Reviews for The American Classics: A Personal Essay

The average rating for The American Classics: A Personal Essay based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-11 00:00:00 Franklin Tinsley I'd be willing to give this 1.5 stars, out of the wealthspring of mine own munificence, but my level of irritation is forcing me to round it down. With possibly not all due respect to Mr. Donoghue, I can't perceive this book as one worth writing. True, most of them aren't, but this one proves it from the beginning. What purports to be a personal essay about the Mr. Donoghue's personal experience with the five American classics pictured on the cover (Huck Finn, Moby-Dick, Walden, Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass) is, in actuality, a mildly deconstructionist survey of the critics and thinkers that have "informed" (oh, that word) Mr. Donogue throughout his many decades as an expatriate Irish smartypants (perhaps he's not an expatriate, and perhaps "smartypants" is inaccurate). And while I am on record as preferring by far authorial voices with authority ("this is how it is!" instead of "I'm only trying to start a conversation"), Mr. Donoghue's smugness overrides his authority - which is likely a wholly mis-representative thing to say, as Mr. Donoghue's smugness only appears rarely. Yet when it appears, it appears in full throttle, often in the form of wholly irrelevant attacks against President Bush (43). Another reason my irritation prevents me from giving Mr. Donoghue the whole 1.5 stars is his not-so-covert hypocrisy in the chapter purportedly about Moby-Dick. After excoriating the 1940s critics who apparently read Moby-Dick incorrectly, blinded as they were by their culture and world circumstances, Mr. Donoghue follows up with asking us "how are we to read Moby-Dick today in light of the post-9/11 world?" (or words to that effect, which also include a vitriolic epithet toward President Bush not-so-subtly associating him with despots). If the "right" way to read Moby-Dick is not to be limited by one's time, why would being in a "post-9/11 world" matter? Donoghue, like Socrates, rarely gives us the "right" way to read things. He is willing to drop names that should have delighted me (Trilling, Eliot), yet he does so in a way of dismissal that borders on "I just read about them on the Internets, so I know all about them." Mr. Donoghue does casually mention toward the end of the book he met T.S. Eliot, but he gives no indication is was a positive memory. Further, Donoghue demonstrates an inability to stick to the point. The thread of Emerson runs throughout the work, and while that is not necessarily a problem, he states the chapters are about different works. The Moby-Dick chapter is sometimes about Moby-Dick, sometimes about other things by Melville, sometimes about Emerson. The Scarlet Letter chapter is mostly about other things Hawthorne wrote, rarely about Scarlet Letter, and never in a way that makes us feel like Donoghue "gets it." Even the Moby-Dick chapter makes us feel like Donoghue, and potentially the coterie of critics Donoghue often cites (usually with favor but occasionally to correct them), didn't even understand what Moby-Dick was about. The Walden chapter is more often about other Thoreau works, and while it is more pertinent to speak of Emerson here, Emerson tends to occlude the purpose of the chapter. And so on. What was, then, the purpose? To explicate these classics? Nope. To deconstruct them as not worthy of being classics? Perhaps. If so, Donoghue's discursiveness prevents us from knowing. To highlight the "crimes" of President Bush? At times. (One wonders what Mr. Donoghue has to say about the present incumbent.) To point to the critics whose opinions we should share? I can't honestly tell. Then, having waded through it all, we learn the sinister secret we suspected all along: many of these chapters previously appeared in discrete magazines over the years. Yes, Mr. Donoghue is recycling old work to make money. And while that is certainly his right and perhaps something I might try to do myself some day, it only gives us one more reason to ignore pretty much everything he has said. What's the 1 star for, then? Because he does give some insights worth pondering (mainly from the quotations of other critics), and reading such a deconstructionist load of piffle encourages me to read these classics again (or for the first time, in the cases of Walden and Leaves of Grass; I haven't read them in their entirety yet). Oh, well. It would have been great if this were a good book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-07 00:00:00 Pleasure Pryncess Excellent companion to Morrison! Don't miss this book.