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Access provided by Duke University Libraries (17 Oct 2016 19:49 GMT)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
What Was “Close Reading”?
A Century of Method in Literary Studies
his article originated as a talk to a group of young digital humanities
scholars seeking to learn about the history of methods in the humanities.1 I am not a historian by profession and it is not my usual role,
but I attempt here to mobilize my sixty years in and around the literary academy to address a double question: how did “close reading”
igure in Anglo-American literary studies over the course of the past
century, and how does it igure now in the discourses of the digital
humanities? At the end, I ofer some general relections on methods,
past and possibly future, in literary studies.
A Parade
Close reading, it has been said, is the “primary methodology” of literary studies ( Jockers 2013, 6). hat is true in a sense, but the term
methodology suggests something more coherent, circumscribed, and
speciically research focused than has been the case here. Reading
individual texts with attention to their linguistic features and rhetorical operations is very diferent, of course, from subjecting large bodies
of digitized materials to the sorts of computational processes now wittily (and mischievously) called “distant reading.” But the term close
reading has been used to name some very diverse activities: from a
New Critic unraveling Shakespearian puns in the 1930s to a Marxist
scholar exposing the political unconscious of Victorian novels in the
1980s or, today, a irst-grader “analyzing” a book by Dr. Seuss in
accord with the directives of the American national Common Core
Curriculum.
If not quite a methodology, however, the practices of close
reading have certainly been a persistent feature of Anglo-American
literary studies. Indeed, their ongoing performance may be the one
constant in a ield notorious for its succession of new “approaches.”
he parade is familiar from textbook rubrics: the old historical philology followed by the New Criticism, structuralism, reader-response
criticism, New Historicism, feminist criticism, deconstruction, cultural studies, ideology critique, and so forth, with many others in
between. Almost any parade becomes comical when it goes on long
minnesota review 87 (2016)
DOI 10.1215/00265667-3630844
© 2016 Virginia Tech
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enough, and the succession of approaches in literary studies has been
seen as showing the futility of all of them. here is good reason to
reject that view, as I shall suggest below. But the point I want to stress
here is that, for all the shifts they relect, every one of the approaches
just named —from the New Criticism, and indeed from the old historical philology, through deconstruction, to ideology critique —
involved reading individual texts closely. he texts varied from presumed literary masterpieces to works of popular culture and documents
of manifest oppression; the discourses that directed their examination
varied from Christian humanism to structuralist linguistics to queer
theory; and the spirit in which they were examined varied from the
appreciative to the disinterested to the deeply suspicious. Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century, whatever the mood, motive,
or materials, if one was teaching literature or doing literary criticism
in the Anglo-American literary academy, one was likely to be reading at least some individual texts closely.
If, as seems to be the case, the practices of close reading have
operated in literary studies not as one method among others but as
virtually deinitive of the ield, then how are we to understand a
method whose advocates deine it in opposition to —and, indeed, as
superseding — precisely those practices? Depending on one’s perspective, the ascendance of “distant reading” can be seen as marking
the dissolution of literary studies, at least as a humanities discipline
(see, for example, Kirsch 2014), or as the proper elevation of the ield
into computational posthumanism. In arguments defending either
of these two opposed views, invocations of “close reading” — celebratory or derogatory —are a recurrent ploy. I consider some of these
invocations below. First, however, a bit of history will be instructive.
A Close Look at Close Reading
he term close reading refers not only to an activity with regard to texts
but also to a type of text itself: a technically informed, ine-grained
analysis of some piece of writing, usually in connection with some
broader question of interest. The practice has multiple ancestors,
including classical rhetorical analysis, biblical exegesis, and legal interpretation, and it also has some cousins, such as iconology and psychoanalysis. All of these would have been familiar to the small group of
accomplished British dons and poets whose eforts to reform literary
study in the 1920s and 1930s came to be called “the New Criticism”
and whose critical essays served as models for the practices that came
to be called “close reading.”
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In its time, the New Criticism was young, cool, and radical.
