Editing Close reading (section)

==Examples==
Brooks's discussion of John Keats's "[[Ode on a Grecian Urn]]" embodies his use of close reading. In "Keats's Sylvan Historian", he finds the controversy over the poem's famous lines misplaced, and insists instead that "the ambiguity" of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is best understood as an expression of the urn itself (151–153). The poem pursues this ambiguity, he writes, in lines that describe the urn on the one hand as a "bride of quietness" and a "foster-child of silence" and on the other, a "sylvan historian" (155). In this way the poem describes the urn in paradoxical terms much as the urn utters a paradoxical line. Brooks then pursues this logic by considering how "sylvan historian" might not only describe the urn as a kind of historian but also the kind of history the urn is said to tell. Further, if he claims that this history is uncertain because it's not clear "what men or gods" feature in it, he continues that line of thinking as he proceeds through the ode's stanzas: when he emphasizes that the "unheard melodies" of the figures depicted on the urn's face are "sweeter than any audible music", that "action goes on though the actors are motionless", that "the maiden, always to be kissed, never actually kissed", that the "boughs...cannot shed their leaves", and when he claims that this "ironic undercurrent" only increases over the course of the poem, to culminate in those infamous lines (156–159, 164). From following the poem in this way, Brooks arrives at the assertion that his interpretation is "derived from the context of the "Ode" itself" (164).

Brooks's close reading is typical of the New Critical investment in the textual object alone. Yet scholars have also found close reading productive for more politically and socially invested work, thereby refusing the New Critical belief in literary transcendence while seizing on the care with which it treated textuality. In ''[[The Madwoman in the Attic]]: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination'' (1979), best known as one of the earliest statements of feminist literary criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar deployed close reading to make a case for the distinctiveness of the female literary imagination. The sixteen chapters of ''Madwoman'' thus pursue their arguments—that women writers expressed their anxiety about authorship, their rage over being constrained to docile femininity, their canny encoding of their patriarchal critique—with the attention to language, imagery, and form Gilbert and Gubar had been trained to wield as graduate students in the late 1960s. New Critical echoes are thus evident in the individual chapters devoted to close readings of Mary Shelley's ''Frankenstein'', Emily Bronte's ''Wuthering Heights'', Charlotte Bronte's ''The Professor'', ''Jane'' ''Eyre'', ''Shirley'', and ''Villette'', but so is the political innovation. Reviewers—academic and mainstream—recognized this trait, describing the two scholars as "gnostic heretics who claim to have found the secret code that unlocks the mysteries in old texts" (Schreiber 11)<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Schreiber|first=Le Anne|date=December 9, 1979|title=I'm Nobody, Who Are You?|journal=The New York Times Review of Books|pages=11, 32–3}}</ref> and their interpretations as a "skillful joint peeling away of the layers" of women's writing" (129).<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Kolodny|first=Annette|date=March 1980|title=Rev. of The Madwoman in the Attic|journal=American Literature|volume=52|issue=1|pages=128–132|doi=10.2307/2925194|jstor=2925194}}</ref>

In an even more extreme example, [[Jacques Derrida]] in ''Ulysses Gramophone'' devotes eighty-six pages to the word "yes" in James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'', an effort which [[J. Hillis Miller]] describes as a "hyperbolic, extravagant, even outrageous explosion" of the technique of close reading.<ref name="Miller_Page_75">{{cite book |last1=Miller |first1=J. Hillis |author1-link=J. Hillis Miller |editor1-last=Cohen |editor1-first=Tom |editor1-link=Tom Cohen|title=Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader |date=2001 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge |isbn=9780521625654 |pages=58–81 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yoRKMwsOjwsC&pg=PA75 |access-date=14 December 2020 |chapter=Derrida and literature}}</ref>