What We Learn From Close Reading

It’s a familiar enough story that Guillory largely takes it for granted. Close reading emerged in England in the 1920s among “practical critics” like I.A. Richards and William Empson at Cambridge University, and shortly thereafter in the United States among “New Critics” like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. But while Richards and Empson were progressives, most of the New Critics were conservatives, even reactionaries, profoundly influenced by T.S. Eliot’s indictment of modernity and his reevaluation of the canon (demoting John Milton, for example, while elevating John Donne). Key founders of the New Criticism had belonged to the so-called Southern Agrarians, who published a manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930, in which they rejected industrial modernity and romanticized the Old South, espousing white supremacy. (In later years, Warren revised his position, publishing a book of interviews with civil rights activists.)

New Criticism dominated the US academy from the 1940s to the ’60s. Language and form took precedence over history and politics. A New Critic focused on short passages in a literary work to show how it used ambiguity, irony, and paradox to express its ideas and accomplish an organic whole.

At the time, the New Critics did not call what they were doing close reading. Drawing on an extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography compiled by Scott Newstok—a gift to the discipline that accompanies the text of On Close Reading—Guillory demonstrates that the term gained currency in the late 1960s, right as the New Criticism fell out of favor, and was used by its enemies to describe its method. Ever since then, we’ve been debating whether close reading was corrupted by the bad politics of some its earliest practitioners. Yet even if the term started as something of a pejorative, close reading itself quickly became the core practice of the discipline. Few literature scholars today would call themselves New Critics, but almost all are close readers.

In On Close Reading, Guillory contributes to the debate by asking the following questions: What have we inherited from close reading’s conservative and sometimes reactionary origins? Does close reading attune us to literary form to the exclusion of history? Can scholars say it is a formalist practice with suspect baggage but then use it to make historicist and progressive—even radical—arguments?

Guillory aims to answer these questions by attempting something that has proved stubbornly elusive: to define close reading itself. Drawing from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his student André Leroi-Gourhan, Guillory argues that close reading is a “cultural technique” more than anything else, a “set of methodical actions that accomplish specific ends, that alter something in our environment or in ourselves.” His point in using such technical language is to situate close reading as a kind of reading and to make clear that reading is a long-standing practice of the human animal that belongs to the same category as “swimming, dancing, riding a bicycle, even tying shoelaces.”

Seen in this way, close reading, like these other cultural practices, “has no ideological or political implications whatsoever.” Fredric Jameson and Edward Said performed close readings just as Harold Bloom and Allen Tate did. Close reading is simply “a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation.” It entails nothing more than showing one’s work. “We might be tempted to say of ‘showing the work of reading,’ ‘Is that all?’” Guillory writes. “Yes, that is all.” And if that is all—if close reading is nothing more than transforming quotes into evidence to explain how one reaches a certain conclusion about the text—then the technique is not predisposed to formalist analysis and can as easily be put to work (as it routinely is, despite how scholars still talk about it) for historicist ends. One might use close reading to reveal the formal logic behind how Jane Austen creates her characters, just as one might use it to demonstrate how the classicist orderliness of Austen’s novels depends on the slave trade in Antigua and the history of the British Empire.

But, Guillory hastens to note, there is a different kind of politics in close reading: “The distribution of techniques almost always has political causes and consequences.” Against those who foreground close reading’s ideological content, Guillory prioritizes its function in the institutional context of the school. The New Critics, he argues, developed close reading less to disseminate conservative nostalgia for preindustrial organicism and more to shore up the cultural capital of a university education in literary study during a time of mass literacy with a technique designed to analyze particularly difficult literary texts, especially those of the high modernists and the metaphysical poets. Knowing how to close-read became an expression of one’s training in higher education, a relatively rare form of reading that endows one with a high level of cultural capital. By transforming quotations into evidence for claims that can undergo peer review and become scholarship, close reading served the New Critics “as the basis for asserting criticism as a specialized knowledge”—a desideratum demanded by the modern research university.

That the New Critics created close reading in part to retain cultural capital is not, for Guillory, a reason to abandon the practice. But unlike in his two previous books, he does not build a case here for how literary scholars should act for the sake of the profession. Seen in the light of that earlier work, though, On Close Reading belongs to Guillory’s career-long project to put the profession on the right ground: He wants us to know ourselves better so that we can best advocate for ourselves. Cultural Capital and Professing Criticism stood against the overestimation of scholarship and its pretension to a mostly nonexistent political efficacy. On Close Reading investigates literary criticism’s methodology, establishing where it came from and what a proper estimation of it might look like.

