On Close Reading
Autor Professor John Guillory Contribuţii de Scott Newstoken Limba Engleză Paperback – 8 ian 2025
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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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226837437
ISBN-10: 0226837432
Pagini: 144
Dimensiuni: 127 x 203 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226837432
Pagini: 144
Dimensiuni: 127 x 203 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
John Guillory is the Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. Scott Newstok is professor of English and executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of How to Think like Shakespeare and the editor of several books, including the forthcoming How to Teach Children, a volume of Montaigne’s essays on education. His closereadingarchive.org documents what scholars have written about close reading from the prehistory of modern literary studies to the present.
Extras
What exactly is “close reading,” and where did the term come from? In On Close Reading, John Guillory 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? In the following excerpt from the book’s preface, Guillory explains why these two puzzles are intertwined.
This small book aims to solve two large puzzles in the history of Anglo-American literary criticism. The first is the question of why the term “close reading” was so infrequently invoked in the decades after its initial mention in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. In fact, the term did not achieve consensus recognition in literary studies until the later 1950s, on the threshold of New Criticism’s decline.
The second puzzle concerns the inability of scholars to define the procedure of close reading in any but the most uncertain terms, usually not much more than is implied by the spatial figure “close.” Sometimes this figure is elucidated by the notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” Yet it does not take much research to establish that reading with attention to the words on the page characterizes many practices of reading from antiquity to the present. How can “close reading” name a practice of such scope and duration and yet be seen as emergent during the interwar period of the twentieth century?
These two puzzles are intertwined. The premise of my argument is that the literary critics of the interwar period—both the representatives of “practical criticism” and the American New Critics—were not aiming at first to devise a method of reading at all. Following the lead of T. S. Eliot, these critics—I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and their peers—were most urgently concerned to establish the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than had previously obtained in criticism. In the course of forming a conception of literature that would function as the basis for judgment, they developed a corollary technique of reading that confirmed the value of the literary work of art in a universe of new media and mass forms of writing. This technique initially had no name, although it was soon recognized by contemporaries as something new, different from the procedure of the literary historians who dominated the language and literature departments at the time. Our recollection today of the technique’s importance as a methodological innovation suppresses its context in the problem of judgment—or rather, forgets this context. We look back on this moment in the history of the discipline and wonder why the literary critics of the time did not recognize what seems to us now their major achievement.
The marginality of the term “close reading” during the decades after its appearance in Richards’s Practical Criticism was correlated to the difficulty critics had in defining their new practice of reading as a precise sequence of actions. The absence of a definite procedure for close reading contrasts strikingly with the rich aesthetic vocabulary of the New Critics—their development of notions of cultural sensibility (as found in Leavis) and of an “ontology” of the literary work of art (as seen in Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and René Wellek). It is my contention that the difficulty of defining close reading is an entailment of its nature as technique. Or more precisely, as cultural technique, a very particular kind of methodical human action. All cultural techniques resist definition of the sort that specifies the sequence and components of methodical action. Techniques must be understood as inclusive of the most universal and mundane activities, even the most basic bodily techniques, such as swimming, dancing, riding a bicycle, even tying shoelaces. These cultural techniques can be described, and they can be taught, but they cannot be specified verbally in such a way as to permit their transmission by verbal means alone. Techniques are transmitted rather by demonstration and imitation. The fact of their resistance to precise definition does not contradict their complexity as human actions. Techniques can be described in minimal terms, but they are not necessarily simple. No cultural technique exhibits this paradoxical aspect more than reading, the genus of human action to which close reading belongs as a species, a specialization.
At the core of literary study, then, is a technique with a history, but no precise verbal formula for performance. The technique of close reading can be described but not prescribed. By means of this technique, literary study established its identity as a discipline, despite efforts to repudiate the technique early in its history as mechanical or pseudoscientific, and later to reject it as mired in the social and ideological conditions of its emergence. The history of Anglo-American literary study records the long effort of scholars to come to terms with the muteness of their discipline’s core technique.
