Welcome to Closely Reading!

A new essay series about the art of engaging honestly with the stories all around us.

Welcome!

Welcome to Closely Reading, a weekly essay series where I closely read a cultural artifact—a film, a novel, a poem, a painting, an advertisement, or something else—to reveal some of its inner workings, to poke at its mysteries, to understand it better.

The goal is really that: better understanding. And the specific kind of understanding I’m after in these musings and analyses is the kind that adds, rather than reduces, meaning. That’s really the art of close reading: attuning yourself to the crafted nature of something that’s been created or molded or invented, and asking yourself why it has the effect that it does on you, or on a part of culture at large. Good close reading, in my view, generates: it creates questions, lines of inquiry, deeper mysteries, lots of good and hard things to wonder about.

“For some, wonder, as a reflex of naiveté, begets new wonders of an intellectual kind. The famed physicist Richard Feynman asserted that the astonishment he felt when seeing a beautiful flower led to ever-deeper layers of scientific inquiry: “The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn’t so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower. The color of the flower is red. Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do they have an aesthetic sense? And so on. I don’t see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds.””

— from Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, page 181.

In today’s inaugural letter to you, my dear and so-far-unknown readers (and hopefully subscribers!), I wanted to tell you a little bit about why close reading is so important to me as a daily practice — why, beyond a fun exercise I learned in college, close reading has become a way of being in the world for me.

Long story short: learning to close read changed my life.

When I was a first-year college student, I found myself awed and nervous in my first humanities course, taught by a tenured English professor who scared the bejeezus out of me. She was serious, strict, and absolutely brilliant. She was also deeply ambitious because, in that course, made up of mostly freshmen Honors students, she assigned Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and expected us to read it, in its entirety, in under a month.

(If you’ve never encountered Foucault’s work: suffice it to say, it’s properly dense.)

I had never in my life been trusted to genuinely engage with big ideas. I’d received steady streams of mainstream Mormon theology, core curriculum, AP content for advanced high school courses—basically, whatever would earn me a lot of gold stars, heavenly brownie points, and social ease. I’d been told since I was 12 years old that the best job for me, if I thought of anything other than motherhood, would be one like dental hygienist, where I could set my own hours and, it was always implied, “be home with the kids.” I often felt as though the people giving me this professional advice—family, teachers, neighbors, friends—had never actually met me.

I entered college without a major and without any real direction. I applied and was admitted to an Honors program, so my entire tuition was paid for. I had early admissions into top courses with leading professors in virtually every department. Yet I had no idea what was possible for me or how to ask about any of it.

What’s more: I showed up not knowing that I was allowed to raise my hand to ask questions. I’d been taught only to raise mine when I knew the perfect answer. I spoke when spoken to and sat reverently otherwise. I’d given up favorite toys as a child because I was a “peacemaker” and I won the “altruism” award in my high school psychology class to unsurprised applause. Uncomfortable feelings were to be avoided at all costs; discomfort and the unknown were danger zones, meant to be carefully gated off and kept from my consciousness. I’d been taught to bear rote testimony of all the things I “knew beyond a shadow of a doubt,” a scripted certainty that felt flat coming out of my mouth, no matter how hard I tried to believe it.

I entered that humanities classroom having been raised in an environment where I was never expected or asked to take anything seriously or to look at any situation in detail or with an ounce of criticism. In fact, I’d been routinely taught to not ask questions, to “doubt my doubts,” a heinous motto, ubiquitous in my cultural world.

This professor upended my expectations for myself and for my environment. She called on me when my hand wasn’t raised. She bluntly told me I was wrong, often, because I was. She asked what words like “culpability” and “extraneous” and “archeology” meant—and kept a dictionary in the room so we could find the definitions we did not know. She didn’t ask me how I felt about an idea or a passage; she’d read a sentence aloud and simply ask me to paraphrase it. Not to make it mean something else through our interpretation, to fancifully add to an idea and perform mental gymnastics to fit it into an existing framework (the only model I’d ever encountered) but to, as clearly and cleanly as possible, inspect what each phrase meant. She wanted us to understand these ideas for their own sake, to clearly get what was at stake so that we could engage honestly with the work.

