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Denis Donoghue. The Practice of Reading. New Haven, Ct. Yale University Press. 1998. x + 307 pages. $30. ISBN 0-300-07466-2.
Denis Donoghue is an advocate of slow reading, and as an author he induces it; his essays are reflective, observant, deliberate, the sort of careful writing meant to make the reader think. But he cannot be a slow reader himself, for the range of his references could only come from wide and rapid reading. It is one thing to quote T. S. Eliot, as he does frequently and effectively, but quite another thing "to use a critical distinction of Vygotsky's," raising the question of just how far afield his practice of reading takes him.
Donoghue quotes most often from his admired forebears, the New Critics Eliot, Ransom,...