This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
Volume 7
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 1994 07:28:48 -0400
Subject: JRNL: CLOSE READING (& Translation)
I don't know what to say about literature in translation. But how can a teacher (how can a scholar) love and respect language itself -- holding "form" aside for a moment -- and *not* urge "close reading" upon students?
Can we go back to Pound in The ABC of Reading? Language has a life. Honor that life or change vocation. In the use of language in poetry especially but in all writing, too, one wants to sort out/sort through the melopoetic, the phanopoetic, the logopoetic (sound, image, allusiveness--the dance of intellect which makes a symbolism out of the word's heritage of meaning in previous contexts). Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but to me that's not bs. I continue to find that poets make the best critics -- well, generally, and some are better than others.
This is coming from someone a long way out of graduate school, who teaches religious studies, and whose predilections have been shaped in part by learning the importance of close, critical reading of biblical texts.
Kevin Lewis
kelewis@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu
Subj: RE: JRNL: Close Reading
I don't see that "close reading" would discourage study of lit in translation, esp. given that one area of inquiry could be comparative--e. g., one translator's version versus another's, a translator's versus the original text, the study of a translation as a text itself, with some independence from the original, etc.
I should think that would depend on what level of "study" is contemplated by the question. As an undergraduate, I did some close reading of French and Italian texts. I had enough of these languages to supplement my reading of the translations. I might not make suche a "study" at a professional level, but for a sophmore it was not bad.
Without ANY knowledge of the language, one can still (obviously) make a close reading of the translation or, better, of two translations. Just remember that a translation is not the original, makes your statements be about the translations, and you should be fine.
my $.02.
---Jim Ventola (jventola@mecn.mass.edu)
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Volume 7
Number 2
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Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 21:25:46 -0400
Subject: JRNL: On Close Reading
At the risk of sounding naive--I always thought, in fact I was taught, that 'close reading' means reading a text closely, not for some predetermined form, but for what the words on the page are, and how they are interpreted by me. That interpretation then becomes the thesis of my argument, which I support by setting forth my 'close reading' of the text. Opposing this, I suppose, would be a 'vague' reading of the text. Having said this, I see that there are at least two meanings of the term--one which is loaded, and one which is, well, not so loaded.
Jane Gassner
jg0a@lehigh.edu
Mark Long's wondering--whether "we all begin with the same assumpiton when we study lit (texts) that attention to form (however we define this term) is the ground of any responsible critical practice?"--seems to me well addressed by Anne Cluysenaar in her Intro to Literary Stylistics:
Clearly, to be as aware as it is possible for one person to become of the matrix of the language is the only honest course for the reader, especially if he is also a critic. He must be able not only to respond to the work in terms of that matrix and the possibilities it offers (in order to know whether they have been well exploited), but also to convey to others, in clear explanatory terms, what would otherwise seem a matter of unverifiable, even if convincing, intuition. If he is also a teacher, this requirement becomes a duty: students are to be taught rather than (however brilliantly) brainwashed....Unless what we describe is capable of being felt intuitively, there would be no point in describing it. On the other hand, to the extent that we cannot describe it, we cannot share our experience with others (35).
I think C's distinction between teaching and brainwashing--between rational dialogue and the exercise of what's finally force (e.g., of teacherly authority/charisma)--identifies acutely the dangers which can accompany teaching which floats too free of the only ground common to all the members of a class: the text: the grounds of communication. Her point reminds me of Socrates' always insisting in the dialogues: say what you mean (i.e., take the vague stuff of your heart and mind and spell it out in particular words so that you and I and the rest of us can see how well they capture the meaning they ought to). I suspect that we come closest to the "Socratic Method" when we ask our students to give an account, an explanation based in evidence available to all, of what they intuit--to *show us* what they mean.
Dan Coleman
Close reading remains an important pedagogical tool for those who wish to teach rhetoric. Literature in translation is always a form, itself, of the original.
I have noticed a tendency on this list to prefer social interpretation over the autotelic. I realize that we teach many things while we are, overtly, teaching something else; however, I still believe that we must teach *how* to read and write above all else. Close reading helps the younger student to focus on the operation of language and therein lies its merit.
