Interesting article by Dan Sinykin on close reading:
Reading, a skill easily taken for granted, is difficult–all the more so when reading literature that wields language as a medium for art. . . . It’s easy to see why close reading, which demands patience, openness to others, and slow, careful thought, is having a moment among academics. . . . academics are rediscovering the quiet excitement of close reading, a relief from the overheated corporate pablum routinely suffocating us.
Pablum is not just corporate
To the above, I’d just add that the “overheated pablum” is not just “corporate”; it’s coming from all sources. We see it in scientific research papers, on twitter, on NPR, all sorts of places that are not themselves corporate (OK, sure, twitter is owned by a corporation but the individual people posting the pablum are not themselves corporate). Overheated pablum is a style, a dominant style for the usual Gresham sort of reasons and also because, as Sinykin says, our discourse has evolved into position where nobody pays attention to anything, so things are written with the expectation that nobody will pay attention to them, etc. I see this sometimes online when someone will criticize something of mine, but they’re criticizing things I never said–one example is here, and there are links to a few more at the end of this post. Or, more directly, there are examples such as the psychology study described as “long term” even though it took place over only 3 days, or the study that claimed “That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications,” even though it had no evidence of anyone actually becoming more powerful.
As I’ve complained, my frustration about such things is not just that this happens–that credentialed scholars write articles with titles and abstracts that are flat-out false–but that nobody seems to care, even when these things are pointed out. To put it in Sinykin’s terms:
– People aren’t doing close readings on scientific papers, even high-profile papers that get tons of media attention.
– Scientists aren’t even doing close reading on their own papers! For example, in the papers linked above, I don’t know that the authors even considered the idea that there could be a contradiction between describing a study as “long term” even though it only lasted 3 days, nor that there could be a problem with claiming that people in their study “instantly become more powerful” even though the study had no measurements of power.
To put it another way, expressions such as “long term” and “more powerful” are to be taken metaphorically, as a sales job, in the same way that you might say that someone “is going to cure cancer in two years” even if, no, you don’t actually think they’re going to cure cancer in two years. It’s advertising-speak, it’s letter-of-recommendation-speak, it’s Ted-talk-speak, it’s the-title-and-abstract-of-papers-published-in-Psychological-Science-speak, and if everybody does it, then it doesn’t count as lying, indeed it doesn’t even feel like lying.
Bad news when close reading is no longer expected
I don’t agree with all the political things that Sinykin says, but that’s not so important for my point here, which is that I agree that there’s not enough close reading going on, and when audiences don’t read more closely, this provides less incentives for authors to write for close readers. Indeed, authors can become indignant at close readers, attacking them as obsessed Javerts. We’re seeing a development of a new equilibrium.
Just by analogy, consider the much-discussed phenomenon of Netflix-style movies where every action on the screen is announced by the characters as it is happening. This is so annoying! It’s certainly not the pattern with every Netflix show, but it happens a lot with the more generic offerings you’ll see on that and other streaming channels, and it’s said that the reason is that people have a movie on in the background while they’re doing something else so the running explanation allows the movie to be followed in that passive way. Then when more movies and shows are produced in this way, it encourages more of this background watching, and you get a new equilibrium in which everybody’s paying less attention–the viewers are paying less attention to what’s happening on the screen, and the actors, directors, and producers are paying less attention. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! Maybe it’s a throwback to the classic era of radio drama, I don’t know. The point is that close reading, or close watching, is a choice. At least, it’s a choice if I’m reading or watching in my native language. When I’m reading or watching in French, I need to apply my full concentration at all times or I’ll lose the thread.
The 4 aspects of close reading
Sinykin gives two examples of close reading, one from the Odyssey and one from the Bible. These examples made it clear that close reading is four things.
1. Most directly, close reading is figuring out the literal meaning of the text. Who are the characters, who is saying what (this can be tricky when reading long stretches of dialogue), who’s alive and who’s dead, what is the sequence of action, etc. It’s possible to read a story and fail in this very basic task, sometimes because the author is hiding things (Agatha Christie, Gene Wolfe, etc.), sometimes because the story is itself incoherent (it’s easier to think of examples from movies where continuity or logic is violated, but this can happen in written stories as well), sometimes just because you’re reading quickly, watching the story go by, and not focusing on the details.
2. The second step of close reading is understanding the characters’ motivations: not just what is happening but why. Sometimes this is explicitly stated, but usually you have to figure it out. In this category I’d also place whatever struggles the reader might have with unreliable narrators, information gaps, and whatever deliberate ambiguities are in the text.
