Speaking of Beauty

How we talk about beauty--""how they, you, and I talk about it, and why we say the things we say""--is the theme of this densely packed meditation, aimed at those who delight in, say, anyone's daring to call a poem""gorgeous."" Donoghue assumes a reader as well read as he, a flattering assumption from a distinguished New York University professor and prolific critic (Adam's Curse; The Practice of Reading; etc.). His tone, lucid and jargon-free, reminds rather than instructs. It helps to have been there (or close by) when Donoghue speaks of Plotinus' Ennead or points out that""In The Rape of the Lock what was once a Christian cross has become a piece of jewelry on Belinda's bosom; you can find it beautiful if you are indifferent--as Pope is not--to its Christian purport."" While sporadically curmudgeonly in his dismissal of feminist and post-colonial theory, cultural studies and all other studies of""gender, race and sexual disposition,"" Donoghue is an incisive, insightful analyst, particularly of Hawthorne, James, Fitzgerald and Ruskin. There's room in Speaking of Beauty for remarks on Turner's paintings, the Elgin marbles and landscape architecture. The book is unapologetically rife with quotations, snippets that conjure fuller texts from Poe to Eliot, and from Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens; a slender appendix assembles some literary passages about beauty. All this and more (Kant and I.A. Richards most significantly) is tied together in the service of a spiritual quest, rooted in his conviction that""the relation between commerce and beauty settled down into domestic comfort so easily that modern artists... yielded up the beautiful to the common culture and resorted to the sublime and...to the grotesque."" Donoghue attempts nothing less than the dispossession of beauty in this slim but capacious volume.