Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies

by Jonathan Kramnick

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading.

Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth , Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that—a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Drawing on the rich and varied landscape of contemporary criticism, Kramnick changes how we think about the basic tools of literary analysis, including the art of in-text quotation, summary, and other reading methods, helping us to see them as an invaluable form of humanistic expertise. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university.

As the humanities fight for survival in contemporary higher education, the study of literature doesn’t need more plans for reform. Rather, it needs a defense of the work already being done and an account of why it should flourish. This is what Criticism and Truth offers, in vivid and portable form.

Genres: Teaching, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

137 pages, Paperback

Published December 4, 2023

Reviews

[Abram Van Engen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t love everything about this book, but I do love the attempt to draw a distinction for the discipline and the kind of knowledge it offers to the world. Ultimately lands on method. I might land instead on domain (the particular kinds of knowledge that only literature has and offers, which is why storytelling and poetry have been practiced in every culture since the dawn of the species). Nonetheless, there’s plenty here to appreciate and think with.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teaching writing in the sciences, whether mechanism description, the formal report, or general science explanation, I can ill-afford to land on too generalized a conception of what it is students should be doing when, for instance in their formal reports, they reflect [in sequence: Introduction/Methods & Materials/Results/Discussion/Conclusion] on "methods." To land on close reading as the method central to literary studies, likewise essentializes what can seem a myriad of approaches to textual work: producing them, and reproducing them.

Jonathan Kramnick, a Yale scholar in literary studies, defends higher education institutionally within an academy implacably turned against its own incomprehension with whomever would wish literary culture to survive. There's an older humanist defense of the higher criticism, so-called. Kramnick doesn't venture it. Instead, and again, probably situating himself as sitting in a conference room in his role as a department chair defending his department against STEM-enthusiast administrators (the STEM fields are, after all, from whence the great majority of Chancellors emerge), he describes, procedurally, what close reading is: quotation -- embedding primary text within your secondary comment; setting off text in block form so that its "feel" can be established; and matching a text's tone through indirect discourse of paraphrased summary.

And they gave you a PhD for that.

Okay, perhaps you were disposed to flatter yourself that your work had been about more than a close reading. Perhaps you're a formalist, an archival commorant, or all three. When Kramnick describes how close reading distinguishes itself from other methodologies in the STEM and social science fields -- "Close reading is different from concomitant variation, which is different from regression analyses" (10) -- he relates "methodology" straight off to J.S. Mill's four methods of causal efficacy: techniques for tracking data in the social sciences (and a few pages on, he adds Bayesian inference to Mill's list) that model certain inferential "traps" or errors to be avoided. To be avoided in handling data. What if I'm a psychologist? An anthropologist? But the descriptive is still strongly appealing to such "modeling" of literary texts, requiring, if one is to avoid judgment, a great many (10, 000 may be too few) kinds of things that absorb one's textual attention. Alas, this is why historical criticism is also something English Literary Studies has traditionally done.

But there is a history of the institution to be told here; Kramnick evades it. We allow the Chris Rufos to write these histories now that, two generations ago, were things like Gerald Graff's Professing Literature or Grant Webster's The Republic of Letters. I don't think this is turning out well for our students. Kramnick, who distinguishes academic methodology (close reading) from public-facing criticism, shows way too much comfort with The Los Angeles Review of Books. Of all things. There is the odd gatekeeper's discomfort, it seems, with public facing criticism that doesn't make itself responsible to reader-feedback. The discomfort, then, projecting now, is with the gate-keeping function of the academic literary study that continuously metamorphicizes itself into projects, programs, and identity positions that make it vulnerable to revanchists like Rufo.

I don't imagine a chastened account of the English Department's activities will please anyone, but I hope I'm wrong. I do share this author's premise that a reading need be little more than apt to achieve its essential democratic function.

[Nat]

I was moved to write a longer review of this...gonna try to pitch it some places.

[Nora Perez-Rubio · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's a book!

[ledi]

Never thought so much about quotations

[Lewis]

Very good - an interesting exploration of the "skills" that English Departments teach (through method) and a further justification of the existence of said departments!

[Kalysta Fern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kramnick takes his time and weaves a compelling argument for the epistemic grounding of what is perhaps the key facet of literary studies-- close reading.

[cassie ✧˖*°࿐ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a clear, fun, and elegantly written defense of literary criticism that should be read by everyone with an interest in literature and writing about literature