A Century of “Close Reading”

Abstract Students undertaking a close reading and scholars studying the practice ask the same question: What exactly is “close reading”? While we now associate the phrase with literary critics of the 1930s–1950s, they themselves infrequently invoked it as a term of art. Since then, scholars have struggled to define close reading beyond the vague notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” While compiling the bibliography for John Guillory’s book On Close Reading , I created a free online archive, which gathers over 2,500 statements on the practice: www.closereadingarchive.org . In harvesting key quotations from this archive, this cento adheres to Edward Said’s insight: “single phrases” can “contain a whole library of meanings.” What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought. Whether from critics well known or lesser known, to poets who have commented on the subject, to government reports and school catalogs, the items cumulatively corroborate that close reading has persisted as the heart of the critical enterprise. I hope, of course, that these excerpts entice readers to survey the online archive and thereby assemble their own alternative accounts.