Appreciation …

… Denis Donoghue, 1928–2021. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Today there is a tendency to see literary authority figures like Donoghue as beneficiaries of various kinds of privilege. So it’s worth remembering that Donoghue was the son of a Catholic policeman in Protestant Northern Ireland, born a long way from the mandarinate. The same is true of Leavis, whose father was a Cambridge shopkeeper, and Trilling, the son of an immigrant tailor in New York. All were outsiders to the academic-literary establishment. That may be why they were so serious about literature, which for them wasn’t an heirloom or pastime but a deeply democratic experience of beauty and truth. Let’s hope that this idea, of which Donoghue is now a “symbol perfected in death,” can never be finally defeated.