Musings on Close Reading

It was only in my senior year of high school in AP English Literature that I learned about close reading. In fact, my teacher was shocked that we hadn’t learned about it sooner. Hitherto, I was expected to read for plot detail and perhaps obvious themes. It was only after I learned how to close read that I appreciated poetry because I was easily frustrated by my inability to immediately glean the poem’s “message” (I assumed that all poems had a moral, or message). In high school, close reading a poem meant identifying all of the literary devices and discussing how they all contribute to the poem’s “purpose”. To argue that a poem was in fact, metapoetry was considered a “cop out,” what English students argued when they didn’t understand the poem. Even in my poetry class last year at my old school (I transferred as a sophomore this year to Penn), this metapoetry argument was laughable and there was such a thing as “reading too closely” to the point of making things up and seeing what you wanted to see in the text for the sake of a paper.

I think that with all works of art, including literature, sometimes the meaning that we derive from the text and how the text is used is more important than those that the author intends. I remember hearing from an ethnomusicology lecture that Aretha Franklin’s song “Respect” was used in some Women’s Rights movements despite the lyrics’ references to prostitution. The point was that the people paid attention to the word “respect” of the chorus and derived their meaning from it, independent of its lyrics or of the composer’s intention. In the end, it didn’t matter what the song actually said, but how it was used/how it was read by its audience. Similarly, while Uncle Tom’s Cabin was intended to be an abolitionist novel, “Uncle Tom” is now used to describe blacks that sympathize with whites. But this method of reading/or understanding music is obviously specific to the reader. In my case, I don’t listen to the lyrics of a song and its significance to me comes from its rhythm/mood, if I can dance to it. I suppose that I approach some literary texts in the same manner. While I can objectively see the value in all literary texts (I can appreciate the author’s experimentation with a new sort of narration, for instance), I am particularly fond of texts in which I have discovered a personal significance, at least initially. Deriving personal meaning from a text is especially useful when attacking a dense work of fiction—it becomes less intimidating and has helped me examine the text more critically without qualms. This personal approach to reading is how D.A. Miller approaches Austen. He finds that he, like Austen herself, is a master of Style for he does not subscribe to societal norm of heterosexuality and of a man disliking Jane Austen. Miller does not sacrifice Style in exchange for Personhood just as Austen’s narrative voice remains neuter in not engaging in the marriage plot of which it narrates.