This review is taken from PN Review 284, Volume 51 Number 6, July - August 2025.
on Close Reading
John Guillory, On Close Reading, with an annotated bibliography by Scott Newstok (University of Chicago Press) £16
The Return of Close Reading
‘All respectable poetry invites close reading.’ Thus I.A. Richards in a text often seen as a seminal document of twentieth-century Anglophone literary studies, Practical Criticism (1929). But what is close reading? John Guillory’s ‘small book’, as his preface calls it – it is really more of an essay padded out by often extensive footnotes and Scott Newstok’s useful bibliography – argues that close reading tended to be taken for granted as a core practice of literary study that was little studied in itself, a mode of analysis that went largely unanalysed during the mid-twentieth-century reign of Leavisian criticism in England and New Criticism in the USA. Guillory points out that Practical Criticism, despite its use of the term on this one occasion, offers no clear definition nor sustained demonstration of close reading or of the procedures it might entail; his book might more justly be called Misreading and How To Avoid It.
In the twenty years that followed the publication of Practical Criticism, Guillory observes, the ‘term “close reading”’ was ‘relatively uncommon in the writing of literary critics’, conspicuous by its absence ‘from the work of William Empson, F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt’ and others. Some passing references can be traced – Guillory gives examples from Stanley Edgar Hyman, René Wellek and Austin Warren, and John Holloway; but none of these were New or Leavisian critics.
Partly perhaps because of this lack of engagement with close reading as an explicit concept and procedure, there was also ...
‘All respectable poetry invites close reading.’ Thus I.A. Richards in a text often seen as a seminal document of twentieth-century Anglophone literary studies, Practical Criticism (1929). But what is close reading? John Guillory’s ‘small book’, as his preface calls it – it is really more of an essay padded out by often extensive footnotes and Scott Newstok’s useful bibliography – argues that close reading tended to be taken for granted as a core practice of literary study that was little studied in itself, a mode of analysis that went largely unanalysed during the mid-twentieth-century reign of Leavisian criticism in England and New Criticism in the USA. Guillory points out that Practical Criticism, despite its use of the term on this one occasion, offers no clear definition nor sustained demonstration of close reading or of the procedures it might entail; his book might more justly be called Misreading and How To Avoid It.
In the twenty years that followed the publication of Practical Criticism, Guillory observes, the ‘term “close reading”’ was ‘relatively uncommon in the writing of literary critics’, conspicuous by its absence ‘from the work of William Empson, F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt’ and others. Some passing references can be traced – Guillory gives examples from Stanley Edgar Hyman, René Wellek and Austin Warren, and John Holloway; but none of these were New or Leavisian critics.
Partly perhaps because of this lack of engagement with close reading as an explicit concept and procedure, there was also ...
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