I. A. Richards was a beginning instructor at Cambridge University
when he assigned the classroom exercises in poetry reading that led to
his inluential book Practical Criticism, published in 1929. William
Empson, a student of Richards, was twenty-three when he wrote Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1947), which became a paradigm of virtuoso close
reading for several generations. T. S. Eliot’s Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism, published in 1920, excoriated dull scholarship
from a position of conident connoisseurship and set the standard for
high-toned literary discriminations.
he views and practices of this group were introduced to American readers in the 1930s by the southern poet and critic John Crowe
Ransom, and they were taken up with particular enthusiasm by two
of his students, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, originally
at Vanderbilt, later at Yale. Brooks and Warren’s coauthored textbook,
Understanding Poetry, irst published in 1938, was immensely inluential. By the time a second edition appeared in 1950, it was being
assigned in more than 250 colleges and universities in the United
States (Davis 2011). Its chapter titles —“Structure,” “Tension,” “Irony,”
“Imagery,” “Rhythm,” “Tone” — are the familiar obsessions of New
Critical close readings, and its large collection of examples and “texts
for further study” weighed heavily in the academic canon for decades
afterward: Shakespeare’s sonnets, Keats’s odes, works by Browning,
Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and modernist works by,
among others, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos
Williams.
he New Criticism was promoted as a corrective for the pedantries of early twentieth-century literary scholarship. But the practices of
close reading themselves were promoted as a speciically pedagogical
remedy for what were seen as the inadequacies of college students:
young men (almost exclusively —we are speaking of the 1920s and
1930s) who, in Brooks’s words, “actually approached Keats’s Ode to a
Nightingale in the same spirit and with the same expectations with
which they approached an editorial in the local county newspaper or
an advertisement in the current Sears, Roebuck catalogue” (1979,
593).2 Indeed, the popularity and persistence of those practices have
often been attributed, not altogether unjustly, to their handiness for
teachers. Some forty years after the publication of Understanding
Poetry, Hugh Kenner, a learned critic of modernist poetry, remarked:
“he curious thing is how a classroom strategy could come to mistake
itself for a critical discipline” (1976, 36; cited by Brooks 1995, 84).
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Kenner was being snide, of course, but the association of close reading
with pedagogy —as distinct from learned criticism —persisted through
much of the century.
To return to the history: Before the New Criticism, in the irst
quarter of the century, the study of literature consisted largely of the
production, transmission, and acquisition of facts about sets of texts.
What one established as a scholar, imparted as a teacher, and learned
as a student were commonly the names of historically important
authors and some basic facts about their lives; the titles, publication
dates, and sources —especially classical —of their major works; relations of inluence among them; and the readily observable features
that distinguished forms, styles, and genres (the medieval romance,
the Petrarchan sonnet, the Jacobean drama, and so forth). One
could say that, before the New Criticism, literary study was “distant
reading” with a vengeance. With the work of the New Critics, it
moved increasingly from illing library shelves with scholarly editions and literary histories to studying and describing how individual texts produced the efects that gave them historical importance
or current interest.
Against the historians and philologists, who treated literary
texts as dusty achievements, the New Critics stressed literature as
art.3 A poem, wrote Ransom, is a “living object” (1937, 601). As
poets and wordsmiths themselves, they were interested in the craft
of text making. As men of letters (Cambridge, Vanderbilt, Yale) and,
in increasing numbers since the 1960s, literary women (the earliest
included poet Josephine Miles at Berkeley), they were appreciators of
aesthetic efects. hough close reading is often described as a method
of interpretation, the New Critics — certainly the irst generation of
them —were concerned less with establishing the meaning of a text
than with understanding its operative machinery. Indeed, a New
Critical “reading” was something like an exercise in reverse engineering: the examination of an artifact to see how it was made and
how it worked.
he aims and spirit of the New Criticism are well represented in
an inaugural piece by Ransom, published in 1937, titled “Criticism,
Inc.” He explains the title: “Professors of literature are learned but not
critical men. . . . Nevertheless it is from the professors of literature . . .
that I should hope eventually for the erection of intelligent standards of criticism. It is their business. . . . Perhaps I use a distasteful
igure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or
Criticism, Ltd” (587–88). he “igure” or metaphor —literary studies
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as a business —would have been “distasteful” because literary academics understood that art and letters were remote from commerce.
hat shared understanding, and the shared antagonism to Big Business and Big Industry, created a bond and otherwise strange fellowship between the conservative southern poets and the left-wing New
York intellectuals who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were the major advocates and practitioners of the New Criticism in the United States.
