Canon Fodder

...This is, after all, what the profession of literary studies has been increasingly preoccupied in doing these past 30 years or so, and this is the very tendency that Donoghue has stood so valiantly against...

...Could Ashcroft be plotting, in retirement, a nuclear strike on Washington Square...

...In successive chapters on Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Donoghue seems much more interested in recounting and assessing what previous scholars have written about these books than in offering his own readings...

...For readers in a hurry, here’s the capsule judgment: Save your money and your time...

...And yet, in another sense, it is a book that is enveloped in the mists of old literary theories and theorists, whose time has long ago passed, for better or worse...

...A typical quotation: “So how would I propose to read Moby-Dick now, now meaning since September 11, 2001 and the rise of George W. Bush as president and commander in chief...

...There is something quite incongruous about a book which complains, with great specificity, about the detention of Jose Padilla under the Patriot Act, while relying so heavily (and nearly exclusively) on the authoritative literary judgments of scholars who are long dead and little remembered, even in the academy...

...Just as a determinedly chaste woman may, after years of self-discipline and self-denial, throw it all away on some incomprehensibly tawdry affair with a transparent lout, perhaps out of a compulsion to make up for lost time, so Donoghue seems to have allowed his accumulated loathing for the American imperium to cause him to abandon all his former scruples in a mad, ranting rush...

...Consider this little gem of analysis, which comes in the middle of his essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I would advise anyone who proposed to speak out against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to take the precaution of being already famous and therefore beyond the reach of John Ashcroft’s arm...

...Yes, that’s the ticket...

...Donoghue’s immense assurance on political subjects— that is to say, on subjects of which he seems to know little—is not matched by mastery or clarity in his analysis of subjects about which he has, in the past, demonstrated that he knows a great deal...

...In a word, politics, which bespatters this book like a deluge of bird droppings unloaded on an unwashed car...

...There is almost no engagement whatsoever with contemporary or recent scholarship, even to dismiss it...

...Not to mention the fact that the book reads as if it were dictated, with pretentious asides and long, long paragraphs, often spilling over four and five pages, with little rhyme or reason in their structure...

...With The American Classics, Donoghue appears to have put aside his principles and gone over to the other side...

...Several of the chapters do little more than set up straw men, knock them down, and then call it a day, leaving us no better off than we were before...

...You would think that a formalist, textualist critic would . . . spend more time with the texts themselves...

...Nor is that the only occasion in this book when Donoghue performs an uncannily realistic imitation of a college sophomore...

...Why not, indeed...

...His chapter on Thoreau, far and away the best in the book, argues that Thoreau ought to be understood primarily as an autobiographical writer, and that we should guard against his being “kidnapped” by political or ideological factions, including the “ecocentrists” who have most recently sought to claim him as their own...

...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...

...Oh, but that’s easy...

...If you have dropped them on Hiroshima, why not again somewhere else...

...Matthiessen, and a whole host of onceauthoritative but long-forgotten critics...

...One can read and interpret, and reinterpret, a body of literature in a way that is designed to further one’s political passions and agenda...

...Or something...

...Autobiography is not a cause,” he remarks, “except that it is a cause of wonder that people as strange as Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Thoreau should exist...

...One begins to feel that the entire subject of American literature is uncomfortably alien to this author, so much so that he has to rely on translators and field workers for second-hand information about what the native populace is up to...

...But you would be wrong...

...Such a suspicion is only heightened when he blunders and calls Mark Twain an exemplar of “Midwest” (rather than “Southwestern”) humor...

...This is an excellent point, convincingly made...

...Well, Professor Donoghue is entitled to his politics, however illinformed and hysterical they may be...

...After all, if you have dropped them on Hiroshima, why not on the NYU English department...

...But what else can one do but read books...

...In one sense, the book is too obsessed with present-day politics to be of any enduring use...

...We get surprisingly little of either in The American Classics...

...What we are left with, then, is an “interpretation” of the American classics that is based on hostile premises: that American “classics” are very poor classics indeed...