3. The third step is following all the details that flow by. Often I read a book and enjoy it, but only on rereading do I notice all sorts of little things that I zipped by the first time in my rush to follow the story. This can even happen on the umpteenth reading! I recently reread Forlesen, and it was full of fun bits that I’d not previously caught. I’m not talking about subtle references or misdirections or deep themes or “easter eggs” or whatever, just the granular bits of conversation, thought, and event that I’d earlier skipped without noticing.
4. Finally, close reading involves understanding a literary work in its historical and cultural context. This has two parts. From one direction, in reading a story or watching a movie or TV show we can learn a lot about the time and place when it was produced, just from things happening in the background–patterns of speech, clothing styles, the way people are milling around in street scenes, etc.–this is what we call the Speed Racer principle. From the other direction, if you know something about the culture within which a work was produced, you can get additional insights into what the author of the story is trying to say.
It’s that fourth aspect of close reading that Sinykin focuses on:
Late in The Odyssey, Odysseus, who has endured 10 years of wandering to return home from the Trojan War, encounters his childhood nurse. No one has yet recognized him, and he does not want to be recognized. He appears a stranger. His erstwhile nurse washes his feet and, in doing so, sees a scar on his thigh, startling her into recognition. The mark on the body becomes, once noticed by a caring, knowing observer, auratic, suffused with meaning. At that moment, Homer interrupts the story with some 70 lines about how Odysseus suffered the wound that left the scar, only to pick up when the nurse drops Odysseus’ foot in the basin.
We might think, given how we have learned to read stories in our time, that Homer interjects the history of the scar into the scene to induce a feeling of suspense, suggests [philologist Erich] Auerbach. But we would be wrong. Suspense requires a distinction between foreground and background, which is unknown to Homer, who writes everything in a fully saturated now. While narrating the history of the scar, he does not expect us to be waiting to find out what happens with the nurse. He expects us, argues Auerbach, to be 100 percent in the presence of the past. Homer must describe the scar because if he did not, we would be left with an unexplained, mysterious detail, which he cannot bear. Everything must be illuminated. He must account for the scar. Everything in Homer proceeds with clarity, “never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depth.”
Sinykin shares a related close reading of a biblical passage, then concludes:
We can learn about a people through its style, its literature, which bears an ineradicable record of its version of reality. This, at least, was Auerbach’s gambit. The method is close reading. Others do it differently and can be no less exhilarating. It starts with a cultivation of sensitivity to art and language.
Agreed. I’d just add that this has several aspects, starting with the most basic of trying to figure out, as a reader, what exactly is happening in the story and what could be going on in the minds of the characters.
Close reading in statistics
This was all on my mind because just last year we were discussing the connections between close reading in literature and close reading in statistics (see also here).
As a statistician, when I read a report closely I go through the four steps listed above:
1. First, I try to put in the effort to understand exactly what was going on in the experiments being discussed. This can be difficult! Research papers often don’t include crucial information such as how exactly the experiment is done and what measurements were taken.
2. Next, it’s useful to understand the authors’ scientific goals. This is usually pretty clear from the way the results are presented.
3. Then there’s the struggle to follow all the details. A paper can have a lot of graphs and tables, and each one can take a lot of close reading to figure out. Especially when the paper has errors, as in the notorious work of Brian Wansink or Richard Tol.
4. Finally, the context of the work. Is this a Psychological Science paper from the 2010-2015 era? A natural experiment from the bad old days of regression discontinuity analysis? Or maybe something that we would expect to be done well? As with a story or novel, it’s good to know what genre you’re reading. And, from the other direction, the just-taken-for-granted aspects of a paper can give us insight into the scientific culture that it came from.
What exactly is “close reading”?
After all this, I was wondering how other people define “close reading,” so I looked up the term on wikipedia:
In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, via close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures. Close reading is thinking about both what is said in a passage (the content) and how it is said (the form, i.e., the manner in which the content is presented), leading to possibilities for observation and insight. . . .
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.
Hmmm, interesting.
The first paragraph above is a good match for how I was thinking about close reading and how Sinykin discusses the concept.
But the description at the end of the second paragraph, describing the attitude of the American New Critics, is pretty much the exact opposite of what we were discussing! Sinykin explicitly talked about how you can use knowledge of the Homeric and biblical contexts to understand what the authors of those passages were doing, and I was saying something similar with regard to reading scientific papers.