In giving an account of this history, I have had occasion to reflect on the question: What is a “technical” term? Literary study is replete with such terms, but for some reason, “close reading” has for the most part fallen out of the discipline’s technical lexicon. The concept of “technique,” which I draw from the work of anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and employ as a means of understanding modes of reading as transmissible human actions, offers a way forward with this problem. Close reading, as a technique without concept (to invoke Kant’s analogous effort to understand aesthetic perception), constitutes the infrastructure for all disciplinary modes of interpretation, from the formalism of the New Critics to deconstruction, New Historicism, and even, I will argue, what has come to be known as “distant reading.” Finally, I aim to bring the technique of close reading into relation to the long history of writing and reading as cultural techniques, among the most important techniques in the history of human culture, perhaps exceeded only by the gift of Prometheus.
Excerpted from On Close Reading by John Guillory, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
This small book aims to solve two large puzzles in the history of Anglo-American literary criticism. The first is the question of why the term “close reading” was so infrequently invoked in the decades after its initial mention in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. In fact, the term did not achieve consensus recognition in literary studies until the later 1950s, on the threshold of New Criticism’s decline.
The second puzzle concerns the inability of scholars to define the procedure of close reading in any but the most uncertain terms, usually not much more than is implied by the spatial figure “close.” Sometimes this figure is elucidated by the notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” Yet it does not take much research to establish that reading with attention to the words on the page characterizes many practices of reading from antiquity to the present. How can “close reading” name a practice of such scope and duration and yet be seen as emergent during the interwar period of the twentieth century?
These two puzzles are intertwined. The premise of my argument is that the literary critics of the interwar period—both the representatives of “practical criticism” and the American New Critics—were not aiming at first to devise a method of reading at all. Following the lead of T. S. Eliot, these critics—I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and their peers—were most urgently concerned to establish the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than had previously obtained in criticism. In the course of forming a conception of literature that would function as the basis for judgment, they developed a corollary technique of reading that confirmed the value of the literary work of art in a universe of new media and mass forms of writing. This technique initially had no name, although it was soon recognized by contemporaries as something new, different from the procedure of the literary historians who dominated the language and literature departments at the time. Our recollection today of the technique’s importance as a methodological innovation suppresses its context in the problem of judgment—or rather, forgets this context. We look back on this moment in the history of the discipline and wonder why the literary critics of the time did not recognize what seems to us now their major achievement.
The marginality of the term “close reading” during the decades after its appearance in Richards’s Practical Criticism was correlated to the difficulty critics had in defining their new practice of reading as a precise sequence of actions. The absence of a definite procedure for close reading contrasts strikingly with the rich aesthetic vocabulary of the New Critics—their development of notions of cultural sensibility (as found in Leavis) and of an “ontology” of the literary work of art (as seen in Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and René Wellek). It is my contention that the difficulty of defining close reading is an entailment of its nature as technique. Or more precisely, as cultural technique, a very particular kind of methodical human action. All cultural techniques resist definition of the sort that specifies the sequence and components of methodical action. Techniques must be understood as inclusive of the most universal and mundane activities, even the most basic bodily techniques, such as swimming, dancing, riding a bicycle, even tying shoelaces. These cultural techniques can be described, and they can be taught, but they cannot be specified verbally in such a way as to permit their transmission by verbal means alone. Techniques are transmitted rather by demonstration and imitation. The fact of their resistance to precise definition does not contradict their complexity as human actions. Techniques can be described in minimal terms, but they are not necessarily simple. No cultural technique exhibits this paradoxical aspect more than reading, the genus of human action to which close reading belongs as a species, a specialization.
At the core of literary study, then, is a technique with a history, but no precise verbal formula for performance. The technique of close reading can be described but not prescribed. By means of this technique, literary study established its identity as a discipline, despite efforts to repudiate the technique early in its history as mechanical or pseudoscientific, and later to reject it as mired in the social and ideological conditions of its emergence. The history of Anglo-American literary study records the long effort of scholars to come to terms with the muteness of their discipline’s core technique.
