Denis Donoghue, a formidable defender of traditional literary values, has died at the age of 92. From 1979, as Henry James chair of English and American letters at New York University, he largely shared his time between Dublin and New York. He remained devoted to his Irish identity, but became a notable combatant in the American cultural wars of the Ronald Reagan years.
His occasional essays were collected in We Irish (1986) and Reading America (1987), but he was not particularly interested in Irishness (or Americanness). Donoghue had no time for the idea that there were metaphysical essences of this sort that the critic was obliged to measure, rewarding passing grades for some, but not all. That kind of teacher’s report was remote from his learned and subtle analyses of how writers coped with the conditions that aided or stunted the task of writing.
Continue reading...