So now I’m confused: Is close reading centered on an understanding of cultural and historical context and authorial intention (my take, and I think Sinykin’s) or is it about “the autonomy of the work . . . more than authorial intention the cultural contexts of reception, and . . . ideology”? What’s going on here???
P.S. I can’t figure out how Sinykin’s article ended up at a sports site. I once published something at Baseball Prospectus, but my article was actually about baseball so that made a bit more sense. I’m not complaining–Sinykin’s post was interesting, and it was written in a friendly, nonacademic style that fit in with other articles at that site–I just wonder how it happened. I see that, in addition to teaching English at Emory University, Sinykin is also a professor of Quantitative Methods. So maybe he’ll appreciate this post!
This makes me wonder if and when there is tension between (a) writing in an “approachable” style and (b) writing “plainly”.
In scientific writing, we try to convey our intended meaning with as little ambiguity as possible. I often find that achieving this goal requires eliminating a lot of words and phrases, particularly words/phrases that convey the authors’ attitude (e.g., “clearly”, “surprisingly”, etc.) or that act as clumsy transitions from one topic to another (e.g., “however”, “be that as it may”, “it should be noted that”, etc.). By eliminating those words/phrases, I think the result is much “plainer” writing, both in the sense that it is unadorned and in the sense that its language is a more pure reflection of the intended meaning.
The problem, as noted in the post, is that such writing is “plain” to a reader only if they are engaged in a kind of close reading, in the sense that the reader comes with the expectation that the author has chosen each word to intentionally convey a particular meaning. A reader without that expectation could miss the intended meaning if they are expecting the author to use a lot of “verbal cushioning”.
So paradoxically, by trying to make our writing simpler, we might actually be making it harder to engage with. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course—I would expect a good reader to put as much effort into understanding a difficult technical point as a good writer puts into trying to convey that point. My own point is just that writing “in a plain style” is not necessarily the same as writing “in an approachable style”.
Ironically, a cultural theorist subjecting a scientific paper to close reading might come to the conclusion that the alleged “plainness” of the stylistic points you mention are actually part of the rhetorical and persuasive form of the scientific paper, where the removal of the authorial personality is intended to imply that the contained truths were handed down from high (one thinks of Peter Medawar’s essay “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” in this relation). It is not difficult to see the link between this and other frequent topics of discussion on this blog, especially forking paths.
“A natural experiment from the bad old days of regression discontinuity analysis?”
Would like to learn a bit more about this question – link? I have a discon paper in draft right now. Might as well avoid carrying forward the “bad old days”.
Lurking,
Just search this blog for “regression discontinuity” and you’ll find lots of examples. I’ve also written about the problem, with examples, in at least 4 publications:
[2015] Evidence on the deleterious impact of sustained use of polynomial regression on causal inference. {\em Research and Politics} {\bf 2}, 1–7. (Andrew Gelman and Adam Zelizer)
[2019] Why high-order polynomials should not be used in regression discontinuity designs. {\em Journal of Business and Economic Statistics} {\bf 37}, 447–456. (Andrew Gelman and Guido Imbens)
[2022] Criticism as asynchronous collaboration: An example from social science research. {\em Stat} {\bf 11}, e464. (Andrew Gelman)
[2024] Active Statistics: Stories, Games, Problems, and Hands-on Demonstrations for Applied Regression and Causal Inference. (Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtari), pages 289-294.
As if you need more examples: I assigned my class the task to build predictive models for price listings of AirBnB properties. I did a literature search and discovered dozens of papers (some published, some unpublished, some theses) doing exactly that task. In reviewing these, I found two peer-reviewed pieces that estimated predictive models with R-squared values above 0.99. In both cases there were clear errors of target leakage and/or overfitting (e.g., including the exact latitude and longitude of each property as explanatory variables). Close reading indeed. The authors even pointed out the high R-squared values as evidence of good models. The peer reviewers and editors didn’t seem bothered. This is a case where a little thought about what to expect would have been adequate warning – unless AirBnB set prices unilaterally (in which case the models would have discovered their algorithm), having thousands of hosts set prices (at least somewhat) independently should have led to an expectation that a perfect model needed to be imperfect.
Admittedly, tourism research appears to not be of the highest standards, but it is yet another example where reading was not close, if there was any reading at all (I’ll add that when I asked DeepSeek what sort of R-squared values should be expected in such a study, the answer I got was exactly on target both quantitatively and qualitatively, and when asked about these specific papers, DeepSeek said that only target leakage or overfitting could have produced such results – maybe AI can do a better job of close reading).
