Lentricchia, Frank 1940–

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Lentricchia, Frank 1940–

(Frank Lentricchia, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced Len-trick-ya; born May 23, 1940, in Utica, NY; son of Frank John and Ann (Yacovella) Lentricchia; married Karen Young (a teacher), June 24, 1967 (divorced, 1973); married Melissa Christensen, 1973; married Jody McAuliffe (theatre director and educator); children: two. Education: Utica College of Syracuse University, B.A., 1962; Duke University, M.A., 1963, Ph.D., 1966.

ADDRESSES: Office—Duke University, 119 Art Museum, Durham, NC 27708. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, novelist, educator, and critic. University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor of English and comparative literature, 1966–68; University of California, Irvine, assistant professor, 1968–70, associate professor, 1970–76, professor, 1976–82; Rice University, Houston, TX, Autrey Professor of Humanities, 1982–84; Duke University, Durham, NC, professor, 1984–, named Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English and Literature.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America.

WRITINGS:

The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1968.

Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1975.

(Compiler, with Melissa Christensen Lentricchia) Robert Frost: A Bibliography, 1913–1974, Scarecrow (Metuchen, NJ), 1976.

After the New Criticism, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1980.

Criticism and Social Change, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1983.

Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1988.

(Editor, with Thomas McLaughlin) Critical Terms for Literary Study, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1990, 2nd edition, 1995.

(Editor) Introducing Don DeLillo, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991.

(Editor) New Essays on White Noise, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Edward W. Said) Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals: Thinking through Literary Politics with Edward W. Said and Frank Lentricchia, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1992.

The Edge of Night: A Confession, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Modernist Quartet, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Johnny Critelli; and, The Knifemen, Scribner (New York, NY), 1996.

The Music of the Inferno (novel), State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1999.

Lucchesi and the Whale, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2001.

(With wife, Jody McAuliffe) Crimes of Art + Terror, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2003.

(Editor, with Stanley Hauerwas) Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2003.

(Editor, with Andrew DuBois) Close Reading: The Reader, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2003.

The Book of Ruth (novel), Ravenna Press (Seattle, WA), 2005.

Contributor to Poetry, Yale Review, and other journals. Former editorial chair, South Atlantic Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS: Frank Lentricchia is "a star in the galaxy of cultural theory," as a Publishers Weekly reviewer put it. The son of a house painter, Lentricchia has become one of the best known literary critics in the United States, and has received notice for writing novels and fiction/criticism hybrids unique to his pen. National Review contributor Jeffrey Hart wrote of Lentricchia: "He is a denizen of the infamous Duke University English Department, a major center of the brand of literary 'theory' allied with ideology that a large and aggressive segment of the professoriate has substituted for literature. Indeed, Mr. Lentricchia has been known as one of the foremost exponents of theory."

According to Terence Hawkes in the Times Literary Supplement, Lentricchia's book, After the New Criticism, is "a tough-minded account of some of the major theoretical preoccupations of literary criticism [of the late twentieth century]…. Its anti-idealist commitment, openly presented and tellingly deployed, gives it an attractive bite. The result is a demanding and compelling work, spirited in its deflation of a number of established reputations, and implacable in its raising of the crucial questions concerning historical consciousness which any new New Criticism must be prepared to answer." Peter Rudnytsky observed in World Literature Today that After the New Criticism "is a landmark book. Combining a masterful gift for exposition with incisive analytical rigor … Lentricchia offers a mapping of the contemporary critical scene on axes at once historical and theoretical."

In Crimes of Art + Terror, Lentricchia and his wife and coauthor, Jody McAuliffe, explore the motivations behind those who committed the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States. Disturbingly, the authors pinpoint an "incestuous relationship between killers and writers" and that such acts are often "governed by a logic that grows out of the romantic tradition and that real terrorists take their inspiration from books," stated reviewer Aparna Zambare in the Library Journal. The two authors ponder whether "Western art's post-Romantic veneration of the destructive, alienated outsider" can be "in any way answerable for the real destruction our culture brings into being," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. They look at writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, and Dostoyevsky, as well as such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, to determine how fictional and cultural concepts inspire real-life violence. The Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that the book's "accessible combination of conceptual daring and moral seriousness places it well above the common run of lit crit."

