On Close Reading
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques.
At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading?
For Guillory, these puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all. These critics were most urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. Guillory understands close reading as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.
Guillory’s short book will be essential reading for all college teachers of literature. An annotated bibliography, curated by Scott Newstok, provides a guide to key documents in the history of close reading along with valuable suggestions for further research.
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Guillory (Professing Criticism), an English professor at New York University, serves up an esoteric examination of what it means to give a text a "close reading." He notes that from the 1600s through the 1920s, literary criticism rendered judgment without dissecting specific sentences or phrases. That changed as T.S. Eliot, Cambridge University scholar I.A. Richards, and others sought to establish "more rigorous grounds" on which to study and evaluate literary quality, proposing that "close reading" could provide a more objective means of interpretation. Guillory explains that even as scholars in the interwar New Criticism movement adopted close reading as the fundamental technique for literary analysis, it remained uncertain what the practice entailed. This ambiguity, he suggests, is the inevitable result of its status as a "technique" that, like musical or athletic performance, "cannot be specified verbally in such a way as to permit transmission by verbal means alone." Elsewhere, Guillory details how in the 1990s, academics came to view close reading as an outdated remnant of New Criticism, and how the practice bounced back into vogue in the 2010s. The meticulous accounting of ivory-tower debates is aimed squarely at ivory tower dwellers who won't need background on the New Criticism, New Historicism, and High Theory movements Guillory opines on without ever explaining. This will chiefly appeal to literature scholars.