...In the case of Huckleberry Finn, for example, the answer is that we should disinter William Empson’s 1935 Some Versions of Pastoral, which would allow us to imagine “‘a proper or beautiful relation between rich and poor.’ Or a semblance of such a thing...

...The chapters on Melville and Twain argue that these authors’ respective “classic” works were turned (by such right-wing proto-Bushies as Matthiessen and Lionel Trilling) into simplistic “Cold War” parables of, respectively, good versus evil, and racial harmony (he said it, I didn’t...

...It is not sufficiently provocative or stimulating to rise to the level of being annoying...

...Typically, too, he never answers it...

...Or, to give you a bit more of a taste of Donoghue’s own words, “the classic books do not offer any resistance to the determination of American culture to go for power, conquest, the empire of globalization—the new version of slavery—and if that doesn’t make every knee bend, there are always the bombs, nuclear if necessary...

...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...

...that their shoddy workmanship and intellectual inadequacy reflect the inability of American culture to sustain and support first-rate work...

...It will be even more of an embarrassment to its author in 5 or 10 years than it already is today...

...Donoghue is very good at asking how “should” we read this or that book, and very wanting in his answers...

...But suppose we never thought such ludicrous things to begin with...

...Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Edward Kennedy, Howard Dean, Paul Krugman, Sean Penn, and Maureen Dowd are unlikely to be arrested under the Patriot Act, but less visible critics, such as the editors of Mother Jones, have no reason to think themselves secure...

...I’m sure that I am not the only reader to come to this book with a real sense of anticipation— and come away from it both surprised and appalled...

...And the result in this case is a failed book, which incongruously combines the formalist critical conventions of 50 years ago with the fashionable political slogans of today, and insists upon seeing all of American literature through a present-day radical lens—albeit one augmented by copious and constant citations from R.P...

...But our present concern is not with his politics, but with their effect on his literary judgment...

...Too bad he seems to have been kidnapped himself...

...He clues us in to what is coming in the book’s opening pages, where, after making a stock observation about the ignorance of his American students, he laments that it is almost too much of a burden to himself to have to read these books, at a time when “the violence without” makes it so hard to concentrate...

...Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Northrop Frye, F.R...

...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...

...Although it would be fair to associate his kind of formalism with the general approach advocated by T.S...

...In the case of Denis Donoghue’s new book on the American classics, the job is, alas, very easy...

...Eliot and the so-called New Criticism of a half-century ago, it would also be fair to say that he proceeds in an idiosyncratic and unsystematic way, without visible school ties, and his work generally will reward the attention of anyone who genuinely loves literature...

...Afghanistan, Iraq—and what next?—Israel’s Sharon triumphant in Bush’s Washington, the Palestinians brushed aside, the American empire enforcing itself commercially and militarily...

...career on American literary topics, his reputation was made elsewhere, and so the interest in this book was great, at least for those of us who have admired his work in the past...

...and that, furthermore, they are poor classics because they did nothing to stop the onrush of demonic tendencies at the heart of American life...

...Although he has written earlier in his Wilfred M. McClay teaches history and the humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga...

...This is exactly the opposite of how it should be...

...The only thing that can justify the publication of a book like this is the sense that one is getting a reading of enduringly valuable works through the eyes of a master, or at least of someone who offers a fresh and consistent and informed perspective on them...

...That is the kind of humane insight we once could count on Denis Donoghue to provide...

...Donoghue has taken up the cause of post-9/11 anti-Americanism with a vengeance, and his eversofashionable political desiderata, which he offers en passant as if they were self-evident truths with which all intelligent readers will of course agree, prove to be the undergirding structure in an otherwise disorganized jumble...

...The end effect is exceedingly strange...

...One cannot be too careful...

...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...

...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...

...What went wrong...

...Until now, that is...

...Leavis, F.O...

...There are, however, a few points where the Donoghue of old appears, and while they are not numerous enough to redeem the book, they are a glimpse of something better—and, indeed, of a better way to have approached this study...

...What is the point of reading books at such a time, when reality is defined as military power, vengeance, ‘the war on terror,’ and oil...

...Indeed, what is more disturbing, there is very little direct engagement by Donoghue with the books under study themselves...