Blair Hemstock
It seems to me that the discussion of close reading is vague right now. Close reading of what? Isn't a cultural critique a close reading? Doesn't Foucault read closely? And R.P. Blackmur? We can read many things closely through many different frames, it seems to me, and I would place that larger sense of close reading, then, at the heart of what I teach my students in composition and literature and at the heart of what I do as a poet, a scholar, and as someone who is generally trying to make sense of my life and culture. To read closely, it seems to me, needs to be defined, not abstractly but through examples. It is for me like trying to discuss art. I can't do that. But I can discuss pieces of art, the body of an artist's work, and historical movements, or particular pieces through particular lenses or frames or perspectives.
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Volume 7
Number 3
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Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 21:33:18 -0400
Subject: JRNL: On Close Reading II
This is an answer to RBASS'S question regarding the teaching of close reading in the classroom of the '90s. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a graduate seminar this summer in which the professor chose to teach only short works.
She discussed her reasons for doing so with the class--it was her hope that we would spend some quality time trying to really understand the works we were presented with rather than quickly skimming through a novel a week and trying to force some meaning from them. It was a bold act on her part, as professors of graduate seminars often assume that their course is not "serious" enough or "tough" enough unless the students are overwhelmed with materials. My experience, however, was one of intense learning. I spent the time, and my fellow students spent the time, to truly investigate the works we were assigned.
The course was entitled "Teaching Multiethnic Literature," and we were encouraged to formulate questions about the works we read--questions which included the subject positions of ourselves as teachers, of our students, and of the authors. Rather than attempting a prescriptive or judgmental stance toward the works, our goal was to question and requestion the way we approached a work, to investigate alternative approaches to reading and teaching, and to understand as many facets of the work as possible.
The course was, for me, a place to connect with small sections of works I had previously skimmed and to discover new depth and understanding. This was not done comfortably, however. Every step of the way was a classmate who challenged my position, questioned my reading and suggested alternative ways of seeing the same word or phrase. I came away knowing that reading and criticism should never be comfortable--when it is, it takes too much for granted.
I also came away knowing that "more is better" is not always the case in a graduate seminar--and that "close reading" can, if handled properly by the professor, lead to a broad understanding of some very serious and very telling assumptions inherit in literary study today.
Michelle Trusty-Murphy
Bowling Green State University
MTRUSTY@ANDY.BGSU.EDU
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Volume 7
Number 4
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Date: Sun, 11 Sep 1994 11:23:37 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Contexts for Close Reading
This post is from Paul Lauter on a particular experience of his in
the 1950's, with some reflection on the bifurcation of formalist and
social approaches.
RBass
I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the distinction that has sometimes been drawn in these discussions between "formalist" and "social" interpretations. It's not that that distinction is unreal, in my view, but that the distinction is rather more historical than formal. Let me tell a little story to illustrate.
Back in prehistory (1954 or so), I took a course at the School of Letters at Indiana, the first four weeks of which was taught by Cleanth Brooks and the last two weeks (or one) by Delmore Schwartz. (This is really true.) For Mr. Brooks we did 1-2 page papers, maybe a little more occasionally, which were very much a la mode New Criticism: close analysis of words, images, formal properties of metaphysical poetry. Schwartz wanted us to do a more historically-based and longer paper. I chose to work on Marvell's "The Mower Against Gardens." Trying to work on that led me to read about English and French garden styles and what they represented in terms of class and power, the enclosure movement, who mowers, gardeners, and similar folks might be, what their lives were like, how they were changing. It was the 50s: had I been able to do a class analysis, or even heard the term, I'd not have admitted it. But that's the direction in which I found myself working.
It suddenly occurred to me that how one read Marvell's language depended very much on what one understood about his world, the world of the Mower, to be sure, but also the poet's. Why, after all, was he writing the poem? Into what cultural matrix? And what cultural work did it seem to be doing? To be sure, that is rather a "social" poem, but so, I would argue, is the "Ode to a Nightingale."
Close reading as it emerged in New Critical practice was, I think, a move in a particular historical moment; it played an important role in defining cold-war culture, in limiting our ability to see how social phenomena, including the conditions of cultural production, always inscribe themselves in the form and language of texts. In this newer moment, I think, our problem is to retain the power of those intensive close reading tactics without being entrapped in the formalist ideology which they helped underwrite.
