the history of close reading

a guest post from Scott Newstok, professor and author

Today, I’m thrilled to share a guest post from professor, researcher, and author Scott Newstok. Recently, he collaborated on a new book all about the history of the practice of reading closely—and the book came out this week!

In today’s piece, Professor Newstok shares his top ten insights from the research he did for the book. I personally had no idea the history of close reading was so tangly and wild and weird — and I can’t wait to learn more.

The book cover — I love it!

You can read more about this new book, On Close Reading, here. I am so ready to get my copy and dive into the text. (With my ruler and pen ready to annotate, of course. You kind of have to closely read a book on close reading, don’t you?)

I learned so much — and I was especially surprised to learn that close reading was originally practiced as a way to judge literature, rather than a way to engage with and better understand literature (as I was always taught).

I hope you learn something new, too.

Take it away, Professor!

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Close Reading: 10 Insights from a Century of Criticism

by Scott Newstok

When Samuel Johnson, the great 18^th century wit, was asked “what is poetry?” he retorted: “We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”

Much the same could be said when the term “close reading” comes up today: it sounds familiar, yet it’s vexingly difficult to define. What exactly is close reading, and where did it come from?

I’ve collaborated with literary scholar John Guillory on his book On Close Reading, which addresses two puzzles. First, why did critics of 1930s-1950s—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom deploy the term? And second, why have we not been better able to define close reading, beyond the vague notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page”?

For Guillory, these two puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all; rather, they were urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature. For this task, they developed “close reading” as a technique, a particular kind of procedure (like riding a bicycle, or playing an instrument) that can be described, but not prescribed—and one that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation. In the words of I. A. Richards, it “is a craft, in the sense that mathematics, cooking, and shoe-making are crafts. It can be taught.” Close reading, in Guillory’s argument, entails “showing the work of reading.”

In conjunction with Guillory’s volume, I’ve compiled a free online archive excerpting scholarship:

www.closereadingarchive.org

In harvesting quotations from over 2500 sources, I’ve followed Edward Said’s insight that even “single phrases” can “contain a whole library of meanings.”

In aggregate, this archive corroborates that the phrase “close reading” has remained in contentious circulation for a century. Constructed on the principle of quotation rather than narration, the archive recovers a tacit discourse that is happening in, below, and through all sorts of other arguments.

As you explore the archive, you might find yourself surprised by the sheer volume of writing on this topic, which has steadily increased since the 1970s, apparently unaffected by shifting disciplinary tides. Patterns begin to emerge: early comments about close reading tend to stem from outside the university, while scholars today increasingly attempt to establish the genealogy of the practice.

Searching permits you to gather your own harvest—whether of one critic’s discussions of “close reading,” an anthology of poems, or even a painting. What follows are a few of the insights I’ve gleaned, but I hope that those who survey the archive will assemble their own alternative accounts.

1. Close reading before “close reading”

When Francis Bacon attempted to define the genre of “the essay,” he noted that “The word is late, but the thing is auncient.” Much the same has been argued for “close reading,” whose numerous forerunners appeared long before the professional practice was consolidated a century ago. Instances of reading closely in this more capacious sense are legion, and include the long history of biblical commentary as well as the philological and textual criticism that emerged during the Renaissance. Others have sought to align close reading with the French technique of explication de texte, a late efflorescence of the commentary tradition. But close reading, as formalized in the early-mid-20^th century, represents a break with this tradition, as well as a break with literary history.

2. “All respectable poetry invites close reading”

While some have alleged that I. A. Richards’ assertion that “all respectable poetry invites close reading” served as a motto for New Criticism, his words weren’t restated in print until a 1948 Master’s thesis—nearly two decades after the 1929 publication of Practical Criticism. Strikingly, none of the New Critics themselves directly quoted Richards’s turn of phrase as precedent, though Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren echoed its cadences in their influential 1938 volume Understanding Poetry: “really good poetry will stand a great deal of close inspection.” Even Richards himself never again spoke of “close reading” across the remaining half century of his life. What in retrospect looks like a slogan to us may have been more of a passing quip. Might Richards have been recalling Oscar Wilde’s witticism “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”?

