Denis Donoghue
Personal Information
Description
Denis Donoghue was an Irish literary critic. He was the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.
Books
On Eloquence
On Eloquence questions the common assumption that eloquence is merely a subset of rhetoric, a means toward a rhetorical end. Denis Donoghue, an eminent and prolific critic of the English language, holds that this assumption is erroneous. While rhetoric is the use of language to persuade people to do one thing rather than another, Donoghue maintains that eloquence is "gratuitous, ideally autonomous, in speech and writing an upsurge of creative vitality for its own sake." He offers many instances of eloquence in words, and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take. Donoghue argues persuasively that eloquence matters, that we should indeed care about it. "Because we should care about any instances of freedom, independence, creative force, sprezzatura," he says, "especially when we live—perhaps this is increasingly the case—in a culture of the same, featuring official attitudes, stereotypes of the officially enforced values, sedated language, a politics of pacification." A noteworthy addition to Donoghue's long-term project to reclaim a disinterested appreciation of literature as literature, this volume is a wise and pleasurable meditation on eloquence, its unique ability to move or give pleasure, and its intrinsic value.
The American Classics
How is a classic book to be defined? How much time must elapse before a work may be judged a " classic" ? And among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation? In this provocative new book Denis Donoghue essays to answer these questions.
Words Alone
"W.B. Yeats is usually seen as a great innovator whose extraordinary imagination transformed modern Irish literature, making a decisive break with the past. But what made him the remarkable writer he was? In this book, drawn from the 2009 Clark Lectures, Yeats's prize-winning biographer R.F. Foster returns to the rich seed-bed of nineteenth-century Irish literature to reveal the influences that shaped the poet's unique and powerful voice: romantic history of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural novels of Sheridan LeFanu, William Carleton's 'peasant fictions', fairy-lore, and folktale collections. The young Yeats consciously mined these traditions and was, Foster shows, an inheritor as much as an inventor."--Jacket.
Who Says What and the Question of Voice (The Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures Series)
The old moderns
Denis Donoghue does not go in search of a fight. He is, among critics, notable for his tact and genial temperament. But by setting aside his own bearing in favor of the bearing of his object, he produces an artifact that rebukes certain competing reports. And thus it is with his consideration of Modernism in the present selection of essays, wherein he makes quick work of the conventional claim that in Modernism an event, or a cause whose consequences can be enumerated, is in evidence. Instead, Donoghue declares Modernism "a stance, an attitude, a choice," further asserting that "it is not necessary to be modern." Nor is it necessary for a critic to be dogmatic or to make theoretical hauteur his game. It is in his rejection of the allure of dogmatism that Donoghue discovers the difficulty of the task before him; for to make any headway, he must take "one meaning of Modernism and ... put up with the embarrassment of knowing that a different account of it would be just as feasible." But in testing his "one meaning" against writers as various as Wordsworth, Poe, James, Yeats, Joyce, Kafka, Eliot, and Stevens, and against an array of philosophers, theorists, and critics (Blackmur, Benjamin, Trilling, Foucault, Jameson, Levinas, and de Man, to cite certain of these), Donoghue makes himself hospitable to an inventory of modern postures as diverse as the personalities who adopted them, or were adopted by them.