“To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the ‘words on the page’ rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern – a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson’s language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, ‘close reading’ also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, ‘literary’ or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a ‘reification’ of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.”
from Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
This is a nice post, very enjoyable. A couple of insights I got. The first one is a reminder of paying attention and reading for precision: I misread ‘autonomy’ for ‘anatomy’ the first time I went through the second paragraph of the Wikipedia quote. It sort of made sense that way. But, I went back and parsed it better. That definitely gave a different feel for the author’s point that I missed.
The second was that your post stirred a reminiscence of some of the fine English teachers I had at various points in my education, all of whom honed a sense of appreciation for literary works through careful reasoning and analysis. You would have loved Mrs. Gelman my HS sophomore English teacher who let me choose some novels and plays to read and then write essays on them. A transformative experience. In an ivy league place I had a young teacher in Expository Prose who was forceful and brutal in getting us to be clear and concise, a skill I have now lost. Finally there was a English teacher that ran a semester Shakespeare course designed to teach analytical essay writing. I wrote an essay on the ‘garden theme’ in Richard II. Not only is there the Garden Scene, but there are thematic elements throughout the play about gardens and gardening. That was a fun essay – the hunt, the analysis, the interpretation. From this distance I can’t say whether I hit the four elements very well, but the Sinykin analysis seems spot on to me.
Finally, Josehine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time” seems to be a novelistic adventure of close reading.
I am a very sloppy reader who tends to miss the point, so when I came across this,
“You would have loved Mrs. Gelman my HS sophomore English teacher who let me choose some novels and plays to read and then write essays on them.”
I therefore wonder whether we are supposed to shrug off the coincidence or puzzle over it. And, are there intentional missing commas? Deep reading can be a time-consuming, pointless activity.
As to “clear and concise,” sometime ambiguity is far better when it comes to deniability.
Josephine Tey…this might be an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon but I don’t recall seeing her mentioned in the previous five years, but now it’s twice in a month: on this blog, and a few weeks ago when I read the mystery “The Franchise Affair”, 1948.
I don’t know anything about The Daughter of Time, but as for The Franchise Affair: It’s very well written, in the sense that the characters are well-described, the dialogue and plot points make sense, etc. But the author’s creepy beliefs about physiognomy really ruin it for me, and for any modern reader I would think. Early on there’s a mention by a character in the book that men with eyes that look a particular way are always cruel, but that’s fine, there are people who believe that (certainly there were when the story was written) and I have no problem with a character expressing that belief. But then we “learn” from another character that girls with wide-set brown eyes are always extravagant liars, and from another we learn that if a mom is a criminal then it makes no difference how her children are raised, they are destined to be criminals too. And that the offspring of “people of quality” are destined to have good character. These are not just the beliefs of the characters, they’re the beliefs of the author, and they color the whole story.
Furthermore, the plot point that leads the story to its triumphant conclusion is very close to deus ex machina. It’s not impossible, just a coincidental occurrence that happens the day after the protagonist’s aunt has said she was praying for just such an occurrence.
The whole thing made me kinda queasy. I find it mind-boggling that in 1990 the UK Crime Writer’s Association listed it as the 11th-greatest crime novel of all time!
Phil:
Regarding what you call “creepy” and what I would call “pre-modern” beliefs about physiognomy, I’ll point you to my discussion of a memoir by novelist Ann Birstein, where I wrote:
I get that pretty people are often more pleasant to look at than ugly people–but it’s possible to take that attitude too far!
Perhaps it’s worth keeping in mind that, during this pre-modern period, there were many more factors likely to create correlations between appearance and morality (as perceived by the ruling classes at least): poor diet, cramped conditions, limited gene pool (local in breeding), those with genetic issues not being hidden away (as they were in asylums for rich folk) etc. I don’t think it’s that surprising that these associations were therefore common amongst those who were reading and writing books (a relatively wealthy minority). This is not to claim that there aren’t other (stylistic, literary tradition etc.) factors at play of course.
Andrew,
It’s not just Tey’s beliefs about physiognomy that I found creepy, that’s just part of the whole package that included her smug certainty that the social hierarchy is mirrored by a moral hierarchy: the upper class are the most moral, then come the salt-of-the-earth working class with their simple, stolid good will, then the lower classes who will work if they have to but you’d better count the silverware after the maid is done polishing it, and finally the criminal class whose children, too, are destined to be criminals, even if adopted at a young age by one of the best families.
