Review: At War With The Word by R.V. Young

I've been doing quite a bit of genuine pleasure-reading this holiday season, serendipitously deciding to pick up C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My only real comment about these novels is that I had forgotten how much Iiked Reepicheep.

But I've also had a chance for more "serious" or "academic" endeavors, such as the featured book for this entry, R.V. Young's At War with the Word. Though originally written as separate essays, the book holds together well and essentially attacks the hegemony of literary theory since 1960. That's right, Toto, we're not in Narnia anymore. Young defends to the teeth the "Old New Criticism" of T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, et al and the "Common Sense" interpretative model pooh-poohed by scholars such as Catherine Belsey and Jonathan Culler. Firmly establishing himself as an embattled minority struggling against a corrupt monolith, Young's style is frequently abrasive. Sometimes this struck me as hilarious, but occasionally it was just plain contentious. Both reactions, however, enlivened my reading experience. Perhaps the best moment in the book occurs in its final chapter:

The Latin educare means to "rear or bring up (children or young animals," adn it in turn derives from educere, "to lead forth" or "to lead out of." Implicit in the term is the idea that education consists in leading the young out of something, and the something out of which everyone must be led is the peculiar, self-interested ego; stifling subjectivism that is the universal prison of all human beings. A great work of literature is, then, a book that extends our horizons, that alters our perspective, that makes us take notice of something beyond our immediate needs and desires.