Hugh Kenner

Canadian-American literary critic (1923–2003), best known as the foremost scholar of high modernism (The Pound Era, studies of Joyce, Eliot, and Beckett) — and, unusually, the author of two very different books on Buckminster Fuller.

Kenner brought a modernist critic's eye to Fuller. In Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973) he offered a literate, skeptical-yet-admiring portrait, treating Fuller as a coordinate-system for the century rather than a saint or a crank. Remarkably, he then wrote Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976), a genuinely practical manual for calculating the chord factors and structures of geodesic and tensegrity forms — a rare crossing from literary criticism into applied structural geometry.

Role in Fuller's orbit

Kenner is both a critical interpreter and a technical expositor of Fuller — the only figure in the corpus to write both a humanistic portrait and a hands-on mathematical manual of Fuller's domes, bridging the "two cultures" that Fuller's work straddles.

See Also

• Bucky (Bucky) — Kenner's critical portrait of Fuller
• Geodesic Math and How to Use It (Geodesic Math and How to Use It) — Kenner's dome-mathematics manual
• Joseph Clinton (Joseph Clinton) — fellow expositor of geodesic mathematics

Sources

• Bucky (source reference) — Kenner's Fuller portrait
• Geodesic Math and How to Use It (source reference) — Kenner's dome-math manual