Reading Too "Close": Invading Other People's Personal Space

There are so many methods of reading, each of which will produce a unique and different reading from a single text. While I by no means am advocating the school of thought which says "You're reading too much into it," I think we need to take a step back as readers.

We carry around our own messages to project onto our readings of texts, a collection of all our personal experiences and our knowledge base. This sort of reading can be valuable on a personal level because you, as an individual, are finding something you value within the text from your own life.

However, when we study close reading through the medium of literary criticism, we are being given readings secondhand. D.A. Miller's book is an enjoyable read and highly thought provoking, but is it too close in a personal sense to be taken as a good model for future readings? The personalization that such an essay projects onto an analysis can be misleading.

When Said capitalizes on the casual references to Antigua of Mansfield Park, he is passing over the reference to the Quarterly Review that allows for a reading of opposite political leaning. His personal history led him to ignore certain facts when historicizing.

Since we all do have histories, we need to recognize that we carry them with us in our writing and reading. As such, close reading cannot be universalized, it needs to be acknowledged as an intensely personal form of analysis. That being the case, when we read criticism we must keep in mind that it is a personal perspective on a written work and not a reading at large. It is a work of art in its own right.