Dammit, Hugh Kenner has died. He was a brilliant literary critic, one of the very few worth reading consistently. Everything he wrote was original and worthwhile. Discovering The Pound Era changed my life. This is a great loss.
Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of literature regarded as America's foremost commentator on literary modernism, especially the work of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in Athens, Ga. He was 80.Posted by Alan at November 25, 2003 08:42 AMThe variety of Mr. Kenner's interests was contained in 25 books of his own (he contributed to 200 more) and nearly 1,000 articles, as well as broadcasts and recordings. He wrote commandingly on everything from Irish poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy (Lucifer Ornamental Yokum), to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer (one of which he built for himself and then wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of Chuck Jones.
But it was for his pioneering guide to English-language literary modernism and for his books "Dublin's Joyce" (1956), "The Pound Era" (1971) and "Joyce's Voices" (1978) that Mr. Kenner was best known. In these works and others he employed the techniques proposed by the writers themselves to define new standards by which to judge their work.
Over time his prose style grew increasingly graceful, witty and accessible, prompting C. K. Stead, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to call him "the most readable of living critics." He thought of writing as an "abnormal act," as he told an interviewer at U.S. News & World Report in 1983, rendered an increasingly "quaint skill" by the rise of other forms of communication.
Yet he scarcely confined his communication to print. Told by Pound in the early 1950's "to visit the great men of your own time," Mr. Kenner befriended many of his subjects, as well as the poet Louis Zukofsky, Buckminster Fuller and William F. Buckley Jr., who was best man at his second wedding.
Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium. "We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk — competent junk," he told U.S. News & World Report. "Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in The evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another."