3. The well-wrought term

Before the consensus around the phrase “close reading” ultimately settled, competing alternatives included John Crowe Ransom’s “close criticism,” F. R. Leavis’s “close analytical study,” William Empson’s “verbal analysis,” and William K. Wimsatt’s “explication”/“explicitation,” as well as a host of variations such as “elucidation,” “exegesis,” “exposition,” “interpretation,” or “paraphrase” (some of which are still in play today).

Even a single critic’s vacillating terminology can be instructive, as evidenced across the career of Brooks. None of his early books deploys the precise wording “close reading,” yet they all hover ambivalently around analogues such as “closer reading,” “closer acquaintance,” “thoughtful reading,” “close analysis,” “close inspection,” “deeper level,” “close scrutiny,” and “exhaustive” readings. It’s almost as if Brooks were auditioning candidates for an apt catchphrase. A certain defensiveness about the term “close reading” is expressed in later decades even by Brooks himself, who in 1979 still seemed reluctant to own the term, suggesting that another phrase, “adequate reading,” would do just as well.

4. The forest for the trees

The Tudor adage about being unable to “see the wood for the trees”—dating at least as far back as 1533—has served as a figure for the limitations of close reading ever since 1947, when a reviewer caricatured the New Critic as someone who “saw the trees, the barks, the veins of the leaves, the roots, but he missed the whole forest, such was his absorption. . . . the close criticism of poetry does indeed lead to an inattention to the poem as a whole.” The identification of close reading with missing-the-forest-for-the-“Trees” perhaps reached its apogee in 1967, when a satirically hyper-myopic analysis of Joyce Kilmer’s 1913 poem “Trees” was published. To this day, you’ll still hear people complain that close reading is too close, and misses the bigger picture.

5. When life gives you lemons . . .

The phrase “close reading” didn’t appear in the title of a published essay until 1958, when a book reviewer asserted that “Close Reading Was Not Enough.” This might imply that arguments against close reading belatedly flushed the term into the open, out from its latency. John Wain’s 1955 Interpretations, the essay collection reviewed, had already generated sharp responses from others, including a perceptive evaluation by American poet Donald Hall: “The partisanship displayed for close reading has not been seen on this side of the Atlantic for at least twenty years . . . in fact, it has become sometimes a convention as blunt, stupid and mechanical as any habit of criticism has ever been” (45). Even more acerbic was T. S. Eliot, who famously dismissed the volume’s method as “the lemon-squeezer school of criticism.” But Wain had the last word, titling the introduction to his revised 1972 edition “On the Squeezing of Lemons.”

6. Secondary-school pedagogy, part 1

It was only in the 1960s that the first guides to “close reading” for secondary school teachers began to appear. A 1968 study of high school classrooms worried that the “‘bloodless’ exercises in the close reading of a work . . . were completely removed from literature, life, or anything of meaning to students.” The authors of the study attributed “the inadequate attention devoted to close reading in our nation’s schools” to “heavy teaching load[s]”—in fact, they concluded that “one of the most important findings” was “the discovery that sustained attention to close reading may be possible only when teaching loads are reduced to permit adequate preparation.” Louise Rosenblatt was less sanguine about what she perceived to be the dismal results of “several decades in which ‘close reading’ has been increasingly stressed in colleges and secondary schools.” From her perspective, “impersonal or objective criticism” fruitlessly “busied itself with exploitation of the techniques of ‘close reading.’”

7. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is”

For decades, literary theory’s proponents maintained that it was an elaboration of (an exhausted) close reading. While others (e.g., Richard Poirier or Christopher Ricks) have disputed the affiliation, “close reading,” averred one critic, “occupies a motherhood position in critical method,” authorizing the work of scholars as varied as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stephen Greenblatt, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Jacques Derrida himself held that “political, ethical and juridical responsibility requires a task of infinite close reading.”

