John Guillory is famous (in certain circles) for his use of the concepts “cultural capital” and “social capital” to take whacks at literary scholars and their pretensions. God knows pretensions always need a good whack, but it makes me nervous when people emphasize sociopolitical concepts like that at the expense of the esthetic (which is always in danger, because it has no obvious utility). At any rate, Dan Sinykin has a good Nation review (archived) of Guillory’s new book On Close Reading:
“What is close reading?” a professor asked us on the first day of a seminar on modern American poetry. I could see that he was needling us, deflating our presumptions. We all pretended that we knew what close reading meant. We not only talked about it but we did it. We knew it when we saw it, and we knew when it was done badly—but what it was, in the end, we couldn’t exactly say. You might think it strange for literature students to be incapable of describing a core practice of their field, but we weren’t alone.
In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sets out to explain what close reading is and “why it has been so difficult to define” by way of a fascinating anthropology of reading that makes available new arguments in defense of the practice. At first glance, the book might appear to be an addendum to Guillory’s 40-plus-year project to clarify what literary study achieves—and, pointedly, what it doesn’t. But On Close Reading is more than that: It helps to clarify the stakes involved in reading to begin with, even if we might quarrel with its conclusions.
After a summary of Guillory’s earlier work, Sinykin continues:
On Close Reading, then, reads like a postscript, a bit that Guillory couldn’t fit into his previous book. But though it is slim, On Close Reading is not slight. In it, Guillory situates close reading in a wide historical, political, and sociological context. Exegetes and interpreters have “read closely”—which is not the same, he argues, as “closely read”—for millennia, from biblical commentators to the “philological and textual” critics of the Renaissance to hermeneuts in the German tradition of Schleiermacher and Gadamer to French practitioners of explication de texte. But in the early 20th century, groups of scholars in England and the United States sought to provide a newly rigorous basis for interpretation, changing how professionals in the Anglophone world read (and still read) today.
(Note that no Russians are mentioned, and a Google Books search shows that Guillory ignores the formalists and their immensely influential version of close reading, but that is, sadly, only to be expected in the Anglophone world of walled-off scholarship. But to continue…)
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