Philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) distinguishes between the buffered self that is insulated from the cosmos, from spirits, from meaning that imposes itself from outside and therefore experiences the world through a kind of protective membrane and the porous self that is open to being addressed, invaded, or transformed by forces outside the individual such as the sacred, the demonic, the natural, the literary. For the porous self, reading is not an act of analysis but of exposure.
Most elite English professors are buffered almost by professional requirement. The theoretical apparatus of the post-1970 academy — Foucauldian suspicion, deconstruction, historicism — was in part a technology for maintaining critical distance, for never being caught simply moved by a text. To be porous is to be vulnerable in ways the profession has trained itself to regard as naive.
That said, a few figures stand out.
Harold Bloom (1930-2019) is the most obvious case. His entire critical project presupposes porousness — the idea that poems are not objects to be analyzed but powers that can overwhelm, possess, and reshape the reader. His anxiety of influence is itself a porous concept: the strong poet is invaded by his precursor, haunted, struggling not to be absorbed. Bloom wrote about Shakespeare and the Bible as sources of actual transformation, not historical artifacts. He believed in the sublime as a real force, not a rhetorical category. His critics found this embarrassing. That embarrassment is precisely Taylor’s point.
Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016), Bloom’s Yale colleague, is another. Hartman’s later work on trauma, testimony, and the relationship between literature and wounding moved toward something like porousness — the idea that certain texts and certain historical experiences break through the self’s defenses in ways that cannot be theorized away.
Denis Donoghue (1928-2021), the Irish-American critic who taught at NYU, wrote explicitly about what he called the experience of reading as a form of surrender. His book The Practice of Reading argues against the hermeneutics of suspicion precisely on these grounds — that literature asks to be received, not interrogated. His Catholicism gave him a framework for porousness that most of his secular colleagues lacked.
Frank Kermode (1919-2010) in his later work, particularly The Sense of an Ending and his memoir Not Entitled, shows something like porousness — a willingness to let texts address him about mortality, time, and meaning in ways that go beyond professional criticism.
George Steiner (1929-2020) is perhaps the strongest case after Bloom. Steiner explicitly argued that great literature makes a claim on the reader’s life — that to read Tolstoy or Dante is to be placed under an obligation. His book Real Presences is almost a theological argument for porousness: that genuine aesthetic experience is an encounter with transcendence, and that the secular critical establishment had built its entire apparatus to avoid admitting this. He was largely ostracized from mainstream academic literary criticism for saying so.
David Bromwich (b. 1951) is not porous in the full Taylor sense — he has no theological or metaphysical framework for it, but his concept of moral imagination, drawn from Burke and Hazlitt, presupposes something like partial porousness: the idea that literature can expand the self’s capacity to feel the reality of others, that reading is not just interpretation but transformation of attention. He is a secular, rationalist version of the porous reader — open to being changed by texts, resistant to the buffering that theory provides, but without Bloom’s or Steiner’s willingness to invoke the sacred.
The pattern is telling. The professors most plausibly described as porous are either religiously formed (Donoghue, Steiner in his way), or operating from a Romantic tradition that retained quasi-religious claims about art (Bloom, Hartman), or working from outside the American theoretical mainstream (Kermode, Steiner). The high-theory academy was, among other things, a machine for producing buffered critics.
