The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances by Richard Poirier
Thomas Hove

Richard Poirier. Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 318 pp. $25.00.

Two important themes that have run through Poirier’s previous criticism unify this excellent, if disparate, collection of essays and reviews. First, Poirier shows how writers like Melville, Whitman, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and, above all, Emerson tried to “appeal to a large contemporary audience” while also writing “in a fashion meant to be taken as original and likely to be thought difficult.” Parallel to this conflict between commercialism and genius is Poirier’s second theme, the conflict between individual authors’ self-assertion through style and language’s deterministic constraints: “words used in a poem or a novel are not the invention of any writer; they carry with them, wherever they are put, an immensely long history of their own, not only from the literature of the past, but from their political, religious, economic, institutional uses, and from other languages.” Armed with these approaches, Poirier proves that critical analyses of the aesthetic functions of literary style still have much to offer. His consistently brilliant readings deserve to stand beside the best work of Harold Bloom, William H. Gass, and George Steiner as challenges to reductive psychoanalytic and sociohistorical criticism, and as explorations of the psychological, philosophical, and social functions of literary style. Even though Poirier concentrates on the stylistic features of canonical American literature, he shows that he is fully aware of what’s at stake in the canon wars, as well as in the variety of interdisciplinary approaches to literature. But by stressing the limits of these approaches and displaying the advantages of stylistic analysis, Poirier reminds us that literature is an international enterprise that sustains itself with its own unique forces, and that these forces often have only an incidental relation to personal and historical circumstance. [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances by Richard Poirier Thomas Hove Richard Poirier. Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 318 pp. $25.00. Two important themes that have run through Poirier’s previous criticism unify this excellent, if disparate, collection of essays and reviews. First, Poirier shows how writers like Melville, Whitman, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and, above all, Emerson tried to “appeal to a large contemporary audience” while also writing “in a fashion meant to be taken as original and likely to be thought difficult.” Parallel to this conflict between commercialism and genius is Poirier’s second theme, the conflict between individual authors’ self-assertion through style and language’s deterministic constraints: “words used in a poem or a novel are not the invention of any writer; they carry with them, wherever they are put, an immensely long history of their own, not only from the literature of the past, but from their political, religious, economic, institutional uses, and from other languages.” Armed with these approaches, Poirier proves that critical analyses of the aesthetic functions of literary style still have much to offer. His consistently brilliant readings deserve to stand beside the best work of Harold Bloom, William H. Gass, and George Steiner as challenges to reductive psychoanalytic and sociohistorical criticism, and as explorations of the psychological, philosophical, and social functions of literary style. Even though Poirier concentrates on the stylistic features of canonical American literature, he shows that he is fully aware of what’s at stake in the canon wars, as well as in the variety of interdisciplinary approaches to literature. But by stressing the limits of these approaches and displaying the advantages of stylistic analysis, Poirier reminds us that literature is an international enterprise that sustains itself with its own unique forces, and that these forces often have only an incidental relation to personal and historical circumstance. [Thomas Hove]

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