Through all this, she taught me the graceful, intentional art of curiosity and the bravery of asking questions. She moved meticulously, even tediously, through thick sentences of Foucauldian prose. She modeled, as magnificently and patiently as anyone ever would throughout my entire 10-year English education, across masters and Ph.D. training, how to sit with difficult ideas and trust yourself to puzzle them out.

She also taught me how to honestly pressure-test ideas. I had always felt that questions were threatening and unwelcome; in her classroom, they were expected and required. She gave me permission to ask myself about basic reading comprehension in a whole new way. She didn’t ask me to read to recite or fit ideas into a 5-paragraph essay; she asked me to read to genuinely, really understand. It’s no exaggeration to say that I felt my brain crackling with electrifying energy when I was in her classroom. When I left it, each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, I found myself dazed and glowy, alive with something wholly new to me: pulses of genuine curiosity and wonder.

It was like discovering that I had gills—and that’s why living out of water had made me feel so numb and anxious. It was like finally, willingly diving into a world that felt made for me; a place where it was so incredibly easy to breathe. Reading Foucault with a fantastically intimidating professor who saw something in me that no one ever had before, I finally woke up to my own life—my own mind, my own ideas, my own potential. I had permission to stop performing fancy rote memorization of words beyond my vocabulary and understanding, a relief that I felt in my marrow.

Instead, I was learning to ask myself: “Do I actually know what this word means?” “Do I get what this is suggesting?” “Does this idea relate to other ideas I’ve heard before? How?” “Do I understand what this is asking me to believe? Do I believe it?”

I finally had permission to be wrong, to not know things, to engage honestly with the world of ideas. Learning the art of close reading changed my entire life.

So, what’s close reading?

Close reading is an art of engagement, a way of interacting with the world around you by asking questions. It’s an analytical reading method that helps you develop an ever-deepening trust in your own curiosity, in your ability to experience something and to care about what you felt in that experience. It’s a way of taking seriously the effects that ideas have on us.

Imagine a book or poem or painting is like a machine. The art of close reading asks: how does that machine work? What’s it made of? What does it produce? Who runs it? Who needs it? Where does it take us?

What it is not: a treasure hunt for buried pleasures or a sloppy detective’s game—both of which assume that meaning is somehow in hiding. It is also not a self-fulfilling prophesy that starts with meaning and cherry-picks only the evidence that proves you right.

What it is: honest intellectual and emotional engagement. When honestly close reading, we embrace the complicated reality that meaning is both found and created in the act of our engagement. Close reading awakens us to that dance between ontology and epistemology.

At its heart, close reading is a belief that what you experienced when you interacted with a piece of culture — a story, a painting, a game, a film — is worth noticing. That in addition to the worthiness of paying attention to the culture around us, there is worthiness in paying attention to our own minds, to our own stories, to our own methods for making and maintaining meaning. There is value in questioning all of it, in asking how well we understand it, in creating space for what we do not, and cannot, know.

Simply put: Close reading produces wonder.

“The term wonder is encoded with not only a sense of pleasurable astonishment but also the arousal of intellectual curiosity. We see the rainbow, are filled with wonder, and also begin to wonder: How did it come into being? For both Plato and Aristotle, wonder is, not surprisingly, the beginning of philosophy. When Michel Foucault declared: “I dream of a new age of curiosity,” he situated curiosity firmly in the territory of wonder, defining it as “a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd” and as “a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing.” For him, curiosity was the direct effect of wonder and fundamental to intellectual inquiry. It was the driving force behind philosophical investigations”

— from Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, page 180.

What to expect.

Every Sunday, I’ll post close readings of what I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to that week. Bonus content, like longer essays about specific genres or methodologies, will roll out on a more random basis, and may drop during the week.

Right now, everything I post is free — all you need to do is subscribe!

I sincerely hope that if you find any value in visiting this space and reading my thoughts on books, movies, and art, you’ll find yourself more eagerly engaging with your own. That, for me, is one of the best effects of close reading—how contagiously inviting it is.

In a favorite poem of mine, the poet Rob Carney asks: “Why do we divide our lives into stories? And how come stories multiply our lives?” I’m eager and excited to wonder about those questions here, with you.

More soon!

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