In giving an account of this history, I have had occasion to reflect on the question: What is a “technical” term? Literary study is replete with such terms, but for some reason, “close reading” has for the most part fallen out of the discipline’s technical lexicon. The concept of “technique,” which I draw from the work of anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and employ as a means of understanding modes of reading as transmissible human actions, offers a way forward with this problem. Close reading, as a technique without concept (to invoke Kant’s analogous effort to understand aesthetic perception), constitutes the infrastructure for all disciplinary modes of interpretation, from the formalism of the New Critics to deconstruction, New Historicism, and even, I will argue, what has come to be known as “distant reading.” Finally, I aim to bring the technique of close reading into relation to the long history of writing and reading as cultural techniques, among the most important techniques in the history of human culture, perhaps exceeded only by the gift of Prometheus.
Excerpted from On Close Reading by John Guillory, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Cuprins
Preface
On Close Reading
—The Rise and Rise of Close Reading
—Toward a General Theory of Reading
—Techné, Technique, Technology
—Close Reading as Technique
—Showing the Work of Reading
—Coda: On Attention to Literature
Annotated Bibliography, by Scott Newstok
Acknowledgments
Index
On Close Reading
—The Rise and Rise of Close Reading
—Toward a General Theory of Reading
—Techné, Technique, Technology
—Close Reading as Technique
—Showing the Work of Reading
—Coda: On Attention to Literature
Annotated Bibliography, by Scott Newstok
Acknowledgments
Index
Recenzii
“On Close Reading is destined to become a classic. Guillory offers a fresh account of the practice of close reading and its place in the work of academic literary critics. On Close Reading mounts a powerful argument for viewing technique as a form of knowledge—that is, as a form of science.”
“In this compact and incisive study, Guillory shows how close reading is attended by mysteries that have long escaped discussion, then untangles these perplexities with meticulousness and flair. Alert to the institutional pressures shaping literary study, yet committed to close reading’s social value, our leading historian of criticism presents an inquiry as groundbreaking as it is air-clearing. Scott Newstok’s annotated bibliography, a treasure in itself, elegantly complements Guillory’s investigation.”
“As always, Guillory comes in cool, concise, and comprehensive, demystifying one crucial thread in our discipline’s myth of origins. In and even after the age of mass literacy, close reading remains an underspecified method, a vital practice we use both to approximate and to negate scientific knowledge, the last ember of a Promethean fire that still defines the literary humanities.”
“No one has illuminated the situation of literary studies in our time with more power than Guillory. This marvelous volume lays bare the history and theory of a technique so central to the discipline that it is usually taken for granted, but which Guillory reveals as a sign of literature’s vexed relation to a wider world.”
"Close reading, [Guillory] proposes, may not be in and of itself a virtue, but it may offer a small private resistance to wide-scale industrialization and automation. It may not save literature, but it will make sure that certain forms of phenomenal experience remain open to us . . . the idea of close reading as something modelled and handed down may offer a kind of companionship: that collaborative exchange Guillory calls 'mutual imitation'."
“Guillory has devoted his career to examining the social functions performed by the academic discipline of literary studies . . . Like everything English professors do, close reading has been loaded down with baggage both by its proponents and its critics. Thus one of Guillory’s primary goals in his latest book is to clear away all of the associations that have accumulated around it . . . Guillory’s terse, no-nonsense defense avoids the risk of overplaying his hand—a risk courted by close reading’s early advocates.”
“On Close Reading has all the richness we have come to expect from [Guillory] . . . Put together, the efforts of Guillory and Newstok make On Close Reading a book that is incredibly valuable for thinking about the concepts our work relies upon—and for putting these concepts into practice.”
“A formidable historian of academic criticism, Guillory strikes a moderate tone in the book, one that is both sceptical of assumptions made about close reading—and yet one that affirms the value of the literary word . . . Guillory’s book is a necessary reminder that accepted critical terms and tendencies should be questioned and reconsidered, lest they lead to lazy reading and thought.”
“Guillory’s goal in this slim volume to convince us that reading, and in particular, the practice of ‘close reading,’ is a technique . . . Guillory wants to avoid endlessly theorizing close reading because like all techniques, he says, it is better understood via demonstration and imitation.”