The Rise and Fall — and Rise? — of Close Reading

When I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” (“I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference”). Look carefully at how Frost describes the two roads, our professor instructed us. One of them “was grassy and wanted wear.” But the “passing there,” it turns out, “had worn them really about the same.” Did the two paths, then, appear all that different in the moment when the speaker chose between them? Is he confident now that he made the right decision, or is he only imagining that he will one day — “ages and ages hence” — tell himself he did in order to rationalize what he can no longer undo? Does the title, “The Road Not Taken,” refer to the supposedly less travelled road that the speaker took, or in fact to the road he did not take? Is the poem a triumphant statement of nonconformity, as we originally thought, or an unanswerable question about what might have been, a reminder that none of us knows what possibilities our various choices have foreclosed?

To start with confidence and end with profound uncertainty: surely the sign of a successful college class! Our minds were duly blown. But what exactly had we learned? There was no obvious takeaway. Quite the opposite: Our professor had divested the poem of its apparent message — don’t follow the crowd — and turned it into a conundrum, a maze of ambiguities.

What led us into that maze was a method widely known as close reading, a central procedure within literary studies that involves isolating and carefully analyzing a short passage in order to reveal its complexities, ambiguities, and ironies. Formalized in the 1930s by British and American critics under the banner of New Criticism, close reading became the dominant method of literary studies in the immediate postwar period. Starting in the 1960s, new theoretical approaches imported from France and Germany and various forms of political criticism — Marxist, New Historicist, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and antiracist — called into question its underlying assumptions and exposed its limitations.

But through it all, close reading remained a technique widely used by scholars and teachers, and it has become newly fashionable in recent years. Why exactly? Although the intellectual rewards it yields may seem obvious to those who have been properly initiated, it is, after all, not the only way to do interpretation. Critics from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson have appreciated and studied literature without it. What, then, has made it such a seemingly indispensable method in the past hundred years? What historical or institutional pressures were responsible for its emergence and growth? In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sketches out some possible answers to these questions. To explain why it has proved so serviceable to the discipline, he contends, we must first understand what exactly close reading is — which turns out to be more difficult than we might assume.

Guillory has devoted his career to examining the social functions performed by the academic discipline of literary studies. In 1993, a time of heated debate over efforts to diversify the literary canon, he published his monumental Cultural Capital. To the extent that English departments had helped foster inequality, he argued, they had done so not through the list of (mostly white, male) authors they championed, but through their unequal distribution of cultural capital, their role in providing linguistic and intellectual resources to the already privileged. But this function, he pointed out, had lost its usefulness. The discipline was in crisis because status and success in the United States no longer depended on the forms of knowledge that literary study disseminated.

In his equally formidable 2022 book, Professing Criticism, Guillory describes literary criticism’s development from a family of miscellaneous practices in the late 19^th century into a consolidated profession located within the university and governed by protocols, standards, and protections designed to secure its legitimacy and insulate it from market forces. Both books underscore how the position of literary studies within a particular institutional structure constrains what it can accomplish and what impact it can have, thus seeking to curb the more grandiose conceptions of the discipline — as political revolutionary or morally transformative, for instance — frequently advanced by its practitioners.

Like everything English professors do, close reading has been loaded down with baggage both by its proponents and its critics. Thus one of Guillory’s primary goals in his latest book is to clear away all of the associations that have accumulated around it. To identify what close reading is in its essence, he invites readers to consider other forms of textual engagement that preceded its arrival. A key example is the influential work of the fin de siècle critic Arthur Symons, who popularized the French symbolists for English speakers. His reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry is rigorous and insightful, Guillory notes. But Symons’s essay is “notable for what is absent from it: any quotation from the poems, any reference to particular words, phrases, or lines that would support Symons’s assertions about Mallarmé’s style, or the larger significance of his language.” To qualify as close reading, Guillory suggests, Symons would need to demonstrate how he arrived at his conclusions; he would need to preserve traces in his criticism of the act of reading itself, the process by which he deciphered the language of Mallarmé’s poetry. Guillory compares the work of close reading to the strategies by which “modernist architects expose the infrastructure of their buildings.” A more helpful analogy might be a math problem that asks students to show their work rather than simply identify the solution.