Seen through Guillory’s argument, close reading is invaluable. By defining reading as a cultural technique and by framing it anthropologically, Guillory challenges our familiarity with it; most of us learn to read at a such a young age that we have forgotten how difficult it is to master “even at the simplest level.” In the 1920s, I.A. Richards conducted an experiment in his Cambridge classroom, sending students home to annotate poems from which he’d removed the author’s name. He discovered that although his students were otherwise quite talented, they often failed at basic comprehension, let alone interpretation.

To address this now shockingly visible problem, Richards and his colleagues and heirs—from Empson and Warren to Helen Vendler—developed close reading. Our misapprehension about the simplicity of reading offers an opportunity for literary scholars to make a case for ourselves: Because reading is actually difficult, we need experts to teach and specialize in it.

But Guillory’s minimal definition—close reading entails merely showing one’s work, making “an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation”—produces inadvertent consequences that undercut such a case. For one, it might misinform prospective close readers. A close reading is not an accurate representation of one’s reading process: The work one shows—and one does show a curated selection of that work—is, in accomplished close readings, highly crafted and designed for persuasion through argumentation and inductive reasoning. Guillory’s neglect of argument is a crucial elision.

Guillory privileges close reading as an epistemological practice: Critics interpret texts to add to our store of knowledge. But in so doing, he makes another elision, here of aesthetics. Epistemology is, after all, only half of what makes a close reading work. Paul Fleming recently argued that “the insight of a close reading is inextricable from its aesthetic effect; the reading itself must also be a work of art…. Like Kant’s ‘aesthetic idea,’ the beautiful close reading gives you more to think about than would seem to be contained in a few short passages.” If we focus only on how close reading serves as a means for knowledge, we miss this beauty, and so we miss the appeal, for many, of close reading.

We must, then, revise Guillory’s definition: Close reading is, in fact, more than merely showing the work of reading—if it’s that at all. Close reading is a genre that turns quotations into evidence for well-crafted arguments made beautifully.

All of this makes it difficult to perform well. One must master various skills. What counts as a reasonable inference, for example, when moving from a particular detail to a claim about what it means? How does one notice a detail ripe for interpretation in the first place? How do we teach students to learn these skills and synthesize them into a graceful close reading?

Guillory acknowledges the challenges of doing so. Cultural techniques, he argues, resist verbal explanation; they require “demonstration and imitation.” We can point to examples of close reading and say, “Do that.” But in practice, some students will get it and many more won’t. This divide is not arbitrary but rather determined by the cultural capital that students carry with them into the classroom—something Guillory would himself concede. Yet by advocating a minimal definition of close reading that elides argumentation in particular, Guillory—against his own political inclinations—impedes its democratization, making it an opaque practice for charismatic, initiated elites and a bit of a mystery to those on the outside.

But if we embrace a broader definition of close reading, if we take a closer look at how it works and what is required of it when it succeeds, we can teach it better. We can specify the steps of close reading, even if no close reading succeeds by performing the steps alone but requires beauty and grace. We can note that one should delimit the context for the text and one’s reading of it. One should quote a detail worth noticing and construct an argument to persuade one’s reader how to understand that detail, why it matters, and how it changes what we know about the text. Each of these steps entails skills that we can teach and that can sometimes blossom—with, yes, practice and imitation—into beautiful performances. We can, in other words, democratize close reading.

At the end of On Close Reading, we are left with a question: Why should we close-read? Guillory gestures toward an answer with his coda on attention. How we talk about attention, he argues, is often ahistorical, incoherent, and overheated, but it remains true that to appreciate a cultural work adequately, we must “succeed in bringing our sensory and cognitive apparatuses into focus upon a single object, a neurophysiological state that distracts us from competing solicitations of attention”—a task that is difficult but bears “considerable social value.” In his deflating final lines, Guillory proposes that “the least one might say about the social importance of close reading” is that it is one of many “attentional techniques” worth cultivating.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement! I wondered what other reasons Guillory might have advanced for why we should practice close reading. He might have argued, drawing on his anthropological framing, that it helps a citizenry overcome the difficulty of reading and become more competent at comprehending and interpreting texts. It teaches how to make an argument about a work of art—and how to make a work of art in the process. Close reading, because it begins and ends with a conversation among critics, offers participation in an intellectual community. And my favorite: We should practice close reading because it is good to read for truth and beauty, and even better without the pressure to instrumentalize this goal for economic ends—a criterion, even a paragon, of human flourishing at least since Aristotle, and one that becomes more difficult for students to recognize with each passing year.

Lifting the pressure to instrumentalize is merely a pretense, a kind of make-­believe, but at our most utopian we might also recognize it as a tactic of prefiguration, the academy at its best, a space of ephemeral or hypothetical separation where we might glimpse a flicker of aestheticism unbound. But of course, this is only a thought experiment.