Editing Close reading (section)

== Principles and practice ==
While [[New Criticism]] popularized close reading in universities, it tended to emphasize its principles and offer extended examples rather than prescribe specific methods and practices. As [[John Guillory]] points out, close reading entails "a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Guillory |first=John |author-link=John Guillory |url=https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo239363263.html |title=On Close Reading |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2025 |isbn=9780226837437 |editor-last=Newstok |editor-first=Scott |location=Chicago, IL |language=en}}</ref> A tendency towards what Vincent B. Leitch calls "canonical statements"<ref name=":0"/> appeared in essays and book-length studies, from John Crowe Ransom's "The New Criticism" (1941) and Allen Tate's "A Note on Autotelism" (1949), to Cleanth Brooks' ''[[The Well Wrought Urn]]'' (1947),<ref>{{Cite book|title=The well wrought urn : studies in the structure of poetry|last=Brooks|first=Cleanth|date=1947|publisher=Harcourt, Brace & World.|isbn=978-0156957052|location=New York|oclc=4908303|url=https://archive.org/details/wellwroughturnst00broo}}</ref> Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's ''[[Theory of Literature]]'' (1949),<ref>{{Cite book|title=Theory of literature|last=René|first=Wellek|date=1956|publisher=Harcourt, Brace & World|others=Warren, Austin, 1899-1986|isbn=978-0156890847|edition=3d|location=New York|oclc=1944737|url=https://archive.org/details/theoryofliteratu00well}}</ref> and W.K. Wimsatt's ''The Verbal Icon'' (1954).<ref>{{Cite book|title=The verbal icon : studies in the meaning of poetry|last=Wimsatt|first=William K.|date=1954|publisher=University of Kentucky Press|isbn=978-0813101118|location=Lexington, Ky.|oclc=328522|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/verbaliconstudie1958wims}}</ref> The first ten chapters of ''The Well Wrought Urn'' thus focus individually on poems across British literary history (John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot) before concluding with "The Heresy of Paraphrase", in which Brooks abstracts the premises on which his analyses rest. Meanwhile, when Wellek and Warren describe their preference for an "intrinsic" study of literature in ''Theory of Literature'', they refer to examples of elements they claim are crucial to a work—from euphony, rhythm, and meter to image, metaphor, and myth—and cite concrete examples of these drawn from literary history, but do not indicate steps by which readers might translate such thinking into their own analyses. Wimsatt takes a mixed approach in ''The Verbal Icon'', combining theoretical chapters ("The Intentional Fallacy", "The Affective Fallacy") with those that discuss concerns he feels are necessary to the study of poetry ("The Concrete Universal", "Symbol and Metaphor", "The Substantive Level", "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason", "When is Variation 'Elegant'?", "Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical"), but he too leaves it to his readers to imagine how they might deploy these views.

As Culler notes in his essay for the 2010 bulletin of the American Departments of English, this tendency not to make statements of method meant that most students of the New Critics learned by example. Thus in the New Critical classroom, "the charismatic pedagogue could pose a question you had not thought of about relations between form and meaning or point to a textual difficulty that had escaped your attention."<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Culler|first=Jonathan|date=2010|title=The Closeness of Close Reading|journal=ADE Bulletin|volume=149|issue=1|pages=23|doi=10.1632/ade.149.20|issn=0001-0898}}</ref> More than fifty years later, this "closeness of close reading" remains vital to the work of more recent thinkers whose thinking has contributed to the radical changes in literary studies and displaced New Criticism. Of these he cites his contemporary, the deconstructionist Barbara Johnson, who stands out for her claim that the value of close reading lies in its capacity for taking seriously what does not immediately make sense.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Teaching Deconstructively|last=Johnson|first=Barbara|work=Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature|publisher=Univ. Press of Kansas|year=1985|isbn=978-0700002832|editor-last=Atkins|editor-first=George Michael|location=Lawrence, Kansas|pages=140|oclc=65306717|editor-last2=Johnson|editor-first2=Michael L.}}</ref> Well aware of the stark differences between New Criticism and deconstruction, Culler here brings the two together, suggesting that their shared investments indicate an understanding of close reading worth maintaining.

In French criticism, close reading is similar to ''[[explication de texte]]'', the tradition of textual interpretation in literary study, as proposed by [[Gustave Lanson]]. As an [[analytical technique]], ''close reading'' compares and contrasts the concept of ''distant reading'', the technique for "understanding literature, not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data", as described, by Kathryn Schulz, in "What is Distant Reading?", an article about the literary scholar [[Franco Moretti]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html|title=What Is Distant Reading? |first=Kathryn|last=Schulz|date=June 24, 2011|work=The New York Times}}</ref>