Life
1923-2003; b. 1923 at Peterborough, Ontario; son of headmaster and teacher
of classical languages; raised in Catholic family; became a reader in
very early years marked by speech defect; studied under Marshall McLuhan
at Toronto Univ., BA 1945; MA 1946, with gold medal in English; PhD Yale;
won Porter Prize with The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1950), his thesis
completed under Cleanth Brooks; taught at Santa Barbara 1950-1973 and
afterwards at Johns Hopkins University, as Andrew Mellon Professor of
Humanities, 1973-1990; moved to Franklin and Callaway Chair of English,
University of Georgia 1990; retired 1999; and authority on Joyce, Beckett,
Pound, T. S. Eliot and other modernists; engaged in printed disputations
with Thomas Kinsella and later Seamus Deane, arising from his view of
Ireland in A Colder Eye (1983); strong advocate of the poetry of
Des Egan.
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Works
Paradox in Chesterton (1948); The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951);
Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guidebook (1954); Gnomon: Essays in
Contemporary Literature (1958); Dublin's Joyce (London: Chatto
& Windus 1955), 370pp.; and Do., edns. incl. [Gloucester, Mass.:
P. Smith 1969), xi, 372pp., port [Wyndam Lewis]; The Art of Poetry
(1959); ed., Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and
Jonson (1965); Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (1965); ed.,
Studies in Change: A Book of the Short Story (1965); The Counterfeiters:
An Historical Comedy (Johns Hopkins UP 1968; 1985), 181pp., ill. Guy
Davenport; The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1959, 1969); The
Pound Era (1971); Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973);
A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973); The Stoic Comedians:
Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (London: W. H. Allen 1964), xix, 107pp.
ill. Guy Davenport; another edn. (California UP 1974), 107pp., pb.; A
Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975); Geodesic
Math and How to Use It (1976); Joyce’s Voices (1978);
Ulysses (1982); A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (NY:
Knopf 1983); ed. & intro., Desmond Egan: The Poet and His Work
(Orono, Me.: Northern Lights 1990), 222pp. Also, intro., A. D. Coleman,
The Digital Revolution : Visual Communication in the Electronic Age:
Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998 (Tucson: Nazraeli Press
1998), 191pp., ill.
Contributions, ‘“Fallen on His Feet in Buenes Aires”’, in James Joyce Quarterly (1982), pp.223-27; ‘Modernism and What Happened to It', in Essays in Criticism, 37 (April 1987), pp.97-109; ‘The Fourth Policeman’, in Anne Clune & Hurson, Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O’Brien (Belfast: IIS/QUB 1997), pp.61-72 [written in the spirit of a riposte to Seamus Deane and containing an acerbic account of his dealings with Thomas Kinsella].
Archives: More than 100 boxes of Hugh Kenner’s papers are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Univ. of Texas, Austin) [link].
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Criticism
Dillon Johnston, ‘A Response to Hugh Kenner: Kinsella’s Magnanimity
and Mean Reading’, in Genre, 13, 4 (1980), pp.531-37 [answering
the charges specifically levelled against Kinsella in A Colder Eye].
Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984), p.17.
John Banville, ‘Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday’, in New York Books Review (16 June 2004) [“Essay”], p.31.
Christopher Murray, ‘‘‘The Choice of Lives”: O’Casey versus Synge’, in Journal of Irish Studies [IASIL-Japan], 2002, p.79.) For longer quotations, see [infra].
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Notes
Bad feeling? Hugh Kenner was among those taken in by an ‘interview’
with John Stanislaus Joyce actually fabricated by Flann O’Brien and
other Dublin’s Joyce (1955).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)