Jonathan Goldberg. Being of Two Minds: Modernist Literary Criticism and Early Modern Texts

Abstract

Jonathan Goldberg, who died shortly after the publication of this book, was chiefly known for creating critical dialogues between early modernity and post-modernism. The simplest premise for a book like Being of Two Minds is reception study; Goldberg’s book is not quite that, although it might be a kind of reception study squared or folded back on itself—an account, by an early modernist, of how three modernist critics (Eliot, Woolf, and Empson) wrote about using early modern literature to think with. Being of Two Minds is more of a how than a why kind of book, and more in the end about modernist than early modern writing, although Goldberg brings to bear a welcome familiarity with the poets who are his main subjects’ subjects (existing studies with overlapping interests, he notes, have been by modernism specialists, and primarily consisted in allusion-hunting). Perhaps its closest kin, mentioned several times in a book otherwise not over-entangled with recent criticism, is Helen Thaventhiran’s 2015 Radical Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers.