Editing Close reading (section)

== History ==
Literary close reading and commentaries have extensive precedent in the [[exegesis]] of religious texts, and more broadly, [[hermeneutics]] of ancient works. For example, [[Pazand]], a genre of [[middle Persian]] literature, refers to the ''Zend'' (literally: 'commentary'/'translation') texts that offer explanation and close reading of the [[Avesta]], the sacred texts of [[Zoroastrianism]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Avesta|last=Williams Jackson|first=A.V.|publisher=Cosimo, Inc.|year=2008|isbn=978-1-60520-191-7|editor-last=Warner|editor-first=Charles Dudley|volume=III|location=New York|pages=1084, 1086|orig-year=1896}}</ref> The scriptural commentaries of the [[Talmud]] offer a commonly cited early predecessor to close reading.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Hermeneutics, ancient and modern|last=Bruns|first=Gerald L.|date=1992|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0300054507|location=New Haven|oclc=25832229}}</ref> In Islamic studies, the close reading of the [[Quran]] has flourished and produced an immense corpus.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-the-quran|title=Exegesis of the Qur'an: Early Modern and Contemporary|last=Wielandt|first=Rotraud|editor-last=McAuliffe|editor-first=Jane Dammen|website=referenceworks.brillonline.com|access-date=10 August 2018}}</ref> But the closest religious analogy to contemporary literary close reading, and the principal historical connection with its birth, is the rise of the [[higher criticism]], and the evolution of [[textual criticism]] of the Bible in Germany in the late eighteenth century.

In the practice of literary studies, the technique of close reading emerged in 1920s Britain in the work of [[I. A. Richards]], his student [[William Empson]], and the poet [[T.S. Eliot]], all of whom sought to replace an "impressionistic" view of literature then dominant with what Richards called a "practical criticism" focused on language and form. American [[New Critics]] in the 1930s and 1940s anchored their views in similar fashion, and promoted close reading as a means of understanding that the autonomy of the work (often a poem) mattered more than anything else, including authorial intention, the cultural contexts of reception, and most broadly, ideology.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Professing literature: an institutional history|last=Gerald|first=Graff|year=1987|isbn=978-0226306032|location=Chicago|oclc=13795373}}</ref> For these critics, including [[Cleanth Brooks]], [[William K. Wimsatt]], [[John Crowe Ransom]], and [[Allen Tate]], only close reading, because of its attentiveness to the nuances and interrelation of language and form, could address the work in its complex unity.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=American literary criticism since the 1930s|last=Leitch|first=Vincent B.|date=2010|publisher=Routledge|others=Leitch, Vincent B., 1944-|isbn=978-0415778176|edition=2nd|location=London|oclc=297149196}}</ref> Their influence on American literary criticism and English departments held sway for several decades, and even after New Criticism faded from prominence in American universities in the waning years of the Cold War,<ref>{{Cite book|title=Professing literature : an institutional history|last=Gerald|first=Graff|year=1987|isbn=978-0226306032|location=Chicago|page=227|oclc=13795373}}</ref> close reading remained a fundamental, almost naturalized, skill amongst literary critics.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The crisis in criticism : theory, literature, and reform in English studies|last=Cain|first=William E.|date=1984|publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press|isbn=978-0801831911|location=Baltimore|oclc=10323916|url=https://archive.org/details/crisisincriticis1984cain}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Walhout|first=Mark|date=December 1987|title=The New Criticism and the Crisis of American Liberalism: The Poetics of the Cold War.|journal=College English|volume=49|issue=8|pages=861–871|doi=10.2307/378114|jstor=378114}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Mao|first=Douglas|date=1996|title=The New Critics and the Text-Object|journal=ELH|volume=63|issue=1|pages=227–254|jstor=30030280|doi=10.1353/elh.1996.0007|s2cid=161883450}}</ref> By the turn of the 21st century, efforts to historicize New Critical aesthetics and its apolitical pretense prompted scholars, especially in departments of English, to debate the fate of close reading, asking about its status as a critical practice.

In two of its 2010 bulletins, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) featured a cluster of articles that attempted to take stock of what the 21st century held for close reading. The articles were motivated, as all of the scholars remarked, by the changes they had observed in the work of their colleagues and students—as well as in contemporary culture—that made them think again about why close reading mattered to the study of literature. Jonathan Culler noted that because the discipline had taken close reading for granted, it had disappeared from discussions of the goals of literary criticism.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Culler|first=Jonathan|date=2012|title=The Closeness of Close Reading|journal=ADE Bulletin|volume=152|issue=1|doi=10.1632/ade.152.0|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |issn=0001-0898}}</ref> For Culler, as for Jane Gallop, that absence needed remedying, and therefore signaled an opportunity for departments of English to renew—in order to capitalize on—one of the more distinctive traits of studying literature.<ref>{{Cite journal|date=2012|journal=ADE Bulletin|volume=152|issue=1|doi=10.1632/ade.152.0|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |issn=0001-0898}}</ref> If New Criticism and its isolationist stance had given way to the politicization of literary studies, and if technological developments were changing the very ways in which people read, Culler and Gallop emphasized that the signature of close reading, meticulous attention to the workings of language and form, still had value. [[N. Katherine Hayles]] and [[John Guillory]], meanwhile, each interested in the impact of digital media on the ways people read, argued that close reading skills were not only translatable to the digital context, but could also exist productively alongside the hyper-reading that web interfaces and links had generated.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Guillory|first=John|author-link=John Guillory |date=2012|title=Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue|journal=ADE Bulletin|volume=152|issue=1|doi=10.1632/ade.152.0|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |issn=0001-0898}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hayles|first=N. Katherine|date=2012|title=How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine|journal=ADE Bulletin|volume=152|issue=1|doi=10.1632/ade.152.0|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |issn=0001-0898}}</ref>