On Close Reading

by John Guillory, Scott L. Newstok (Contributor)

John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques.

 

At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading?

 

For Guillory, these puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all. These critics were most urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. Guillory understands close reading as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.

 

Guillory’s short book will be essential reading for all college teachers of literature. An annotated bibliography, curated by Scott Newstok, provides a guide to key documents in the history of close reading along with valuable suggestions for further research. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Research

144 pages, Paperback

Published January 8, 2025

Reviews

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*
Reader, I did not close-read much of this essay.

I was catapulted into an existential crisis when one of my teachers posed the question "what is close reading?" during a course preparing us for writing our master's theses. No one had a good answer. How could we not know what most of us had been doing for 3-4 years by that point? Guillory both does and doesn't provide an answer in this essay. I find the parallel with music and sports helpful: close reading is just ("just") a technique, and no, I can't explain that any further without regurgitating the whole essay.

I love close reading. Its history is complex (moreso than I had realised) and its future is perhaps endangered. That's why I hunted through this essay, because I was looking for an emotional argument that would appeal to me and reveal its writer to be in love with reading, too. The coda hinted at it, but only faintly.

The last one third of this book is an annotated bibliography by Scott Newstock which was really quite funny and there's an online even bigger annotated bibliography which I'm curious about.

waarom voel ik me altijd zo pretentieus als ik een review schrijf op goodreads? misschien ironisch in dit geval gezien Guillory ook mooi de shift aanstipt tussen criticism als judgment (vroegah) en criticsm als technique of reading (= close reading) dus, en hier zit ik lekker te judgen. nou groetjes

[Gregory Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Biblical Studies Ph.D., close reading as a practice (technique) akin to exegesis is a welcome analogy. Guillory does an excellent job laying out the history of the development of the bigram and showing its relationship to other forms of literary criticism (e.g., New Historicism, which is something akin to the old “historical criticism “ in biblical studies). I am sure to return to it again and again, and to mine the very helpful annotated bibliography provided by Newstock. I hope to provide an extended review later this year.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only about 60 pages of text. Remainder of the book is a detailed index and a detailed bibliography citing traditionally published books and digital resources.

I found this excerpt illuminating:

....Every cultural work that distracts us does so by soliciting our attention. Attention and distraction are different expressions of the same cognitive complex, different ways of observing its operation. 93
Bearing this point in mind, it seems evident that the defense of literary reading against its rivals in the realm of cultural consumption too often resorts to a reductive emphasis on attention in an effort to save literature. If the immersive reading of long novels, for example, is offered as the chief case of failed attention among our students, it is easy to point to video gaming as a counterexample. This form has the effect of powerfully fixating attention, suggesting that attention alone is not the issue in the failure of literary reading. A better way to address this problem is to start from the difference between writing as a media form and the multimedia apparatus of the video game. The difference that matters is between writing’s static marks on a page—the only source of visual stimulation the reading of a novel ordinarily affords—and the interactive kinetic imagery that is the vector of narrative in the video game. Narrative in written form can produce a kind of complex phenomenal experience that is available only in the medium of writing, where long strings of sentences generate singular effects of meaning.94 This is not to deny that the video game—to stay with this example—delivers its own kind of complex narrative pleasure. It is rather to assert that the cognitive techniques demanded in the use of media as different as the novel and the video game are not easily commensurable and have to be socially valued separately. These two media forms are not just alternative vehicles for delivering narrative, the one more stimulating than the other in sensory terms. On the contrary, engagements with narrative in these two media are essentially different cognitive experiences. One cannot be substituted for the other.
As complementary states of mind, “attention” and “distraction” have been remarked for millennia....

[ASC Library]

428.4 Gui

[Grace]

I skimmed this

[John B Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guillory does a good job of grappling with and pinning a term in words that, like so many around the techniques of reading and writing, is historically defined through experience.

The wealth of citations and suggested readings is also a gift.

[Nat]

I wish I had read this before writing my review of Kramnick's account of close reading as a kind of *writing* in his Criticism and Truth. Guillory gives a concise history of the varied and contested ways that close reading has been understood in literary studies. Guillory himself endorses "explicitation" as his preferred understanding of close reading, whicch involves "a showing of the work of reading" (59).

There is a useful coda that discusses close reading in the context of worries about attention—it makes for a helpful companion to other recent attempts to say how we should approach art in the age of "disordered attention" (Claire Bishop's term).

An annotated bibliography by Scott Newstock gives a fascinating overview of all of the diverse domains in which theorists have argued about how to understand close reading.

[Anne Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was extremely helpful in my work which involves teaching close reading primarily to college freshmen. Even if your work doesn’t involve teaching close reading, this text presents ideas for a world experiencing a global decrease in literacy and increase in skimming. I’m thankful this book was written!

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

59 ‘Explication is not interpretation but the name of a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation. Very simply, explication is a showing of the work of reading. It puts pressure on the moment of reading when the comprehension of a text’s elemental features turns, or struggles to turn, toward the correlation of those features with larger structures of meaning. The explication of what is implicit constitutes an infrastructure for interpretation. The structure is exposed, in the way that modernist architects expose the infrastructure of their buildings.’

62 ‘At the same time, “showing the work of reading” is more than paying attention to the words on the page. Close reading is a minimal but not a simple procedure.’

70 ‘On this account, close reading is an “instrument” to the second order, analogous to techniques for playing a musical instrument such as a violin or piano. Close reading “plays” the literary work. An instrument does not determine what is played on it; nor does a basic technique for playing an instrument determine how well a piece of music will be performed. The instrument will always be just that; but the artistry with which the instrument is played has no determined outcome or limit of sophistication. This dual potentiality has indeed been our experience of close reading. It can be done in virtuoso fashion or as a mediocre exercise.’

[Nani · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I expected this book to be a primer on its titular concept, which it wasn't. Instead, Guillory delivers a philosophical essay on the nature of literary technique, interspersed with a VERY specific historical account of the practice of close reading in literary criticism. I completely agree with his conceptualization of close reading as an evidentiary practice, a second-order literacy technique that is content-neutral and instrumental to literary interpretation regardless of ideological motivation; he got me thinking about how I might make this practice less intuitive and thus more achievable for students. But I found myself wishing the book had actually described the constitutive steps to achieving this technique, instead of copping out and describing it as a kind of artistic performance.

[Barrett Gough · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that does not make me miss graduate school. Was hoping for more of a primer on close reading...which I did not get.

[JoAnn]

bro j tell me what close reading is