8. To infinity . . . and beyond!

In the 1990s, one senses a mounting impatience with close reading, with exasperation evident in titles such as “Against Close Reading,” “On the Impossibility of Close Reading,” and “Should College English Be Close Reading?” (the author’s answer: “no”). As if in response to pent-up demand, alternative nomenclature began to proliferate once more in the early 2000s, just as it had before the 1950s settlement; new modifiers of “reading” included: actual, affective, analytical, assigned, attentive, calibrated, close but not deep, closer, cognitive, compulsive, critical, deep, denaturalized, denotative, descriptive, dialectical, digital, distant, distracted, ecological, electronic, embodied, engaged, enumerative, extensive, flat, formal, hyper, immersive, inattentive, intensive, interfaced, just, large, lay, literal, literary, lyric, machine, medium-close, mere, micro, middle, middle-distant, nostalgic, not, object-oriented, outraged, paranoid, patient, pleasure, plural, postcritical, professional, proximate, reflective, reparative, repeat, responsible, restorative, serial, slow, surface, suspicious, symptomatic, technical, tedious, thin, thick, too-close, tracked, translated, uncritical, wakeful . . . “the rest were long to tell.”

9. “To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance”

In the wake of two polemical essays from 2000, Franco Moretti was frequently credited with coining the spatial trope of “distant reading”—what Jonathan Arac called “new formalism without close reading.” As many have observed, the practice (of quantitative textual analysis) preceded Moretti, whether you point to J. F. Burrows’s 1987 computational study of Jane Austen, Josephine Miles’s 1940s hand-tabulated phrasal forms, Edith Rickert’s 1927 statistical analyses of style, or an even earlier experiments in the 19^th century. Yet Moretti did give “distant reading” a kind of escape velocity—launching the phrase into public discourse (and social media), where it could be sloganized as a ready antonym to (purportedly) antiquated scholarly routines.

10. Secondary-school pedagogy, part 2: The Common Core

It’s no exaggeration to assert that the Common Core State Standards Initiative has done more to disseminate the notion of “close reading” in schools than any other single event, person, or institution. In but a few years, this initiative re-enshrined close reading in primary and secondary education across the United States; whether that’s been a beneficial development remains a matter of fervent contention. Intriguingly, the initial 2010 CCSS guidance for English Language Arts & Literacy didn’t directly invoke the phrase “close reading.” Within the context of the CCSS, the precise term “close reading” seems to have first appeared in 2011 workshops led by David Coleman; shortly thereafter, “close reading” was formally incorporated in the 2012 Publisher’s Criteria. Sensing an opportunity, educational presses and consultants hastened to produce handouts, textbooks, lesson plans, and associated pedagogical materials, leading to the remarkable post-2010 surge in publications about “close reading.” Many veteran teachers were skeptical about what they perceived to be the latest abstract buzzword; some vehemently opposed the apparent incoherence of expecting close reading to somehow come before basic comprehension at the primary level.

“Close reading” today

Animated in part by the emergence of “distant reading” (as well as the above-noted litany of alternative reading practices), conferences, special issues, handbooks, anthologies, and edited collections have sought to articulate rationales behind close reading, as well as probe its history. Just as the arrival of new media in the 1920s induced reflections on the practice of reading, the advent of machine reading in the 2020s has encouraged many to revisit the enduring value of decelerated or “de-industrialized” reading.

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Scott Newstok is professor of English and executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of How to Think like Shakespeare and the editor of several books, including the forthcoming How to Teach Children, a volume of Montaigne’s essays on education.

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Thank you for these incredible insights, Professor Newstok!

I cannot wait to begin to “gather my own harvest,” in the archive of close reading history and research. And T.S. Eliot has me thinking I need a lemon as my logo around here—I’m a proud student of the lemon-squeezer school!

If you loved today’s post and want to learn more about the archive, I encourage you to bookmark any of the incredible links above to begin harvesting your own ideas and learnings. You can also leave questions or comments for Professor Newstok in today’s comment thread—I’ll make sure they make it back to him!

‘Til next time, happy reading!

Note: this article was last updated on January 13, 2025.