The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Practice of Reading by Denis Donoghue
Brooke Horvath

Denis Donoghue. The Practice of Reading. Yale Univ. Press, 1998. 298 pp. $30.00.

“Are we quite sure,” asks Denis Donoghue early in this newest collection of his work, “that we have devised methods of reading responsive to our own new needs and to the literature we have still to read?” The fifteen essays gathered here attempt an answer, the first eight by raising questions about how we read, the final seven by offering implicitly exemplary commentary on individual texts (from Othello and Gulliver’s Travels to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian).
Donoghue remains enamored of those critics who first shaped his critical thinking (Eliot, the Leavises, Empson, Kenneth Burke), and throughout The Practice of Reading he makes a persuasive case for the value of a formalist aesthetics. What is unfortunate about the ideological approaches to literature in vogue today is that their “common motive,” Donoghue insists, “is the mortification of the subject” via “the deployment of themes, arguments, and morally charged conclusions.” Consequently, critics see their job as the exposing of manipulative messages read out of texts that tend in the process to become more or less generic.
Donoghue, following Kenneth Burke and others, would see art rather as symbolic action, as performance, the point of which is to provide texts worthy of emphatic contemplation. That contemplation ought properly to result not in acts of interpretation but of careful description, acts of close “attention to objects that ask only to be perceived,” literature being, first and foremost, a generous incitement to “imagine being different.”
Donoghue might have done more to transform these fifteen lectures and journal articles into a book with a sustained argument. Regardless, The Practice of Reading more often than not proves provocative, urbanely argued, helpfully corrective of current truisms, and demonstrative of the fact that formalism needn’t be either a dull drive down a dead-end street in a conservative neighborhood or a trip away from the world beyond the word. [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Practice of Reading by Denis Donoghue Brooke Horvath Denis Donoghue. The Practice of Reading. Yale Univ. Press, 1998. 298 pp. $30.00. “Are we quite sure,” asks Denis Donoghue early in this newest collection of his work, “that we have devised methods of reading responsive to our own new needs and to the literature we have still to read?” The fifteen essays gathered here attempt an answer, the first eight by raising questions about how we read, the final seven by offering implicitly exemplary commentary on individual texts (from Othello and Gulliver’s Travels to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). Donoghue remains enamored of those critics who first shaped his critical thinking (Eliot, the Leavises, Empson, Kenneth Burke), and throughout The Practice of Reading he makes a persuasive case for the value of a formalist aesthetics. What is unfortunate about the ideological approaches to literature in vogue today is that their “common motive,” Donoghue insists, “is the mortification of the subject” via “the deployment of themes, arguments, and morally charged conclusions.” Consequently, critics see their job as the exposing of manipulative messages read out of texts that tend in the process to become more or less generic. Donoghue, following Kenneth Burke and others, would see art rather as symbolic action, as performance, the point of which is to provide texts worthy of emphatic contemplation. That contemplation ought properly to result not in acts of interpretation but of careful description, acts of close “attention to objects that ask only to be perceived,” literature being, first and foremost, a generous incitement to “imagine being different.” Donoghue might have done more to transform these fifteen lectures and journal articles into a book with a sustained argument. Regardless, The Practice of Reading more often than not proves provocative, urbanely argued, helpfully corrective of current truisms, and demonstrative of the fact that formalism needn’t be either a dull drive down a dead-end street in a conservative neighborhood or a trip away from the world beyond the word. [Brooke Horvath]

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