Reflections on Close Reading

Having completed the requirements for an English major at Penn, for me, reading Rabinowitz made a lot of sense because I’ve experienced most of it. It’s true that we are taught that “good reading is slow, attentive to linguistic nuance and [especially] suspicious of surface meanings” (230). At some point, we are conditioned to believe that the best papers are the most subversive to an author’s intention, if that intention is clear, or at least subversive to the norms of the historical period. Also, the idea that close reading can allow a student to reclaim a work to conform to their beliefs is absolutely true. Part of the temptation of being a critic, both in class discussions and in papers, is to make your own soap box and espouse your personal philosophies on life. Interpreting literature is not like math where there is only one right answer.

Two musings on possible ways to go beyond close reading:

1) What does it mean to “read” a text? From Rabinowitz’s observation that the New Critics’ assume the production of texts comes the idea that the physical text is infallible—the words on the page are not to be questioned. We merely assume “that the text we have are the texts the authors wrote, thus conveniently ignoring the interference of publication as an economic and cultural institution” (231). Questioning intentionality, historical context, and the instability of language itself is fair game, but not the materiality of the text. What if we began to think about the meaning behind the print as a way to construct new meanings about a text? What if instead of the relevant literature of the time, we looked at the history of printing and publishing? Thinking specifically about the plays of Shakespeare, and the idea of publisher as author, there are material constraints that limit plot and drastically affect the text we take for authority. There is meaning in the physical process that is often overlooked.

2) In the Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks argues that all good poetry, preconditioned by an ability to close read it, is not only paradoxical but meta-poetry. What if we used that same theory to think about epistolary novels as intrinsic commentaries about modes of reading? Without the benefit of narrative voice, a novel comprised entirely of letters necessitates that everyone is a reader. Can parallels be drawn between reading and hermeneutic practice and the way we conceive personal character? Whether it is a detective novel or an early novel of sentiment, how does reading the very act of reading incriminate a plot outside of the one the author may or may not have intended?