The Rise and Fall — and Rise? — of Close Reading

[...] But through it all, close reading remained a technique widely used by scholars and teachers, and it has become newly fashionable in recent years. Why exactly? Although the intellectual rewards it yields may seem obvious to those who have been properly initiated, it is, after all, not the only way to do interpretation. Critics from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson have appreciated and studied literature without it. What, then, has made it such a seemingly indispensable method in the past hundred years? What historical or institutional pressures were responsible for its emergence and growth? In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sketches out some possible answers to these questions. To explain why it has proved so serviceable to the discipline, he contends, we must first understand what exactly close reading is — which turns out to be more difficult than we might assume. Timothy Aubry, The Chronicle of Higher Education

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