English 305H
Close Reading
Fall 2017, Tues 3:15-6:05
Building 240, Room 110
Professor Alex Woloch
Office: Building 460, Room 201C
Phone: 723-4594
Email:
What is the difference between reading and reading closely? Is “close reading” a specific methodof literary criticism or just a sensibilitythat might attach to any critical mode or method? And how would we characterize this ubiquitous but elusive term -- as either method or sensibility?
This course will try to develop some basic categories for this interpretive practice, examining close reading at the juncture of several distinct, but sometimes overlapping, intellectual and critical traditions (these could include formalism,philology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, ideological critique). Neither a chronological nor conceptual survey, the course will revolve around experiments in critical response, including various texts that “stick with” the reading of another text in conspicuous ways. In some cases (as with S/Z by Roland Barthes) this act of reading involves the critical re-articulation of every moment within the text. In other cases, as in Auerbach’s Mimesis, this act of reading entails, on the contrary, a marked compression of the text, into its essential “moment”.
The contrast between these two approaches -- each of which might be seen as close reading -- is the type of problem that I want to focus on. Does close reading involve looking at a text longer than expected or more rigorously than expected (and what would this latter definition mean, exactly)? Does it entail getting “close to” or intimate with the text, or, on the contrary, developing angles of interpretive vision that are actually at a remove from the text: so that looking at a textual object “closely” is synonymous with looking at it in a new and unfamiliar way? Or in a way that pays not merely close (empirical) attention to the object of analysis but close (reflective) attention to the unstable processes involved in the act of reading or interpretation itself? These kinds of questions and tensions multiply when we pause on the term, rather than just taking “close reading” as self-evident, whether for good or ill.
Most of the texts we’ll consider dramatize these problems both intellectually and formally – they engage in often inspiring, sometimes infuriating, acts of hesitation, of slowing down at the moment when the rules of cultural encounter might say to keep moving. This course will start with three influential andvery different kinds of close reading, as practiced byWilliam Empson, Roland Barthes, Erich Auerbach. We will then look at a broader range of figures, including Theodor Adorno, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller and Helen Vendler. As much as possible, the seminar will use these texts as spring-boards and reference-points for discussing the function and nature of “close reading” in students’ own critical, scholarly or literary work.
Provisional Schedule:
Tuesday Sept 26 Introduction
Tuesday October 3: Empson
William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
Optional: Paul de Man, “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism” (handout)
Michael Wood, “William Empson” (handout)
October 10: Barthes
S/Z (1970)
Optional: “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (handout)
Selections from Roland Barthes (handout)
October 17: Auerbach
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946), Selections
Optional: “Introduction: Purpose and Method,” from Literary Language and Its Public in
Late Latin Antquity(Auerbach)
October 24: Hermeneutic Circles
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” and
“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in The Interpretation of Cultures
Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well-Wrough Urn
Shoshana Felman, “To Open the Question” in Literature and Psychoanalysis
Stanley Fish, “Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling” inSurprised by Sin: The
Reader in Paradise Lost
October 31: Cultural Criticism: Theodor Adorno
Adorno, selections from Minima Moralia(1951)
November 7: Art Criticism: T. J. Clark
T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2008) and selections
from The Painting of Modern Life (1984)
November 14: D. A. Miller
D. A. Miller, JaneAusten, or the Secret of Style(2003)
Optional: D. A. Miller, Hidden Hitchcock (2016)
November 21: THANKSGIVING BREAK
November 28: Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler, The Odes of JohnKeats (1985)
December 5: Conclusion/Review
Franco Moretti, from Distant Reading (2013)
Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, “Surface Reading” (2009)
Assignments:
1. Some weeks there will be specific responses or preparation that I’ll ask for. These will be geared toward facilitating discussion -- and, in particular, toward the challenge of absorbing and engaging the book-length material we are reading most weeks.
2. Short Essay (500 words, due October 15). Describe a significant experience of reading. What was an important or interesting text that you read closely? And what constituted this reading as a “close reading”? Or what was an important or influential critical text that distinguished, for you, the fault line between “reading” and “close reading”? How did this distinction emerge? These will be shared and integrated into the discussion.
2. Presentation (10-15 minutes). Presentations will take place throughout the quarter and are aimed to draw connections between the texts and questions in our course and your own individual critical and research interests. You might again want to consider an act of reading that clarifies the differences, or the tensions, between reading and “close reading.” The subject matter of this presentation is open. You can offer a reading of a literary text (including something that you’ve already worked on or thought about) or consider an example of critical work outside of or adjacent to the syllabus. In either case, the presentation should dwell in part on the intersection of a critical argument and a literary text: what are the strategies for selection and analysis, for integrating literature into argument, for paraphrase, citation, synthesis, or abstraction of the text? If close reading often involves a moment of discovery (where we see a text one way and then -- under the pressure of our own or another critic’s reading practice -- see something else) what is the nature, and significance of what’s found and what’s (exposed as) hidden? While we can’t read too much more material for these presentations, students should feel free to distribute some material beforehand to the class (either literary or critical).
3. Final essay, 12-15 pages. This essay can explore one of the primary texts in our class, or elaborate some of the problems and questions that we’ve broached in relation to other material.
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