Ransom, referring in the essay to the relation between historical scholarship and criticism, is clear about which should be up front
and on top: “Behind appreciation . . . is historical scholarship. It is
indispensable. But it is instrumental and cannot be the end itself. In
this respect historical studies have the same standing as linguistic
studies [that is, philology]: language and history are aids” (595). He
also makes explicit the New Critics’ pedagogical mission: “he students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not
merely about literature. But I think this is what the good students
have always wanted to do. he wonder is that they have allowed
themselves so long to be denied” (588).
Only toward the end of the essay does Ransom say what the new
forms of literary study would consist in, and then in just a few phrases:
“hey would be technical studies of poetry[;] for instance, [in a particular poem] . . . if they treated its metric; its inversions . . . ; its tropes;
its ictions, or inventions by which it secures ‘aesthetic distance’ . . . ;
or any other devices, on the general understanding that any systematic
usage which does not hold good for prose is a poetic device” (600).
his is followed by a bit of New Critical mystery mongering:
he critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre. . . . [he] poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively
ininite. [he critic] knows that his practical interests will reduce
this living object to a mere utility, and that his sciences will
disintegrate it for their convenience into their respective
abstracts. he poet wishes to defend his object’s existence against
its enemies, and the critic wishes to know what he is doing,
and how. (601)
As I said: rather like reverse engineering.
It was often recalled that Ransom, like Richards before him,
had summoned criticism to be more “scientiic,” but his meaning and
aim were often misunderstood. Here is the passage:
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Criticism must become more scientiic, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective
and sustained efort of learned persons —which means that its
proper seat is in the universities. . . . It will never be a very exact
science, or even a nearly exact one. But neither will psychology,
if that term continues to refer to psychic rather than physical
phenomena; nor will sociology . . . ; nor even will economics. It
does not matter whether we call them sciences or just systematic
studies. . . .he[y] . . . have immeasurably improved in understanding since they were taken over by the universities, and the
same career looks possible for criticism. (Ransom 1937, 587–88)
As I think is clear, Ransom was not seeking to make literary criticism
scientiic in the positivist sense of the era. What he sought, rather, was
to move it from the margins of the ield to the center and to claim for
its practitioners a form of technical expertise that elevated its status
from an occasional pursuit to a duly accredited and properly housed
academic program. If that sounds like what promoters of the digital
humanities are seeking today, both for themselves and for the practices of “distant reading,” then it is very much to the point here, with
all the historical ironies that doubling involves.
Other doublings and ironies are apparent in the hostile reactions
that greeted the New Criticism. Such reactions came, as Ransom
anticipated, from “the present incumbents of the professorial chairs,”
who, he wrote derisively, “spend a lifetime in compiling the data of
literature and yet rarely or never commit to a literary judgment” (587).
A notable counter-polemic appeared in 1949 in the pages of PMLA.
Its author was Douglas Bush, an eminent Shakespeare scholar at Harvard. Its self-consciously conservative title was “he New Criticism:
Some Old-Fashioned Queries.” Bush writes: “he new criticism, the
ofspring of Mr. Richards and Mr. Eliot, has carried the marks of a
mixed heredity. . . . [heir] close reading of poetry has braced the laccid sinews of this generation of readers and has had some highly beneicial efects upon teaching and writing. . . . But . . . a scholar-historian may not be disposed to grant all its claims and assumptions” (13).
