What is Close Reading?
Sarah Guayante
While close reading is the primary method of literary criticism, critics have found “close reading” difficult to define. Unlike other academic disciplines where there are explicit steps you must take to solve a problem (e.g. “the scientific method”), there isn’t a systematic process for exploring a literary text. Throughout our semester, we’ll work together to define close reading and develop strategies for close reading. For now, take a look at some of the definitions produced by scholars over the years. Before class, identify those definitions that feel most useful and be prepared to explain why.
Jonathan Culler: “…examining closely the language of a literary work or a section of it […] Close asks for a certain myopia…It enjoins looking at rather than through the language of the text and thinking about how it is functioning, finding it puzzling.”[1]
John Guillory: “…close reading means paying attention to the words on the page.” [2]
Barbara Johnson: “…to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.” [3]
Toril Moi: “…to read is to pay attention to the particular text, to look and think in response to particular questions…” [4]
Elaine Auyoung: “…a synonym for interpretation.” [5]
Stanley Fish: “Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there.” [6]
N. Katherine Hayles: “…detailed and precise attention to rhetoric, style, language choice, and so forth through a word-by-word analysis of a text’s linguistic techniques…” [7]
Peter Middleton: “…our contemporary term for a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions…” [8]
Jonathan Kramnick: “Rather, the interpretive work we call close reading is a form of writing […] Close reading as a method thus involves the confrontation and commingling of one’s own words and words out there in the world. Such writing about writing is reading only in the metaphorical sense.” [9]
- Culler, Jonathan. “The ‘Closeness’ of Close Reading,” ADE Bulletin no. 149, (2010): https://www.maps.mla.org/content/download/7902/file/ade.149.20.pdf. ↵
- Guillory, John. "Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue," ADE Bulletin no. 149, (2010): 20. ↵
- Johnson, Barbara, BILL JOHNSON GONZÁLEZ, LILI PORTEN, KEJA VALENS, JUDITH BUTLER, and SHOSHANA FELMAN. “Teaching Deconstructively.” In The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, edited by MELISSA FEUERSTEIN, 347–56. Duke University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jkw7.29. ↵
- Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. University of Chicago Press (2017): 178. ↵
- Auyoung, Elaine. "What we Mean by Reading." New Literary History 51, no. 1 (Winter, 2020): 93-114. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0004. ↵
- Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (1980): 327. ↵
- Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. University of Chicago Press (2012): 58. ↵
- Middleton, Peter. Distant reading: performance, readership, and consumption in contemporary poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. ↵
- Kramnick, Jonathan. "Criticism and Truth," Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021): 222. ↵