So, OK, you can call Tey’s beliefs “pre-modern”, but then what about Bennet Cerf’s sexism, why not call that “pre-modern.” Or — to go ahead and get Godwin’s Law out of the way — how about Adolf Hitlers “pre-modern” views about white supremacy, and so on.
Obviously I am exaggerating for effect. I do not think Tey’s attitudes are completely outrageous. But neither would I excuse them by calling them “pre-modern.”
OliP,
I agree there are reasons for the associations Tey was talking about, and I don’t want to dismiss your point. But neither do I think it excuses Tey’s attitude. Many of her contemporaries — indeed, many people a hundred years earlier — recognized that there were structural factors that kept poor people poor, and there were reasons poor people committed more crimes. I love Anatole France’s line “”La loi, dans son égalité majestueuse, défend aussi bien aux riches qu’aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler le pain”, which is always translated as “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” “Egalité majestueuse”, that’s just perfect. Les mots juste.
I can accept a certain amount of casual racism, classism, sexism, etc., from authors from previous eras. But there’s a limit, and Tey is over it for me. I can appreciate and even admire the Tey’s writing, plotting, etc., of Tey’s book, but, as Andrew says in tomorrow’s post, “now I kinda want to have washed my hands after touching it”.
Phil:
Yes, I would also describe Cerf’s sexism as pre-modern, and I’d describe a lot of racist attitudes as pre-modern. I’m using pre-modern as a description, not as an excuse!
I also agree with you that in some settings I can find a pre-modern attitude charming, even if I don’t agree with it. Also, sometimes a little bit of it is fine, but too much is overwhelming.
I enjoyed reading a book called “Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard”. Someone should write a book called “Slow Statistics”, though I’m not sure what the subtitle should be.
There is a book called “The Slow Professor” by Berg and Seeber, who aim to counter the “culture of speed in the academy”, although, if I recall, both are humanities professors.
TL;DR
I’m not sure if I’d call academia non-corporate. The corporate takeover seems pretty complete. Yeah, most universities are technically non-profit, but the leadership is mainly highly-paid MBAs trying to maximize revenue and minimize costs (at the expense of everything else, like curiosity and integrity). Which pretty much explains the decline of deep reading in academia.
What’s going on there is intellectual history. While the Wikipedia entry is correct about the origins of so-called “close” reading in literary criticism, it didn’t become institutionalized – at least in the American academy – until after WWII. It became institutionalized under the rubric of formalism, which was a philosophical belief about the nature of meaning in literary texts. The idea was/is that the formal nature of literary texts somehow frees or isolates them from any context, whether in the author’s biography or historical context more generally. This seems most plausible with respect to poetry, with its (often quite elaborate) patterning of sound, and that’s where the practice of “close” reading got its start.
This proved to be pedagogically useful. Why? In the wake of Sputnik in 1957 the federal government poured a lot of money into college education, which translated into more undergraduates, but also more funding for graduate programs to prepare professors to teach those undergraduates. So, how do you teach literature to undergraduates? Prior to formalism academic literary criticism was historical, biographical, and philological (think a combination of intellectual history and pre-Chomsky linguistics). It was a learned pursuit requiring a lot of preparation before you can get down to the business of interpreting your texts. Formalist close reading stripped all of that away. All you need is the text and your native good wit, that and a lot of practice if you want to do it at a professional level.
By the early and mid-1960s trouble began showing up. You see, in 1957 a Canadian named Northrop Frye published something called Anatomy of Criticism, which became something of a Bible of lit crit to a large swatch literary critics. In the preface he asserted:
He went on from there. Whatever literary criticism is, it is exact in its own way. [Also, Frye wasn’t a formalist, not exactly, but that’s a detail I’ll ignore in this context.]
So, if close reading is exact, then how come different critics come up with different interpretations of the same texts? And it’s not even that they come up with different readings because they’re looking for different things (a position known as pluralism), but the different readings are incompatible with one another? How can that be possible? That was THE central issue in literary theory throughout the 1960s, 70s, and into the 80s, at which point it was dropped without ever having been definitively resolved, which is the current situation.
