NONFICTION - Oct. 20, 1991

REJOINING THE COMMON READER: Essays, 1962-1990 by Clara Claiborne Park (Northwestern University Press: $36.95, cloth; $12.95, paper; 231 pp.). Essays on literary works by mainstream academics tend toward the soporific, but in this collection, Clara Claiborne Park makes literature seem relevant, even important. It’s clear from the first essay that Park’s sensibilities are different from those of most scholars: As a teacher for many years in a small community college, she learned early on to value students whose lack of familiarity with literary subjects “has not rendered (them) immune to ideas found in books.” Such students represent the “common reader” to Park: those who haven’t learned to assume that “what’s relevant is what’s complicated,” who still search for meaning in texts rather than a cause to be clever. Park, now a professor at Williams College, is capable of writing numbing lit-crit, but fortunately, does so infrequently; the essays here on Flannery O’Connor, Roland Barthes and the modern differentiation between “author” and “narrator” are original and illuminating.