“Go with the grain of the wood”: My distinguished colleague recently invoked that adage to our visiting prospective graduate students in English to describe his approach to literary criticism. I was struck all over again by the wisdom of this metaphor and his desire to be an “eclectic critic,” responsive to the “grain” of the literary work he was analyzing in each case, never settling for one way of reading, but instead being responsive to each individual work’s distinctive pull and tug.1
Author: Richard Rankin Russell
A native of Paris, Tennessee, Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English and directs the Graduate Program at Baylor University in Texas, where he directed the Beall Poetry Festival for eight years and served as 2012 Baylor Centennial Professor. He has edited three collections of essays and has authored five monographs–all on contemporary literature from Ireland and Northern Ireland–along with other essays on writers as various as Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Harry Crews, Graham Swift, Cormac McCarthy, Eavan Boland, Hopkins, and George Mackay Brown. He is currently writing a study of James Joyce and Protestantism.