Paul Lauter
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Volume 7
Number 5
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Date: Sun, 11 Sep 1994 11:35:56 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Contexts of Close Reading (II)
For a number of years I've taught a class in stylistics, a term that nowadays evokes the dreaded specter of formalism, so I take considerable pains to explain to students that our brand of stylistics will pay a great deal of attention to the role of the reader and the situatedness of the writer in history and culture. Nonetheless, the overriding strategy of the course is close reading, really close reading, paying attention to the ways in which patterns of diction and syntax and such work as well as how relations between readers and narrators are conceived and how point of view works in a range of texts. The texts and focus tend to change from year to year - last semester we concentrated on questions of genre, this year on first person point of view, but the basic purpose of the course doesn't. It's a course I never tire of teaching, and students say it's about the only class that does this sort of thing - this in a department that still sports a healthy complement of New Critics. It seems to me that offering students a flexible system or set of techniques for doing close reading within a context of contemporary theory is not only possible but really necessary if we're to do an important part of our jobs for students: helping them understand not just *that* there is a relationship among readers, texts, and even authors, but *how* the relationship works.
jo keroes
san francisco state
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Volume 7
Number 6
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Date: Wed, 14 Sep 1994 20:59:16 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Contexts of Close Reading (III)
Isn't the foundation text for the modern practice of close reading PRACTICAL CRITICISM by I. A. Richards? I suggest that anyone wishing to know why close reading was thought necessary should look at that book and study some of Richards's "protocols."
Edward M. Griffin
U of Minnesota
The idea of close reading is, for me, akin to an "experiment" conducted within the boundaries of "normal science" as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That is, the conclusions, procedures, as well as the paradigm within which these conclusions and procedures follow, are all firmly established before the "results" are obtained. The problem comes in when this type of experiment (or reading) is somehow posited as exploratory and objective--when we read to "see what's there" as if somehow our conclusions are therefore more accurate and in a sense more "scientific" than other "biased" readings.
One needs only to read the New Critics (and their critics) to recognize the cultural biases that inform their "close readings"; post-structuralist criticism teaches us the impossibility on any neutral, Archimedean position from which we can lift meaning from a text. The idea for me, then, is to show my students that paradigm within which I'm reading a text--the criticism, historical data, correspondences, etc., that constitute the framework within which I've constructed my reading. In doing so I hope to model for them a process of "close reading" that is simply open, rigorous thinking--one that is capable of being critiqued (I try to provide evidence for opposing positions) and that--most importantly--dissolves the idea of the teacher as the one person who knows all the answers because of some great store of hidden knowledge that only that teacher possesses (and shares with only the chosen few).
My demand, then, is for *rigorous* reading on their part--to provide me with the evidence, thought, and conclusions that led them to their own particular readings. Quite simply, there is no good reading of a text without "close reading."
Just one man's opinion,
Brian A. Bremen
Editor, William Carlos Williams Review
Department of English
The University of Texas, Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1164
Phone: 512-471-7842
Fax: 512-471-4909
It just occurred to me while reading Jo Keroes' post that I use a version of "close reading" quite a bit -- in my freshman comp classes. If we are using an essay or other piece as a model as well as a catalyst for discussion (and usually we are), the students need to do a close, often guided reading of the text to understand it well enough to adapt its techniques to their own writing. Our ventures into close reading are often limited in scope: I have students read a paragraph or a section of a work, and/or I have them looking for something in particular (diction, organization, tone, point of view). These exercises are also often collaborative: students work in small groups and then share/discuss their findings with the rest of the class.
Ideally, of course, this kind of close reading helps prepare them both to write and to react to my own "close reading" of their writing when I turn back their essays, as well as sharpening their reading skills. In practice the results are somewhat less spectacular ;) but positive enough that I wouldn't teach comp without some attention to teaching "close reading." I do wonder now, though, how much of this approach my comp students carry with them into their lit classes, and whether it helps and/or hurts their performances in that setting....
shelley
SREID@uwyo.edu
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Volume 7
Number 7
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 07:57:18 -0400
Subject: JRNL: On Close Reading (cont)
The following is in reply to recent postings to T-AMLIT on the subject of "close reading".
I think we must maintain fairly clear distinctions between "formalism", "New Criticism" and "close reading". I find it vexing that these three terms should be used interchangably, as they so often are. A fine example of this occurs in the introduction to Lentricchia's "Ariel and the Police" (a book for which I have unrestrained admiration), where we read: "In its own most deeply felt metaphor, the classic formalist reading featured in Anglo-American New Criticism is `close' reading. . ." See also, in this regard, the glossary of critical terms appended to the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism text of "The Scarlet Letter", edited by Ross C. Murfin and published by Bedford Books. (I assigned this book for a course in literary criticism.) The entry for "Formalism" begins: "Also referred to as the New Criticism. . ."; the entry for "New Criticism" simply says: "See Formalism". Most subscribers to this discussion list could cite other instances where these several terms are confused.
