John Guillory. On Close Reading . With an annotated bibliography by Scott Newstok

John Guillory’s On Close Reading offers a concise historical overview of the technique / theory / method / procedure / process / action—the academy has never been quite sure what to call it—of close reading, documents various reappraisals of close reading, and discusses potential future applications. Readers familiar with the technique—let’s settle on technique for now—already note the seemingly inherent contradiction of historically situating a theory that has actively discouraged historical contextualization.The opening chapter, “The Rise and Fall of Close Reading,” argues that “often close reading is recognized as a controversial method” (9n13). Given its considerable presence in so many levels of the classroom, describing close reading as controversial may seem surprising, but as Guillory reminds us, close reading was and is a disputable practice. Most recently, “With the advent of New Historicism, close reading was subjected to a more thoroughgoing, if largely implicit, critique in arguments against the residual ‘formalism’ of High Theory” (11). Arising in part as a reaction to literary thought that concerned itself more with the biographical details of an author, formalism evaluates the literary work as an apolitical, ahistorical, autonomous orphan whose creator is (dis)regarded as a distant parent, perhaps acknowledged but never accounted for. With close reading as their essential tool, New Criticism, an American version of formalism, continued to study the literary work as a closed circuit, a microscope scrutinizing itself, both a means and an end to understanding.New Historicism, in contrast, contends that not only are historical and personal circumstances an important part of the work, they are inseparable from the work, that they may even be the work, that the work is a manifestation of the cultures, social conditions, people, and publishing structures producing it. While such factors, no doubt, affect the creation of such productions and information about these influences may enhance our interpretations, as those who teach introductory literature classes know, students may skip over and interpret around the text by locating a publication date for the piece and basic biographical information about its author, forming hasty assumptions, and then terminating the work of reading and interpreting before they have ever begun. At the same time, can anyone seriously advocate studying “Letter from Birmingham Jail” only on the page and ignoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and era?Unsurprisingly, “a conflict between historicism and formalism structured literary theory from the 1980s forward” (11n19). “Close reading, then, is a puzzling anachronism, a contradiction, even a scandal,” Guillory concludes (15). Close reading as a first-choice tool, however, seems to lay the foundation for any sort of theoretical approach or critical reading. How can we understand or interpret the text if we do not read the text? Guillory examines the difference between reading and close reading. First, he distinguishes between “reading, as an ability possessed by the majority of the population, and interpretation, the most common name for disciplinary practice in literary study” before pointing out that “reading does not necessarily result in interpretation” (16). Still, “close reading gestures toward ‘reading’ as a name for the practice that inaugurates the discipline of literary study as an interpretive practice” (16).How is or isn’t close reading different from reading? In “Toward a General Theory of Reading,” Guillory makes several distinctions. To do this, he imagines “a grid” (though the image he describes is more of a vertical pole—a graphic or illustration would be helpful) (21). Close reading is “a rare practice” that “belongs at the upper end of the vertical hierarchy of sophisticated reading practices” (21). “By contrast, skimming or browsing practices of reading—characteristic of our engagement with newspapers, magazines, and many internet sites—are located at the pole of maximum dispersion” at the opposite end (21). The middle is where “we can locate the extracurricular reading of fiction in which the reader is driven forward, without pausing for closer inspection of the text” (21). Taken as a whole, these three positions suggest close reading as a slower, circular action marked by pausing, contemplation, and rereading. Guillory also draws a through-line from decoding (“the conversion of marks . . . into words”) to comprehension (“the reader’s achieved understanding of a written utterance”) to interpretation, “which implies something more complex than is indicated by the mere comprehension of sentences” (26, 27, 24). He argues that decoding and comprehension are reading while close reading is a special type of reading that lays the groundwork for—but is not in and of itself—interpretation.“Techne, Technique, Technology” explains that just as “comprehension is never simply assured with the act of decoding,” reading, as he stated earlier, is not the same as interpreting, but interpretation cannot be accomplished without reading (36). Literary works are “possessed of inherent complexity, even when the language appears to be simple” (36). One implication is that close reading is the elevated type of reading required to understand this level of literary complexity. While the previous two sections do an excellent job separating the various components of reading and close reading, we still do not know what constitutes close reading. “Close Reading as Technique” further documents and problematizes the struggles of defining close reading. Guillory recounts that “historians of literary study have been frustrated by the difficulties of defining the actual procedure of close reading” (37). Usually, they default “to the notion of reading with ‘attention to the words on the page,’” but such an explanation “is too broad to account for the specificity of close reading as technique” (37).