wilderness" on almost any of the aforementioned writers and it works pretty well...

...Granted, both were primarily writers rather than critics (and writers, Donoghue mentions here, in whom he has a keen interest as critics...

...Then things turned noisy...

...The movement often caught on like, well, Perrier water, and departments raced to strengthen themselves in deconstruction theory or whatever derivative of it was currently in, lest they be left behind...

...Most of that has subsided now...

...WALKS ON THE WILD SIDE READING AMERICA ESSAYS ON AMERICAN LITERATURE Denis Donoghue Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95, 320 pp...

...And most of the noise came from some scholars telling others more traditional that they had been studying literature the wrong way all these years...

...The essays treat Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Eliot, and Stevens, among others, and the reviews deal chiefly with modern and contemporary poets, from Marianne Moore and Hart Crane to Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery...

...Donoghue, Irish-born and now a chaired professor at New York University, brings that spirit to this book, a collection of essays and reviews on American literature...

...With consistently handsome prose, his essays strive to give a most balanced reading...

...And so for Donoghue's observations here...

...What does is maybe the "wild" criticism of D.H...