ThePracticeof Reading. By DENISDONOGHUE.New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UniversityPress. I998. x + 307 pp. ?20. To keep our subjective imaginations active, an inner logic in Denis Donoghue's fifteen essays develops ideological debate out of their occasionally elegiac but recurrent anti-ideological stance. From laying out 'Theory, Theories, and Principles', setting 'Murray Krieger Versus Paul de Man', exploring 'Orality, Literacy,and Their Discontents', to writing about Wordsworth'suse of 'uncertain' in 'There was a boy', about a chapter of Ulysses,or on 'Yeats:The New Political Issue', Donoghue's modes of attention, claiming general resistance to the 'split politics' of abstracting'Theory', warm to the intrinsicqualities of literaryform. In theprocessan ironicassociationwith MatthewArnold'sinjunction'to see the object as in itself it really is' (p. 36) matures an appropriately politicized conspectus elaborated in the United States by formalists of various hue whose verbal icons, well-wroughturnsand articulateenergiessensitizedgenerationsof studentsto midcentury practices of reading. But since the moral here cannot be 'backto the New Criticism. I wish it were', Donoghue develops instead a fertile and combative engagement with the politics and pedagogies of possible readings in a culturally ravagedacademy. An enabling assumptionthat articulateform introducesus to alterityas symbolic action, and the fact that Donoghue's essay on Yeats constitutes a dialectical meditation on the political and aesthetic lives of a poem and the politics of literary criticism, combine uneasily with his insistence that for imaginative sympathywith differenceto blossom, we need to 'purgethe political' as well as 'the metaphysical, the religious,the economic, the historical,or anyotherideologicaldiscourse'(p. 64). That requirement, as its author well knows and these sinuous readings testify, is itselfan ideological project. Donoghue also knowsthat language is the very stuffof intersubjectivity,and within an older, broadernotion of politics as the space where individuals realize their nature as rational, sentient beings, imaginative sympathy extends political orientation: 'Nothing is to be gained by positing a categorical discrepancybetween individualsand society. [. . .] It is also self-evidentthat social discourseremains silent until someone chooses to speakit. [ . .] We need a theory of such performance' (p. IO6). It might be argued (and Donoghue elsewhere concedes) that among others Bakhtinhas inaugurated such a theory, though how far social discourse (by which I take Donoghue to signify politics in this broader sense) is a matter of free choice for all participantsremainsunclear. It seems, then, to be an accident of design that a persuasive explication of 'What Happens in Othello' constructstragicperformancebetween Iago and the Moor as historicalsafe haven: is Elizabeth'sbanishment of 'blackamoors'from the English state assumed information, or something we should purge to preserve a trueraesthetic sympathy with Shakespeare'sfiguration?A brilliant reading of Gulliver's Travels uses Locke's descriptionof human consciousnessas a blanksheet awaitinginscriptionto propose that Swift's durable anti-hero is a character with no 'character' at all: 'no imagination, no depth of feeling, no resourcesof inner life' beyond an awarenessof merely 'incrementalevidence' (p. 68). The permissiveparametersthus opened up are explicitly closed against the interpretativeoption that Gulliver'stransforming dimensions, 'appropriatefigure for an Ascendancy which was both colonized and colonialist', might also encode an Irish context (p. I70). A preferred reading emphasizesinstead brainwashingand systementrapmentexperienced by a subject who manages to survive his failure to understand what is happening. The monetarization of consciousness that was engulfing society when Gulliver's Travels was being written, and its evidential purchase on politicallypowerfulpeople (both I48 Reviews MLR, 96. , 200I MLR, 96. , 200I topics about which Swifthad a great deal to say),might have something to do with this. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH COLIN NICHOLSON Memory& Narrative.The Weaveof Life-Writing. By JAMES OLNEY. Chicago and London:Universityof Chicago Press. 1999. xvi + 430 pp. [27.95. James Olney has written an attractive and often persuasivestudy of what he now calls 'life-writing', the product of many years devoted to the understanding of autobiography.InMemory &Narrative he treatsof threewriters,Augustine,Rousseau, and Beckett, two at least of whom would figure on anyone's list of significant autobiographers.Partof the bookfirstappearedin essayformin NewLiterary History, 24 ( 993) as 'Memory and the Narrative Imperative',a revisedversion of a paper presented at a colloqium; as such it contained only a few scattered remarks on Rousseau, who is here a centralfigure('thetruecenterof it all',p. xii), and thefocus of a very...