In the middle of that period we have the (in)famous structuralism conference at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1966. [I was a sophomore at JHU at the time, but didn’t attend any of the conference sessions, which were conducted in French.] While the idea was to introduce structuralism to the American academy, which it most certainly did, it turned out to be the beginning of the end of structuralism in literary criticism. A young philosopher named Jacques Derrida was brought in as a last-minute replacement for some worthy who canceled and delivered a paper, the memory of which dominates subsequent discussion of that conference: “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In that paper he gave Lévi-Strauss a thorough deconstruction (which largely missed the mark, IMO, but that’s a complicated matter).
In the wake of that paper, and others, but above all, in the wake of actual critical practice, and under the influence of developments outside the academy (Civil Rights, anti-war, feminism) a large swath of literary critics dropped the idea of autonomous meaning for literary texts. We need to understand texts in relation to historical context, but also in relation to the (ideological) desires of critics. Interpretive readings were still “close” – the best deconstructive critics, starting with Derrida himself, paid exquisite attention to details in the texts – but reference to context was not only permitted, but required.
A final note, just what does “close” mean in this context? Normal reading distance is about 18 inches from the text or so. Does a close reading mean you get, say, only 10 inches from the text, or even get out a magnifying glass? Of course not. That’s silly. The distance involved is metaphorical, not literal. But it’s also a foundational metaphor. What do I mean by that?
Take Dawkins’ notion of the selfish gene. That’s a metaphor. He’s not asserting that genes have motives like humans do. Rather, he’s using “selfish” as a metaphor for something that can be explicated in a moderately techical way using a bit of math. It’s a convenient way of talking. But its not foundational. In this case, the foundation of the metaphor (“tenor” in one account of how metaphors work) is the technical account of gene flow in reproduction. Selfish is simply the “vehicle” (again, from that same account of metaphor)
for conveying the technical content is a short-hand way.
In the case of “close reading” there really isn’t a technical content being conveyed. Just what happens in close reading, who knows? It happens in the mind and resists observation. In practice, it simply means (quoting your Wikipedia entry) “careful, sustained interpretation.” You look at details, individual words and phrases, and say intelligent and interesting things about them.
Now, that’s a LOT more than I had intended to say. And I could easily have said a LOT more, and have done so elsewhere.
I hadn’t read Sinykin when I read your post, Andrew. Now I have. And that explains where the two examples come from, Homer and the Bible. They are from Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. As Sinyikin says, Auerbach was a philologist and not at all literary formalist, as that term is normally understand. The critics Sinykin mentions – Stephen Greenblatt, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said – all came of age during the mid-1960s or after. Both Jameson and Said lectured at Johns Hopkins while I was there, probably during early 1970s when I was working on a masters degree (while waiting out the draft).
I’ve been aware of Sinykin for some time but have never read anything by him and I only blitzed through that essay. He’s a young critic. The events I talk about above, that’s all in the past for him. He’s read about it, he may even have read through the published proceedings of the 1966 structuralism conference (but he almost certainly has read Derrida’s essay), but he didn’t live through it. Starting at 1965, I lived through those intellectual events, and even participated in them a bit.
What’s the difference between living through them and reading about them? Put informally, in living through those events I had to change a bunch of my priors, and do it fairly often and deeply. I started with structuralism as an undergraduate in, say 1966, and ended up publishing on the computational semantics of a Shakespeare sonnet in 1976. But reading about those events in the past, you start with the current state of things, the intellectual world that exists in the wake of all that. Depending on where you start from, reading about the past is not going to force any deep intellectual change.
Yes there has been a tension between a literal and inferential interpretation from the start of “close reading,” which began with the exegesis of scripture. I would argue we should do both, but arguments continue apace. I did some geeking out on this history in connection to more recent K-12 debates a while back https://schoolecosystem.wordpress.com/2019/02/09/close-reading-the-context-of-an-exegesis/
“Homer must describe the scar because if he did not, we would be left with an unexplained, mysterious detail, which he cannot bear. Everything must be illuminated. He must account for the scar. Everything in Homer proceeds with clarity, “
‘never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depth.'”
This is a frustrating thing to read because it is clearly not true. It is not possible for Homer to plumb every depth, because depths are infinite and the Odyssey is (last time I read it) finite! Any explanation should at least tell us why the poet chose to plumb that particular depth at that particular time. The Auerbach explanation — it generates suspense — may be wrong, but it seems like the right *kind* of explanation for the explicandum at hand.
“To read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which has started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose.”
Ortega Y Gasset, José. “The Difficulty of Reading.” Diogenes, vol. 7, no. 28, Dec. 1959, pp. 1–17. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215900702801.