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.
CEPACS
Volume 8
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 09:20:02 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Contexts of Close Reading
To recall, the discussion thread concerned the question of "close
reading" and the strategies and contexts thereof in a field of
American literature that has changed in so many ways.
RBass
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
Shelley Reid's point about composition classes reminds me of Ed White's article "Post-Structural Literary Criticism and the Response to Student Writing" in CCC 35, May '84, 186-95. Comp teachers have known about this sort of close reading for a long time but have never really thought of it in these terms until White's article came along. Moreover, as we teach our students to read with a writer's eye, we train them kin close reading. So what they learn to do in reading each others' papers and in professional pieces of writing carries over very nicely to close reading in lit classes.
David Kann
dkann@cymbal.aix.calpoly.edu
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.
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Volume 8
Number 2
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Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 09:24:29 -0400
Subject: 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
I agree with Mark Richardson's excellent post, in spades. I think though the average reader entering the the debate would be well advised to stay away from Empson, who is plainly a nut and at times reminiscent of Professor Irwin Corey. (In that book on Pastoral he has a whole chapter on Alice in Wonderland where he never mentions Alice.) To me, what New Criticism represents is a professionalization and ordering of close reading made in response to the older textual criticism and impressionistic criticism ("it reminds one of spring..." "When one reads such works one feels that one is at one with one who once..." etc.) The great exemplar of this school is not Brooks, and not Ransom, and not Empson, but Hugh Kenner, the smartest and most readable, humane, and supple of all 20th century critical minds working in literature. Formalist criticism, unmoored from scholarly quadrilles, is well represented by the books Richardson mentioned, e.g. Poetic Form and Poetic Meter. But I would add Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. There is the thing in its most elevated form.
Josh Ozersky
Department of History
University of Notre Dame
joshua.a.ozersky.1@nd.edu
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Volume 8
Number 3
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Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 17:51:38 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Form, Language, Ideology
As with the last two JRNL postings, this posting was responding to an
earlier posting, this one by Paul Lauter. Because of the time elapsed,
I've reposted the original Lauter posting first, then appended the posting
responding to it.
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
In a recent post, Paul Lauter describes the way in which
>"New Critical practice was...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"
and suggests that nowadays
"our problem is to retain the power of those intensive
>close reading tactics without being entrapped in the formalist ideology
>which they helped underwrite."
Because his sounds like an interesting project, I was hoping Prof. Lauter might explain more precisely, perhaps by using an example, how form and language necessarily enforce particular socio-cultural ideologies. I've heard arguments similar to his before, but never in terms specific enough to enable me to be sure that I agree or disagree with them. My suspicion thus far is that this idea of the ideological power of form is more convincing when made about the past and in general. Could Professor Lauter, for example, identify the relevant socio-cultural influences informing his prose style, or mine, or Cormac McCarthy's? If we refuse to accept that Samuel Johnson or Virginia Woolf or Herman Melville lived in worlds any less complicated than our own, can we isolate those aspects of their environments that most shaped their writing? And how would such an attempt deal with what keeps striking me whenever I read canonical texts--the enormous irony (not to sound too New Critical) with which their authors treat the forms they inherit? (I.e., how can an author's form underwrite an ideology if that author spends much of her or his time playing games with that form?)
I hope these questions are not so big as to be unanswerable--or so naive as to be not worth answering.
Cheers,
Dan
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Volume 8
Number 4
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Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 23:17:55 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Form, Language, Ideology (cont.)
I don't think I was arguing that "form and language necessarily enforce particular socio-cultural ideologies," but something closer to the reverse: that particular historical tensions and responses to them get inscribed in the forms and language of art.
Dan wanted examples: Betsy Erkkila's readings of Emily Dickinson, in which she points to the ways in which Dickinson's metaphors involving an exiled queen, distaste for commerce (e.g., "Publication--is the Auction"), and the like encode the decline of D's gentry class.
In TYPEE the narrator's obsession with cannibalism and the tattoo embody the 1840's concern over what constitutes a "savage" or "civilization"--increasingly critical to the debate over slavery.
Or think about the narrative structures of texts like Chesnutt's collection of Uncle Julius stories and Jewett's COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS in relationship to the rise of forms of consumption--including that of exotic places and people.
In another area: look at Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists," particularly the last section, as I recall, on Rosa Bonheur.
