Hugh Kenner, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is considered one of the finest critics to come out of Canada. He has written more than 30 books encompassing the fields of literature, language, art, history, mathematics, and popular culture. The Elsewhere Community was originally developed for the 1997 Massey Lectures, broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas program.

This is one of those books that can be read in two hours and thought about for a lifetime. In five brief chapters, Kenner defines and discusses the “elsewhere community” – where we go, either physically or electronically, to fulfill Aristotle’s “desire to know.” It is the place we visit for intellectual stimulation that forever enriches and defines our thought.

Kenner’s musings range from the European Grand Tour, which every well-brought-up young 18th-century Englishman was expected to undertake, to the self-imposed exile of the founders of the modernist literary tradition, and the ethereal journeys of the Internet. He treads a path broad enough to include Homer and Bugs Bunny, as well as a wonderful description of his meeting with T.S. Eliot and a poignant image of William Carlos Williams laboriously lifting his paralyzed right hand with his left and letting it fall with a loud “clack” onto the selected typewriter key. The great literary names of the first half of this century come alive in these pages as they do service to Kenner’s ideas.

But The Elsewhere Community does not require an intimate familiarity with the works of Ezra Pound or James Joyce; both the writing and the ideas are accessible. The search for an “elsewhere community” which motivated the great writers within these pages is an endeavour central to Western culture and hence, when clearly defined and discussed by Kenner it is familiar. Since The Elsewhere Community is based on a series of lectures, there is some repetition between chapters, and the ideas are not as strongly focused as they might have been had the project been conceived as a single work. However, these are very minor points and anyone looking for a book to make them think as they enjoy it will come away enriched.