On Close Reading

From the classical commentary tradition to the contemporary Common Core, Guillory brings into relief what’s at stake in “close reading” — the most enduring, yet also most contested practice in literary study across the past century. The amount of learning that he consolidates in short space can be staggering; some of his footnotes alone would be fodder for an entire book’s worth of insights by another scholar. As Guillory compellingly argues, close reading entails “showing the work of reading”; it’s an art, a craft, a technique, best learned (like all human practices) through “demonstrative modeling.”

Guillory does not wear his learning lightly. This article, expanded into a book and padded with an extensive and awkward bibliography, is really a footnote (with its own footnotes) to the professor's Professing Criticism. Guillory continues to make the point that the practice and objects of reading have expanded and shifted drastically. His lasting point is that close reading is a "techne" or method and a rather minimal one at that. This is a truism. Almost all great critics engage in some form of close reading, be they Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, or Aristotelean. To me, the most conspicuous absence is Samuel Johnson. Johnson's landmark Lives of the Poets is a masterclass of quotation and close reading. Look again at Aristotle's poetics and you will see a lot of pragmatic criticism that anchors itself to quotations. On a side note, his abstruse style is a prime example of how academic writers have abandoned the educated common reader. Guillory is interested in the broader audience of readers, but he certainly doesn't write for them.