To be sure, historical and social forces are not the only external influences on form and language. As Dan said, I think, genres have their own momentum, and artists are always working in, around, and in spite of that. It is also true, of course, that looking backward, after the social conflicts have been played through, is easier. But that's precisely the challenge of cultural criticism: trying to understand what is shaping style and form in our own moment. There's a nice example of that focused on Doctorow's BOOK OF DANIEL in T.V. Reed's FIFTEEN JUGGLERS. Also check out Rob Corber's book on Hitchcock. This is--my apologies--a bit hasty and off the top, but I think there are many good examples of this kind of integrated close reading that others could supply, and I hope they will.
--Paul Lauter
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Volume 8
Number 5
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Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 08:33:19 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Ethics of Sharing Syllabi
At the expense of adding one more discussion to the long list that are currently in progress . . . I have been pondering the ethics of sharing syllabi with other instructors. On the one hand, I see it as an opportunity for those who have taught particular classes to assist others in finding new and interesting ways to organize and present texts. This allows for the opportunity for instructors to share knowledge and expand the range of material that is offered in the American Literature classroom.
On the other hand, I see it is an opportunity for unqualified persons to take the work of qualified persons and become "instant experts" in a field without doing the difficult and time consuming work of really getting to know a subject before teaching. This second consideration seems especially distressing in regards to multiethnic and women's literature because many who have not studied those subjects thoroughly may present them in an irresponsible manner because they have not spent the time (or don't really believe they have to) to get to know the literature well.
Has anyone else been quietly pondering this question? How do others feel about requests for syllabi?
Michelle Trusty-Murphy
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH
MTRUSTY@ANDY.BGSU.EDU
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Volume 8
Number 6
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Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 20:20:16 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Form, Language, Ideology (cont)
To follow Paul Lauter's line of thought here, I'm remuinded of Jean F. Yellin's intro to the 1969 reprint of the first version of Wiliam Wells Brown's Clotel. She points out the differing contexts which influence the form and content of each of four versions of the novel between 1853 and 1867.
I would point out the novels Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt and Hanover by Jack Thorne. Both Afro-American writers deal with the same event, the "riot" of 1898 in Wilmington, NC, but the formal characteristics of each novel are radically different, primarily, I would suggest, because Chesnutt and Thorne occupy diferent socio-economic and political positions, although each is a Black man trying to write for a living at the turn of the century.
In a very direct way, ideology influenced the form of Clara Weatherwax's 1935 "prize-winning" novel Marching! Marching!. Her task was to find a narrative form that would allow for the expression of an evolving collective consciousness in a strike-torn town. Her use of stream-of-consciousness and point of view were selected to obviate the singular consciousness of the traditional novelistic protagonist and to create a collective voice based on class. She sought and found a form to suit her politics.
This is a quick read, but I think Paul's basically right.
Chris Suggs jcsjj@cunyvm.cuny.edu
Doctorow is nothing new. "While I complain of being able to glimpse
no more than a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as
it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the
stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it...
Twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish
communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over
without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence."
- Levi-Strauss, TRISTES TROPIQUES
What is going on with the modern novel? Wait and SEE?
-Ned Oldham
Thanks a bunch Paul. Your thoughtful, specific response helped me to see what you mean much more clearly.
It also leaves me wondering along somewhat divergent, but connected paths. It makes sense to me that authors write from within a particular world that ends up in what they write (i.e., "that particular historical tensions and responses to them get inscribed in the forms and language of art"). However, if this older world is what we're most interested in discovering, as in, for example, your first example:
"the ways in which Dickinson's metaphors involving an exiled queen, distaste for commerce (e.g., "Publication--is the Auction"), and the like encode the decline of D's gentry class."
--why not try to get at them a little more directly through, e.g., the kind of source materials historians typically use. In other words: why sweat over decoding what Dickinson's metaphors encode instead of reading a contemporary newspaper's attempt to say unambigously what it thinks about the same subject? (In fact, if I could raise anyone from her space in time, I think ED would be the last person I'd choose to offer insight into the current events happening so far away from where she spent her time so exclusively. Though she might be among the first to whose ideas about almost anything else I'd long to listen.)
Or to take another tack:
If teaching literature involves the attempt to enable our students to
participate in the particular fascination of the stuff we're asking them to
study, shouldn't we be trying to figure out and communicate what
Dickinson's poetry does best--rather than second or third best? Don't we
all sign on to this basic ambition once we decide to try to help our
students do something better with books of poetry than stack them under
cans of beer (even though the right kind of bookpile can make a perfectly
serviceable coffee table)?
Hoping these questions develop the dialogue rather than distract from it--
Happy trails,
Dan
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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.
CEPACS