‘Reading, a skill easily taken for granted, is difficult—all the more so when reading literature that wields language as a medium for art. In the wake of Richards’ revelations, scholars in Britain and the United States developed a technique to address our failures. Eventually that technique took the name “close reading,” and it remains the principal methodology of literary studies.
Close reading is untimely. It bristles against today’s universities, which treat students as customers to please and as future workers to train rather than as people in pursuit of human flourishing. Jeff Bezos’ empire—Amazon; Goodreads; Kindle Direct Publishing, which dominates the perfervid world of self-publishing—encourages readers to “talk about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device.” Social media compels us to attend to what we’re seeing for as long as it takes to scroll by. Every day, AI produces more of the words we come across, making it hard—maybe impossible—to care about reading them. I’m sure there were college courses this semester where students completed their work with AI and professors graded it with AI, cutting humans from the loop. It’s easy to see why close reading, which demands patience, openness to others, and slow, careful thought, is having a moment among academics.
In January, literary critic John Guillory, emeritus faculty at NYU, well known in the small world of literary studies, published a slim volume, On Close Reading, accompanied by an exhaustive annotated bibliography compiled by Rhodes College professor Scott Newstok that demonstrated that more people are writing about close reading now than ever. Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth has garnered disproportionate attention, occasioning roundtables, special sections of journals, and many reviews. Much more, including a volume I co-edited, is forthcoming. After a spell of taking it for granted, academics are rediscovering the quiet excitement of close reading, a relief from the overheated corporate pablum routinely suffocating us.…’ via Defector