Indeed, according to Guillory, close reading is nothing more or less than “showing the work of reading.” This procedure is what allows it to be not merely the serendipitous result of a sensitive mind’s encounter with a literary text, but instead a technique, a skill that can be replicated and taught, thus the basis for an academic discipline. At the same time, however, it must remain what Guillory calls a “minimally formalized technique.” Teachers cannot offer a recipe, a “precise sequence of actions” for doing it; they can only give students models to imitate. It’s not like putting together a Lego set. It is both a skill and an art, as dependent upon sensibility as on technical proficiency, which accounts for its prestige when performed well. Moreover, it requires metacognition; one must not only read but register the act of reading as it is unfolding. The explicit recording of one’s process serves a key disciplinary function, opening “interpretation to inspection and contestation by other readers,” thus facilitating, like the procedures of empirical science, evidence-based debate, rebuttals and refutations, the identification of errors, and refinements and advances, all of which, significantly, have become central both to teaching and to various professional activities focused on the production and sharing of knowledge through research, peer review, and publication.

Close reading, Guillory contends, developed in response to the “the massification of literacy” and the proliferation of different kinds of texts and media in the early part of the twentieth century. If literacy alone was no longer a mark of distinction, close reading enabled its practitioners to elevate themselves above other less-educated readers. At the same time, as a method for demonstrating what made certain texts rich and rewarding, it served as the basis for aesthetic judgment, thus privileging a select number of works out of the vast heaps of writing suddenly being published. Later, this function was partially responsible for the backlash against close reading, with politically oriented critics casting it as a reactionary means of policing the literary canon (and keeping it white and male). Moreover, these critics claimed, close reading served to sequester the text from its social and political context, thus supporting myopic assumptions about literature’s autonomy. But Guillory’s parsimonious definition describes a technique disentangled from any such conservative agendas. Employed even by the left and progressive methodologies that rejected New Criticism, close reading, as he understands it, has in fact consistently demonstrated its usefulness to historicist analysis. Noting its utility among competing schools of criticism, Guillory concludes that “close reading as a technique has no ideological or political implications whatsoever.”

While literary scholars never stopped doing close reading, in recent years many have come to its explicit defense. The very useful annotated bibliography at the back of the book, produced by Scott Newstok, which cites numerous examples and discussions of close reading, attests to its return to prominence in recent years. (A substantial essay collection on the subject, edited by Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin, Close Reading for the 21^st Century, is due out in 2025.) A product in part of New Formalism, an assortment of scholarly efforts aimed at bringing literary form back into the foreground, close reading’s apparent comeback can also be read, Guillory argues, as a response to historical developments that echo those which underwrote its emergence. Once again, readers confront an unprecedented proliferation of distractions. This time around, “digital technology has given us immeasurable new quantities of industrialized textual ‘content’ and even the automation of writing itself.” To be clear, the current preoccupation with reading, and by extension close reading, Guillory stresses, is not the result of a widespread loss of ability to pay attention, as some observers fear. After all, video games can elicit remarkable focus over long stretches of time. But our ability to pay a particular kind of attention to “static marks on a page,” to “long strings of sentences” that “generate singular effects of meaning” may be in serious decline.

The sudden interest in theorizing a method that had been quietly doing its work without much fanfare, an old-fashioned, but trusty standard operating procedure, may well be the expression of a preservationist urge. Guillory shares this urge, but his defense of close reading as a practice that ought to be nurtured and protected is, curiously enough, far less robust than his account of its genealogy and history. It amounts to three or so sentences at the end of his study. “The value of close reading as technique is more than great enough, in my view, to merit its continued support, even if this art is for the most part confined to the university.” And: “The least one might say about the social importance of close reading is that, as one technique of reading among others, it is a node in a larger, unorganized network of attentional techniques, both within and without the university. These cultural techniques are well worth the effort of their transmission.” Notwithstanding the sudden irruption of technical circumlocutions, this certainly is “the least one might say.”