“Showing the Work of Reading,” which winds up the main body of On Close Reading, may be its strongest and most pertinent section. Ironically, though close reading as a named technique lost popularity, it “facilitated the integration of sophisticated new theoretical schemas into scholarship” (47). Similar to Latin’s influence on numerous languages, close reading, from one perspective, is integral to virtually every literary theory, yet also like Latin, it has been classified as a dead language, or, in this case, dead theory. Guillory explains that since “close reading never acquired the procedural formality of other scholarly practices . . . it was relegated as a discrete practice to the introductory level of literary study” (47). The implication is that close reading is just not complicated enough for serious scholars. “Close reading is a minimal but not a simple procedure,” and Guillory’s definition is a short five words (62). He reveals that close reading is “showing the work of reading” (60). To the question “‘Is that all?’” Guillory simply responds, “Yes, that is all.” He believes that “we feel compelled to burden it with unnecessary descriptors and qualifications as well as ideological entailments” (61). In Guillory’s estimation, “close reading as a technique has no ideological or political implications whatsoever” (61).Nevertheless, as Guillory discussed earlier, one of close reading’s contributions is “establishing criticism as a disciplinary practice distinct from literary history” (69). Prior to formalism’s rise in the early twentieth century, this was a much-needed separation. In subsequent decades, however, that same strength has become close reading’s weakness, but close reading is far from a useless or obsolete technique in the current era. “Because close reading entails no one mode of interpretation for literary works, nothing prevents it (or has prevented it) from articulation with historical or archival scholarship,” points out Guillory (72). Furthermore, “With a better understanding of this point, literary study might finally move beyond the conflict between formalism and historicism that drags along so much metaphysical and ideological baggage in its train” (72). Thus, Guillory ultimately argues, in different words, for new formalism, an approach incorporating close reading with relevant historical and social information.“Coda: On Attention to Literature” considers topics such as attention, distraction, videogames, distant reading (not for the first time), and future uses for close reading. “The very forms of writing that could be regarded in earlier historical periods as sources of entertainment and therefore distraction—poems, novels, plays—were dialectically repositioned as demanding the most strenuous of attention,” observes Guillory (76). One might infer that like more recent categories of popular culture such as television, movies, and comic books that English departments now deem worthy of study, other types gaining critical traction such as videogames and music lyrics might one day stand alongside even newer forms of communication such as social media. Close reading can potentially apply to all of them, especially since everything now falls under the heading of content. Close reading is attention-driven and so in our distraction-driven culture of skimming, skipping over, and surface engagement, Guillory points out: “We might see close reading today as the disciplinary analogue of the countercultural movement embracing ‘slow tech’ and other slow forms of cultural consumption” (83). What was once a radical movement that became conservative is poised to once again become cutting-edge.On Close Reading ends with a useful and very readable annotated bibliography prepared by Scott Newstok. The bibliography, Newstok tells us, “documents some key moments in the still-unfolding history of close reading” (89). His list is a curated version of a much larger collection he has compiled at www.closereadingarchive.org. The bibliography is a valuable tool, the inclusion of which should not surprise readers given the book’s focus on documentation and its extensive use of footnotes on almost every page (on some pages the footnotes occupy the majority of the page). The shortened print version in On Close Reading uses a quote (“in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is”) or a subject title (“Secondary-school Pedagogy, Part 1”) as a heading, riffs on that topic for about a page, and finishes with a listing of various sources related to the heading’s concept (107, 102). Newstok includes full publication information and the entries are arranged chronologically with the date of publication first. Like Guillory, Newstok makes sure to ground his contributions in specific time.On Close Reading is a remarkable volume with far more content than what its page count suggests. While readers looking for examples of close reading applied to specific literary texts or elaborations on method will need to consult elsewhere—the closest Guillory approaches giving a detailed process is on pages 51–52 via Vincent Leitch’s sixteen-step “itemized prescription” for close reading, which Guillory questions—On Close Reading provides an in-depth primer on the past, present, and future of close reading that will reward any scholar of literature.