Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader

Christopher J. Knight. Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Pp. xiii, 506. $50.00 cloth. This compendious and well written book is valuable addition to UTP's new series, Studies Book and Print Culture. Its very thoroughness may make it unattractive to anyone but the academic reader, but it deserves careful consideration by such readers at time of volatility and vulnerability the humanities general and literary studies particular. Like histories of academic institutions and disciplines, studies of the oeuvres of eminent scholars help us to situate the challenges of the present, if not to solve them. Having read this book, I have much clearer sense of why the three scholars it features have written as they have. However, I continue to be dismayed by parts of Knight's argument and the imperturbable masculinity and Eurocentrism of his focus. Many young literary scholars (and regular readers of ARIEL) may well take one look at the cover and title of this book and dismiss it, and the series which it features, as intolerably reactionary. That would be pity, because we can learn much from our predecessors and those who do think differently than we do. But it is also fair to say that book of this sort seems bizarre, parochial, even uncommonly smug its notions of the common and the uncommon at time when Englishes of various sorts--critical, creative, demotic, refined--are helping redraw the map of literary and critical accomplishment and redefine notions of centre and periphery. Yet for some, established patterns of cultural enclosure are no longer enough; even the cultural commons requires sovereign sensibilities prescribing levels and rituals of devotion to 'the' canon. Knight begins with Lionel Trilling's allegiance to cultural continuity and the fact that culture has recent decades been seen as the site of rupture and discontinuity. This latter tendency is tracked through the MLA way consistent with the Amero- and Anglocentric emphases of follows. The opening moves are deeply problematic their attempt to protect the privileges of imagination from those allegedly accessible determinants (4) of the literary--race, class, and gender--as though the latter three categories are instantly intelligible, relatively uncontested, and largely predictable their shaping of creation and interpretation. Knight locates himself with Trilling in the middle of things (5), as though one is free to choose one's socio-aesthetic location, this case discreetly epic one within the critic's version of medias res. Knight continues: what we find and most value Trilling ... is criticism characterized by willingness to reside contradictions, to review and take responsibility for conveying host of viewpoints, not all of which the critic finds congenial, but which nevertheless enhance the critic's own best sense that final determinations should be kept abeyance as long as possible (5). The diseases here are sectarian and reductive reading; and the cures are kind of critical negative capability, patience allegedly more purposive and productive than Derridean differance, and a method of comprehension on its way to modest forms of determinacy and mastery. …

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