Sufficient Passion: An Epistemology of Historicist Close Reading

Abstract: This essay makes three arguments. (1) Though obvious if one attends to everyday practice, it nevertheless remains necessary to contend, because of the intimate association today between close reading and New Criticism, that close reading is central to most historicist scholarship in literary studies; (2) Erich Auerbach is the crucial figure through which historicism, in the academy in the United States in the 1980s, adopted close reading, in traditions that pass through Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Greenblatt, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said; and (3) the epistemology of historicist close reading in the traditions that inherited Auerbach depend, finally, on humanist faith in the faculty of the historical imagination, which, to succeed, must mount sufficient passion. In the end, the essay considers the degree to which epistemology stands against aesthetics as criteria for evaluating close reading in literary studies today.