ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 20

The Closeness of Close Reading

Jonathan Culler
The author is Class of In many En­glish departments, and I daresay foreign language departments as well,
’16 Professor of En­glish the practice of close reading, of examining closely the language of a literary work or
and chair of Romance a section of it, has been something we take for granted, as a sine qua non of literary
Studies at Cornell
study, a skill that we expect our students to master and that we certainly expect of job
University. A version of
the article was presented
candidates, whatever other sorts of critical activities they may flamboyantly display.
at the 2009 ADE-ADFL But perhaps precisely because we do generally agree to value it, we have not given
Summer Seminar East it much thought recently, at least not in broad public critical discussion. As a good
in P­rovidence. Saus­surian, I believe that meaning is the product of differences—any term is defined
by what it is opposed to—so to think about close reading one should begin with
what it is contrasted with. We don’t really seem to have an antonym for close read-
ing, which may be part of the problem. The most obvious might be Franco Moretti’s
“distant reading,” but this is scarcely reading at all: Moretti’s fascinating analyses of
large-­scale trends, whether in the spread of genres across Europe, the publication of
translations, the length of titles of novels, or marriage patterns in Jane Austen’s nov-
els, provide extremely valuable perspectives in literary studies but are too divergent
from regular modes of literary analysis to serve in a defining contrast.1 This distant
reading would turn any sort of attention to an individual text into close reading.
Perhaps what contrasts with close reading is not distant reading but something
like sloppy reading, or casual reading, an assessment of “life and works,” or even
thematic interpretation or literary history. The fact that we have difficulty saying
what close reading is opposed to suggests that it has served as a slogan more than as
a name for a particular definable practice. In a book that does propose an alternative
practice, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contempo-
rary Poetry, Peter Middleton calls close reading “our contemporary term for a hetero-
geneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions” (5).2
There are indeed different traditions of close reading: practices inherited from
Anglo-­American New Criticism and those that derive from the French tradition of
explication de texte, as well as more recent versions of deconstructive, rhetorical, and
psychoanalytic reading. A recent volume collecting distinguished examples of close
reading emphasizes that while the practice is associated with the formalism of the
New Criticism, critics of historicist and other persuasions have also practiced close
attention to the language, tone, and figures of a text (Lentricchia and Dubois). In
the En­glish department at Cornell, people do very different things with literature,
but we all seem to subscribe or at least pay lip service to the idea that close reading
is important to what we do, and it is always pertinent criticism of a job candidate to
say that in the end his or her writing samples do not include much close reading or
that he or she does not really do close reading. Close reading, like motherhood and
apple pie, is something we are all in favor of, even if what we do when we think we
are doing close reading is very different.
ADE and the Association of Departments of En­g lish are trademarks owned by the Modern Language Association.
© 2010 by the Association of Departments of En­g lish, CrossRef DOI: 10.1632/ade.149.20, ISSN 0001–0898
ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 21

The Closeness of Close Middleton’s formulation, “a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of prac-
Reading tices and assumptions,” seems to presume that close reading ought to be a more
homogeneous and organized practice. Whether that is so or not, we should at least
Jonathan Culler
reflect on our assumptions and what we believe the practice is. I think above all that
we cannot just take close reading for granted, especially as we welcome into the uni-
versity a generation of students raised in instant messaging, where language becomes
a crude, ever more abbreviated code for communicating minimal information. Let
me turn, as a point of departure for thinking about close reading, to a description of
the practice offered by an immigrant who came to the United States after the Sec-
ond World War and experienced close reading in a well-­known literature course in a
humanities program. In an essay whose title, “The Return to Philology,” provides an
unlikely genealogy for close reading (philology, after all, was what medievalists who
refused really to read were thought to practice), Paul de Man describes the approach
of Reuben Brower’s Hum 6 course at Harvard, a multisection course that attracted
the most talented teaching assistants, eager to work with the distinctive kind of liter-
ary experience generated in this course, in a department where otherwise traditional
literary history was the norm. De Man writes:
Students, as they began to write, were not to say anything that was not derived from
the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could
not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They
were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move
at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly
or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of
tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice
them and honest enough not to hide their non-­understanding behind the screen of
received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.
This very simple rule, surprisingly enough, had far-­reaching didactic consequences.
I have never known a course by which students were so transformed. (23)

This passage from “The Return to Philology” hints at the radical nature of close
reading, achieved through the “analytical rigor” of attention to the philological or
rhetorical devices of language. The results of this pedagogical decision were startling,
de Man reported:
Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse
in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teach-
ing of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or
intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because
it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret
aim of literary teaching to keep hidden.  (24)

De Man describes accurately some of the effects of a certain kind of close reading,
especially in an academic context where literary study concentrated primarily on the
description of how works belonged to a literary period or expressed the underlying
thought of a great author. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, some years
later, this course and courses taught by young faculty members who had worked
in it, were seen as the most serious, most engaged examples of literary study—by
contrast, say, with Walter Jackson Bate’s lecture courses on the greatness of Keats,
ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 22

