The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion by Henry Sussman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 489 but one wonders if they could have chosen to include only one story per author; in so doing, perhaps they could have encouraged rediscovery and/or discovery of even more Catholic writers. That is a small quibble. McVeigh and Schnapp have given us a fine book. If the authors they chose are familiar with the creed and the Trinity, if they believe in the Eucharist, in the "forgiveness of sins and life everlasting:' their readers might probably be people who are likewise shaped by faith. They might be better readers of these particular stories because of that faith; but they do not have to be Catholic or even Christian to appreciate these stories. They simply need to be good readers. Finally,I don't know if these are the "best" American Catholic short stories of the last 75 years, but they are very good stories, and they deserve serious readers. I hope they find them. Carol Hinds Mount St. Mary's University The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion. By Henry Sussman. New York: Fordham UniversityPress,2005.ISBN0-8232-2465-1.Pp.xi+292. $75.00. The Task of the Criticby Henry Sussman, professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffaloat the State University of New York,and Visiting Professor of German at Yale University, entails a "close reading" as he advocates, for the rhetorical reader who desires a knowledge of interrelationships between poetics, philosophy, and religion. His language style approaches the meta-poetic discourse he analyzes in the book itself, selecting a theme beyond the poststructuralists, deconstructionists , and meta-narrative discourse of such contemporary writers like Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Benjamin, as well as the influence of the nineteenth century and twentieth century philosophers like Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Freud, and Nietzsche. The reader is captured on a journey through the history of ideas in a Borges labyrinth of academic mazes. His language reveals a style like Nietzsche, without the dashes and exclamation marks! The outcome for the close reader em- 'bodies a new consciousness, a new critical approach for the reader as critic, a critique beyond Kantian logo centricity. Ultimately, the reader stands on the edge of the precipice, beyond non/traditional approaches to religion (the three Abramic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), creating a new religious impulse, an exploration into a nexus of religious criticism and scholarship. The journey of the close reader begins with a "Game of Registers:' in which "authors, critics, journalists, archivists, scholars-have a vital stake" (ix). Registers are mindsets for a cultural coma: Post structuralism, New Criticism, Deconstruction , the sensibility of Kant and Hegel, and other Romanticists. Sussman sees the task of the critic as "teasing apart the different writerly registers of poetry, phi- 490 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE losophy, close reading, and criticism, which are all interrelated and coimplicated in contemporary critical work" (4). He owes a debt to Jacques Derrida who creatively linked this process of prefabricated categories to the interrelationships of literature, religion, and law.Thus, Sussman desires to clear the consciousness of value-laden Kantian categorical critiques, to the point of poetic phenomenological interpretations by the reader-critic, "in an open-ended gauntlet of blows and coups ... a rhetorical loose cannon wreaking havoc on the system of values and way of life" (17). Interestingly, in addition to military metaphors, Sussman'svocabulary evokes violent similes: "Like the perches of a sniper ... Like a sociopathic shark, the critic assembles a collection by various tools" (29). The author confesses, "In order to sketch out this rough project of criticism, I have had to delve into the registers of poetics, exegesis, and philosophical disputation, to find myself lost in traversing the unmarked boundaries between them" (16). His hope on this journey to the "point of messianism" (11) would need to come out in the reading itself. This messianic hope becomes the future grounding for interpretation of literature, religion, and philosophy-a hope counteracting the presuppositions of the three Abramic religions. The next fivejourneys or chapters cut across the borders of poetry, criticism, religion, and literary criticism, including Deconstruction and Derrida's influence. Sussman attempts to tediously point out the presuppositions of former movements in these areas, demonstrating the cessation of...