In his memoir, Professor Donoghue wrote that his love for his stern but kind father set the tone for his love of the written word as something to be revered. Ransom, the editor of the Kenyon Review, accepting one of his essays. A favorite memory from his undergraduate years was receiving a handwritten letter from Mr. Professor Donoghue was a lifelong devotee of postwar American literary critics, in particular poet-critics like Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Kenneth Burke. “He thought it was a great thing to be able to write about Jonathan Swift one minute and Lady Gaga the next,” his daughter said. In the late 1980s he shared a weekly rotating column in The New York Times Book Review with Anatole Broyard, Cynthia Ozick and Marilynne Robinson, a position that allowed him to write expansively not just about books but about whatever caught his mind. At his death he had just finished writing a book on the later novels of Henry James. As an author, co-author or editor of more than 30 books, he also contributed lengthy essays to learned publications like Salmagundi and The Sewanee Review and punchy, shorter pieces to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. “If I am listening to a quartet by Bartok or reading ‘Nostromo,’” he wrote in his book “ The Practice of Reading” (1998), “I should not be using the occasion to plan my next move in the class struggle or the war of all against all.”Īlthough he was never associated with an intellectual movement or theory, there were certain through-lines in Professor Donoghue’s work - above all his fascination with the irrational, almost mystical quality at the heart of the creative process. At least the deconstructionists paid close attention to texts, as he did, unlike the real objects of his derision: what he called “ideologically opportunistic” theories that, taking a page from Marxism, saw literature as little more than a social construct to be analyzed alongside things like comic books and soap operas, and that criticized as hopelessly bourgeois the sort of close reading he performed. He was an ardent opponent of deconstruction, and in the late 1970s and early ’80s he wrote lengthy takedowns of its leading proponents, including Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Emma Donoghue, the novelist.įirst at University College Dublin and later at New York University, Professor Donoghue carved out a middle ground in the contested landscape of late-20th-century literary studies, standing opposed to both the politicized theories of the left and the traditionalist pieties of the right.

Eliot and William Butler Yeats, and fierce aversion to the impositions of postmodern theory earned him a reputation as one of the last great humanist critics, died on April 6 at his home in Durham, N.C.

Denis Donoghue, an Irish academic whose wide-ranging literary tastes, erudite analysis of poets like T.S.

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