The Closeness of Close or of Dr. Johnson, who actually sounded rather similar in his account of their deep
Reading commitment to fundamental human values.
De Man’s description helpfully conveys one thing that is crucial to the practice
Jonathan Culler
of close reading: a respect for the stubbornness of texts, which resist easy compre-
hension or description in terms of expected themes and motifs. The close reader
needs to be willing to take seriously the difficulties of singular, unexpected turns of
phrase, juxtapositions, and opacity. Close reading teaches an interest in the strange-
ness or distinctiveness of individual works and parts of works. But the emphases
in de Man’s description on “bafflement” might be taken to suggest that the goal of
close reading is to determine the meaning, to produce an interpretation. In fact, the
work of close reading is not primarily to resolve difficulties but above all to describe
them, to elucidate their source and implications. I would stress that close reading
need not involve detailed interpretation of literary passages (though there is plenty
of that around in close reading, especially when the texts in question are difficult to
understand), but especially attention to how meaning is produced or conveyed, to
what sorts of literary and rhetorical strategies and techniques are deployed to achieve
what the reader takes to be the effects of the work or passage. Thus it involves poet-
ics as much as hermeneutics.
But the passage from de Man does disservice to the discussion of close reading in
one important respect. It makes it sound as though all you need is a negative disci-
pline, a refusal to leap to the kind of paraphrases one has been led to expect, so that
effective close reading requires no technique or training, only an avoidance of bad or
dubious training. The suggestion seems to be that if one strips away these bad habits
and simply encounters the text, without preconceptions, close reading will occur. If, as
de Man puts it, you are “attentive” and “honest,” close reading “cannot fail to respond
to structures of language” that most literary education strives “to keep hidden.” Atten-
tion is important but not, alas, enough. Readers can always fail to respond—though
then de Man might not want to dignify the practice with the name of reading.
It is our conception of close reading as a fundamental practice that makes us want
to believe that it can occur without explicit instruction. As soon as we come up with
accounts of particular operations students should carry out or steps they should
follow, we fear that we are producing something like doctrine about the function-
ing of literary works and steps of a critical method. We want to believe that close
reading is something more basic, more fundamental, than theories of literature or
critical methodologies. Hence, perhaps, our willingness to allow that there are vari-
ous different ways to do close reading—if we insisted that there was one correct way,
we would clearly be championing a particular method or critical orientation and a
particular vision of literature.
But responding to language and textual details is not something that takes place
automatically or necessarily. Instruction is necessary. Though New Critics were
themselves often disdainful of textbooks, which they saw as crude or mechanical, in
the heyday of the New Criticism, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Under-
standing Poetry and then Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense provided instruction in
the things to look out for and questions to ask when confronted with a poem, and
they did much to establish an orthodoxy of close reading. More frequently, though,
ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 23

The Closeness of Close close reading was taught by example. Certainly one reason students were enthusiastic
Reading about Reuben Brower’s course, Hum 6, where there was no textbook, was that they
could learn, both from Brower’s lectures and from talented section leaders in small
Jonathan Culler
discussion groups, how to ask new questions about the functioning of language in
texts and how to come up with observations that were surprising in an educational
context where broad literary historical remarks were the norm. The charismatic ped-
agogue could pose a question you had not thought of about relations between form
and meaning or point to a textual difficulty that had escaped your notice but that
would repay reflection and discussion. Seeing teachers do things with texts that did
not just happen naturally when you confronted the text yourself was crucial to the
success of this course. Students learned not just to avoid the moves made in other
courses but also and especially to make other sorts of moves and attend to puzzles
and difficulties that they might earlier have been inclined to ignore or gloss over.
Partly because of our resistance to textbooks for literary study and explicit instruc-
tions, there exists a wide range of practices of close reading or, as Middleton called
it, “a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices.” The crucial thing is to
slow down, though “slow reading” is doubtless a less useful slogan than either “slow
food” or “close reading,” since slow reading may be inattentive, distracted, lethargic.
Close asks for a certain myopia—a Verfremdungseffekt. It enjoins looking at rather
than through the language of the text and thinking about how it is functioning,
finding it puzzling. Barbara Johnson writes:
Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a
speed-­reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away;
how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking;
how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it. (140)

In her essay “Teaching Deconstructively,” she provides, with an unusually bold ex-
plicitness, a series of examples of different kinds of signifying conflicts or tensions
that students should look for in passages they are studying: ambiguous words, unde-
cidable syntax, incompatibilities between what a text says and what it does, incom-
patibilities between the literal and the figurative, incompatibilities between explicitly
foregrounded assertions and illustrative examples, and so on. Such attention involves
“a careful teasing out of the warring forces of signification that are at work within
the text itself” (141).
There are all sorts of ways of achieving closeness in reading. Very different from
Johnson’s mode is memorization—unfashionable these days but one way to become
intimate with the language of the text. Helen Vendler remarks that musicians learn
the pieces they are going to perform and that critics should not shy away from learn-
ing by heart the poems they are discussing, since this exercise gives a sense of how
elements of the language fit together. A strategy modeled by Roland Barthes in S/Z
is to oblige students to comment on every clause in a passage, identifying the codes
at work in producing whatever meaning they take to be at play there and in the con-
nections between elements of this passage and those elsewhere in the text. The virtue
of such quasi-­mechanical systematicity is to compel a different sort of attention. A
related procedure is promoting close reading of Shakespeare, as Marjorie Garber has
ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 24

