On Close Reading

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 [its] 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 Elsewhere, Guillory details how in the 1990s, academics came to view close reading as an outdated remnant of New Criticism, and how the practice bounced back into vogue in the 2010s.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. (Dec.)