Close reading in crisis times

The question ‘What do literary critics do now?’ contains two parts, or perhaps two orders of magnitude. The first is methodological: what are the protocols of literary criticism today? The second is existential: what is the recourse of literary criticism, faced as it seems to be with disciplinary collapse? One possible answer to these entangled concerns, posed indirectly by Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century and more squarely by On Close Reading, uses the technical question of method to tackle the second, more anxious and encompassing question of institutional legitimacy. Our self-justification for continuing to do the work of literary criticism depends upon a better understanding– more deeply historical and more finely attentive to matters of technique– of our shared procedures, which amount to a discipline. In offering this answer, such state-of-the-discipline books reduce the defensive (and probably unanswerable) cri de coeur from the heart of the crisis to the more manageable proportions of the daily business of the way we read now.