The Closeness of Close done, using George Puttenham’s The Art of En­glish Poesy, a Renaissance rhetorical
Reading treatise, and requiring students to find examples of the tropes Puttenham describes.
The goal is to estrange reading, to give it a different optic. Another artificial way of
Jonathan Culler
slowing down reading and producing effects of closeness is translation. This is how
literature used to be taught, of course: the class collectively translated Vergil or Hor-
ace, line by line, learning along the way about rhetorical structures and figures and
things such as mythological allusions. There would be little enthusiasm for bringing
back this sort of class, but as a strategy for encouraging attention to the details of
a text, it has its merits. Certainly working with translation, which is anathema in
many foreign literature classes, is an excellent way to enforce slow and close reading,
of texts in languages students are learning as well as texts in their native languages.
This range of possibilities raises questions about the nature of the closeness of
close reading. In Le plaisir du texte Barthes imagines a typology of pleasures based
on reading neuroses: the fetishist treasures the fragment or turn of phrase; the ob-
sessional is a manipulator of metalanguages and glosses; the paranoid a deep inter-
preter, seeker of hidden meanings; and the hysteric an enthusiast who abandons all
distance to throw himself or herself into the text (Pleasure 63). The fetishist and the
paranoid illustrate quite different modes of closeness, as do the diverse varieties of
what has been called symptomatic reading, which may attend closely to the language
of the text in order to detect ideological complicities or psychological investments,
where a textual detail is a sign of some larger historical or psychological reality. The
notion of closeness might alert us to the importance, for the practice of close read-
ing, of remaining close to the language of the text, even when it is made to serve as a
metalanguage, as in the work of Jacques Derrida, for example, instead of treating the
portions of a text that have been closely examined as markers for a reading whose
interests lie altogether elsewhere.
It may become especially important to reflect on the varieties of close reading and
even to propose explicit models, in an age where new electronic resources make it pos-
sible to do literary research without reading at all: find all the instances of the words
beg and beggar in novels by two different authors and write up your conclusions.
In Sollers écrivain, Barthes suggests that there are five modes of reading Sollers,
reading in different keys, as it were: en piqué, en prisé, en déroulé, en rase-­mottes, and
en plein-­ciel, which might be rendered as a “spearing” reading, a “savoring” reading,
an “unrolling” reading, a “nose to the ground” reading, and a “full horizon” read-
ing (75). The deeply engaged savoring and the word-­by-word nose-­to-­the-­ground
modes would be versions of close reading, as opposed to the opportunistic spear-
ing of tasty morsels, the swift following of the plot in the unrolling mode, and the
synoptic overview of full-­horizon reading. Though this particular typology does not
seem especially promising, its example might serve as a stimulus to better thought
out and more copiously exemplified typologies. We would be better equipped to
value and to promote close reading if we had a more finely differentiated sense of its
modes and a more vivid account of all the types of nonclose reading with which it
contrasts and that give it salience, making it more than something desirable that is
taken for granted.
ADE Bulletin ◆ Number 149, 2010 25

The Closeness of Close Notes

Reading 1. For genres and translations, see Moretti, Atlas and Graphs; for titles, see Moretti, “Style”; and for
Austen, see Moretti, Atlas.
Jonathan Culler 2. Middleton argues that the recognition of the diverse contexts in which poems are encountered is
not irrelevant to their meaning and that reading should take the measure of the distances poems have
traveled. His “distant” thus need not contrast with close reading, since attention to the various distant
contexts in which the poem’s words are encountered can serve an analysis of “the words on the page.”

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1975. Print. Trans. of
Le plaisir du texte.
———. Sollers écrivain. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Print.
———. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1975. Print.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students. New
York: Henry Holt, 1938. Print.
de Man, Paul. “The Return to Philology.” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
21–26. Print.
Johnson, Barbara. “Teaching Deconstructively.” Writing and Reading Differently. Ed. G. Douglas Atkins
and M. L. Johnson. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1986. 140–48. Print.
Lentricchia, Frank, and Andrew Dubois, eds. Close Reading: The Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry.
Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005. Print.
Moretti, Franco. An Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
———. “Style, Inc.: Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850).” Critical Inquiry
36 (2009): 134–58. Print.
Perrine, Laurence. Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1956. Print.
Puttenham, George. The Art of En­glish Poesy. Ed. Frank Wigham and Wayne Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 2007. Print.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.