Of course, the terms may (within reason) be made to mean whatever one wants them to mean. But for purposes of clear argument, I like to set them apart from each other. To my mind, "formalist" criticism of poetry (to limit the question generically) interests itself in meter, line, rhyme, stanza, etc.--in how a poem holds itself together. The boundaries of such terms are neither hard nor fast, but the terms are are useful enough nonetheless. An example of formalist criticism is Paul Fussell's "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form". A better example is John Hollander's extraordinary "Vision and Resonance"; see especially his chapter on enjambment in English verse. A formalist critic asks questions like these: What structural features make a sonnet "Miltonic"? What is the relation of Petrarchan structure to "argument" in Longfellow's "The Cross of Snow"? How are line and sentence related in Wordsworth's blank verse? Etc. At times good "formalist" criticism of poetry can seem "merely descriptive" (though it rarely is "merely descriptive"). At its best, this sort of criticism is often the work of poets--as is the case with Hollander. Formalist criticism reminds us that poetry is a craft, even (in a sense) one of the "plastic arts": words can offer a positively "physiological" experience and are (again, in a sense) arranged by the poet according to "weight", "shape" and "color". Formalist critics attempt to describe these arrangments simply because they are irresistably sensitive to them. Not all readers are truly sensitive to these things; good formalist criticism is very hard to come by.
I reserve "New Criticism" to describe certain assumptions about "propriety" in critical practice, because, properly speaking, New Criticism is prescriptive, whereas formalist criticism (as I've loosely defined it) is not at all prescriptive. (I should also point out what is perfectly obvious: "formalist" criticism is centuries-old; it is not the invention of American Cold Warriors.) The New Criticism positively *argues* that biography, intention, bibliography, and history are not properly the concern of literary critics; a formalist critic may not read for history, but he or she does not argue that history is irrelevant, and would not say that it is. This difference in policy is considerably more important than the similarity in practice that often *apparently* associates formalist and New Critical readers. New Criticism also has a noticeably evaluative quality (as opposed to the more or less descriptive quality of good formalist criticism), and features a philosophy of "organicism" that includes a concern for "form" but is by no means limited to it.
As I see it, "close reading" describes certain habits of attention rather than a critical orthodoxy--let alone an orthodoxy of a recognizably "New Critical" sort. William Empson strikes me as an exemplary "close reader", and yet "Seven Types of Ambiguity" is neither "formalist" (as I've defined that term) nor "New Critical" in character. Empson's commitment to history should be plain to any reader of "Some Versions of Pastoral"; his opening paragraphs, there, on Gray's "Elegy" are a fine example of "close reading" put to the service of a basically historical inquiry. And his "Structure of Complex Words" is uncommonly alert to the social inflections of literary language. The latter two books especially demonstrate by example that close reading is a supple and absolutely necessary instrument for historicist and "ideological" literary criticism. What's more, one encounters fine "close reading" in critics as diverse as Kenneth Burke, Paul DeMan, Derrida, Richard Poirier, Raymond Williams, Samuel Johnson (see the notes on Shakespeare), Randall Jarrell, Eliot, Pound, Henry Louis Gates, Susan Howe, Sacvan Bercovich, R.P. Blackmur, Frank Lentricchia, Marianne DeKoven (see her wonderful study of Stein), and so on. "Close reading" does not name an orthodoxy.
The value of keeping these three terms distinct is that we thereby throw all the more in relief the essentially objectionable prescriptive and "ideological" tendencies of "the New Criticism". We also do not, thereby, encourage students to think that concern with form *as such* is, for some reason, sinister. One of the most regrettable things about this debate, as it is often carried out in undergraduate classrooms, is that students end up with a charicature of post-war American literary history, a charicature that obscures the invaluable and complicated accomplishments of such "close readers" as Empson, Burke and Blackmur, who are often irresponsibly tarred with a "New Critical" brush.
A "New Critic" may be (and often is) both a "formalist" and a "close" reader, but neither "close reading" nor "formalism" is necessarily "New Criticism." I do not see why these three terms should be used interchangably when they can so readily (and usefully) be distinguished.
Mark Richardson
Western Michigan University
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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.