In addition to his numerous critical works, Lentricchia has written several works of fiction that reveal "the once-detached scholar no longer hiding, or hiding behind, his judgments and values," in the words of a Kirkus Reviews critic. Lentricchia bases his fiction closely on his youth in Utica, New York, but he is also well versed in a postmodern aesthetic that revels in crossing genres and bending the rules of character, plot, and purpose. A Publishers Weekly contributor candidly noted that The Edge of Night: A Confession "may be indigestible for the average reader." According to other critics, more demanding readers can find rewards in Lentricchia's work. In his New York Times Book Review piece on The Edge of Night, John Sutherland maintained that the book is "absorbing … because Mr. Lentricchia is an interesting and ultimately rather elusive man. In a competitive field where traditionally the cards are stacked against sons of Italian-American house painters, he has succeeded brilliantly…. He has refused to conform, assimilate or show his origins. It is a remarkable achievement." Writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Irving Malin deemed Johnny Critelli; and, The Knifemen "an ambitious attempt to use language as matter to make it bleed." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that Lentricchia's fiction displays "a rousing capacity for language and a gritty sense of the contemporary male mind."

In Lucchesi and the Whale, Lentricchia combines a contemplative rumination on Melville's classic Moby Dick with metafictional episodes surrounding Thomas Lucchesi, a fictional reader of the novel. The author uses as a starting point the fact that the novel's title was originally hyphenated, while the whale's name is unhyphenated. Luccesi, acting as his own literary critic, goes on to present a deep reading of Melville and the novel, as well as offering sage commentary on such topics as writers and writing, sons and fathers, and the nature of death. "Lucchessi's take on Moby-Dick may be profound revelation or deconstructionist over-reading, but it is most definitely a pleasure," commented T.J. Gerlach in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Lucchesi reappears in Lentricchia's novel, The Book of Ruth. In the book, Ruth Cohen is a forty-six-year-old photographer who still bitterly regrets events that happened to her in Cuba years before. Visiting Cuba to take pictures of the daily lives of ordinary Cubans, Ruth is deceived by two Cuban double agents working for the United States. As a result, an assassination attempt on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is botched and an innocent young girl is killed. Though Ruth's photographic portraits catapulted her to later fame, she still feels guilty for the girl's death. Almost thirty years later, she meets and marries Lucchesi and goes off to live in a remote part of the Adirondacks. In 2002, she is pulled from obscurity and is sent to Iraq to photograph Saddam Hussein in the build-up to the Iraq War. The photographs are a success, but Lucchesi is apprehended by Saddam's henchmen. A Kirkus Reviews critic called the novel "an extravagantly farfetched novel that ogles celebrity even as it professes artistic detachment."

For Sutherland, both Lentricchia's fiction and his critical work reveal a unique mind at work. The critic declared: "Think of 'college professor' or 'Eliot scholar' and a tweedy, pipe-puffing, upper-class WASP (or would-be WASP) comes to mind. Mr. Lentricchia is a new breed—one for whom 'don' evokes Al Pacino playing Michael Corleone rather than C.S. Lewis."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Lentricchia, Frank, and Edward W. Said, Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals: Thinking through Literary Politics with Edward W. Said and Frank Lentricchia, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

America, May 7, 1994, Paul Wilkes, review of The Edge of Night: A Confession, p. 18.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2000, review of Lucchesi and the Whale, p. 1710; September 15, 2005, review of The Book of Ruth, p. 996.

Library Journal, June 15, 1980, George Rallis, review of After the New Criticism, p. 1389; November 1, 2003, Aparna Zambare, review of Crimes of Art + Terror, p. 83.

National Review, November 21, 1994, Jeffrey Hart, review of Modernist Quartet, p. 68.

New York Times Book Review, February 6, 1994, John Sutherland, review of The Edge of Night, p. 24; December 29, 1996, Lorna Sage, review of Johnny Critelli; and, The Knifemen, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly, January 10, 1994, review of The Edge of Night: A Confession, p. 51; November 4, 1996, review of Johnny Critelli; and, The Knifemen, p. 64; December 11, 2000, review of Lucchesi and the Whale, p. 62; October 27, 2003, review of Crimes of Art + Terror, p. 57.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1997, Irving Malin, review of Johnny Critelli; and, The Knifemen, p. 294; spring, 2002, T.J. Gerlach, review of Luccesi and the Whale, p. 139.

Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1981, Terence Hawkes, review of After the New Criticism.

World Literature Today, spring, 1981, Peter Rudnytsky, review of After the New Criticism.