Part of the problem is that in paring down the definition of close reading to make it an ideologically neutral technique and thus protect it against slander and mischaracterization, Guillory appears to rob it of all that might make it valuable or appealing. Techniques are of course important in many areas of life, but most of us will take the time to master them only if we have a sense of what exactly they will allow us to accomplish. To be fair, Guillory’s terse, no-nonsense defense avoids the risk of overplaying his hand — a risk courted by close reading’s early advocates. I.A. Richards, for instance, suggested that the careful reading of poetry could foster long-term psychic health and, if disseminated widely, a more harmonious democratic society. Needless to say, though he offered visual diagrams to demonstrate the potential effects of poetry on the reader’s neurons, he was able to prove none of what he argued. Rejecting Richards’s account of poetry as a mere exercise routine for the brain, John Crowe Ransom suggested that close reading poetry performs an ontological function, giving us a more complete knowledge of reality than the sciences. But because the poem is, according to New Critical doctrines, unparaphrasable, and the realities it represents absolutely singular, the experience of heightened perceptiveness he describes yields no general theories, no conclusions, no insights that can be applied to anything beyond the experience of reading itself. Close reading is, in other words, rather like a drug trip: It seems to refashion the whole world while it’s happening but leaves you wondering what you were so worked up about after it is over.

Although Richards and Ransom defer in different ways to scientific criteria of value, what implicitly animates both accounts is faith, a sense that the experience of close reading poetry must in some profound way be valuable to the individual and to society — indeed qualitatively superior to other pastimes and distractions, including other kinds of reading. Anyone who has done close reading well, especially at a young and impressionable age, can probably understand their faith. When it works, meanings multiply; words irradiate; the text becomes dense with possibilities; one’s mind seems to shiver; the air seems to shimmer. No metaphor gets it right exactly, but in the midst of it one thinks: Surely this is good — for me, for anyone who gets to have this experience, for anyone I might share it with, for the world.

Considering the temptation to treat close reading as a religious experience, Guillory seems to approve of what some digital-humanities scholars have called the “detheologizing” of close reading. But even as he evinces dispassion, epigrammatic statements scattered throughout the book suggest a kind of reverence. Guillory is especially attached to italics as a way of lending gravity to seemingly simple statements. “The technique of close reading can be described but not prescribed.” “Reading is the art of making sense of writing.” “Explicitation is not interpretation, but the name for a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation.” Such emphases seem designed to make readers reflect upon the words that are italicized, to search within them for hidden depths, in order to comprehend more keenly the described activities. At times these statements read like bits of secular scripture, indeed like prayers.

We may all of course need to pray for the future of close reading if we want it to survive. But are there ways of defending it, as Guillory clearly hopes, that don’t slide into mysticism? Perhaps the mistake its proponents have made is to assume there is one key to the value of close reading, one big thing that it accomplishes, some singular world-historical impact it has that would justify the work of literary-studies departments. When we put aside grand mission statements and simply throw ourselves into the work of performing and teaching close reading, we remember that it is in fact a useful enterprise, one that serves many purposes. Depending on the poem or the passage, after all, it can teach us about love, power, desire, domination, the sky, identity, history, waterfalls, empires, trees, dreams, buildings, bridges, and so on — often revealing contradictions in things we thought were simple or simplicities in things we thought were complex, making strange objects familiar and familiar ones strange.

Close reading also teaches us about language: how a multitude of words might be necessary to convey an exact nuance, or how just a few words can suggest an array of meanings. In a fundamental way, it contributes to knowledge, if we think of knowledge not just as something contained in scientific journals, but as something people need to have, to experience, to inhabit, to communicate in their everyday engagements with the world. In adumbrating these uses, of course, it is hard to avoid statements that sound hokey or obvious, which may be why Guillory skips a more elaborate justification. But in practice, close reading educates us in ways that its theorizations can only faintly trace. Indeed, it teaches us to use language ourselves, to convey what we’ve seen or felt, to say who we are, to get what we want. Or it may reveal that we will never get what we want, that we will never stop wondering about the road we didn’t take.