he grudging concessions and sense of strained dignity are familiar in
the responses of upstaged eminences. By the late 1940s the hold of the
old historicism had been efectively shaken, the literary academy was
an increasingly lively place, and Bush could speak ruefully but accurately of the New Critics’ “tone of conscious superiority” (14). After
chiding Ransom and others for gafes relecting their supposed igno-
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rance of history, he goes on to charge them with leaving ordinary
readers out in the cold: “he common reader might go so far as to
think that poetry deals with life. . . . However valuable the processes
and results of the new criticism, for some readers its preoccupation
with technique, its aloof intellectuality, its fear of emotion and action,
its avoidance of moral values, . . . all this suggests the dangers of a
timid aestheticism” (20). Bush concludes his essay with a bit of tableturning: the charge —or, rather, countercharge —of scientism: “Since
poetry does after all deal with experience, the most fastidious critics
have to touch on it[;] yet they may give the impression that they are
looking, not at human beings, but at specimens mounted on slides.
Indeed, though the critics have censured scholarship for aping science, their own aims and methods seem much more deserving of the
charge” (20). Much of this is quaint but also, I think, remarkably recognizable. Virtually the same set of general claims and charges were
rehearsed throughout the century, irrespective of the methods at issue
and, indeed, irrespective of which side was being taken, revolutionary
or counterrevolutionary. hirty or forty years later, the same resentful
tones would be heard from the New Critics themselves, no longer
young, or cool, or radical and now upstaged by deconstruction and
what they called “high theory.” Ransom’s reference to the vested interests of incumbent professors; the charge of elitism in Bush’s invocation of “the common reader”; the exchanged charges of hyper-formalism (or “aestheticism”) and scientism: these would all recur in the
“theory wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, in the “canon wars” of the
1980s and 1990s, and, like much else in both these essays, in current
polemics around the digital humanities. It looks like a pattern. It may
even be a law of history. It is time to turn to Franco Moretti and the
twenty-irst century.
Close Reading on the Screen of the Digital Humanities
It was Moretti, of course, who broached the idea that literary studies
would beneit from a turn away from close reading to a new set of
practices that could be called “distant reading.” he key passage
appears in an essay titled “Conjectures on World Literature,” originally published in 2000:
he trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from
the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends
on an extremely small canon. . . . And if you want to look
beyond the canon . . . close reading will not do it. It’s not
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designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s
a theological exercise —very solemn treatment of very few texts
taken very seriously —whereas what we really need is a little pact
with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how
not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat
it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that
are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes,
tropes — or genres and systems. And if, between the very small
and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of
those cases when one can justiiably say, Less is more. If we want
to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing
something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge:
reality is ininitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s
precisely this “poverty” that makes it possible to handle them,
and therefore to know. his is why less is actually more. (Moretti
2000, 57–58)
he rhetoric is neat; the argument is bold; and several strong themes
and claims echo in current arguments promoting the digital humanities. One is the theme of scale: the association of “close reading”
with a few small things. Another is knowledge: the summons to literary critics and scholars to dare “to know,” to produce more abstract,
theoretical, and comprehensive knowledge. A third, the most consequential in institutional terms, is less is more: the suggestion that, for
literary studies to operate as a ield of genuine knowledge production,
scholars must sacriice something: their interest in “the text itself” and
the centrality of close reading to their practices.
he themes of scale and less-is-more are sounded, less playfully,
in an article by Matthew Wilkens titled “Canons, Close Reading,
and the Evolution of Method” (2011). Wilkens sees literary canons
as a product of the practices of close reading and also as something
like a moral problem — a matter of injustice to the excluded — as
well as a methodological one. He writes: “What little we do read is
deeply nonrepresentative of the full ield of literary and cultural production, as critics of our existing canons have rightly observed for
decades. . . . So canons . . . are an enormous problem, one that follows from our single working method as literary scholars—that is,
from the need to perform always and only close reading as a means
of cultural analysis” (251). His solution is clear: “We need to do less
close reading and more of anything and everything else that might
help us extract information from and about texts as indicators of
Herrnstein Smith
65
larger cultural issues” (251). After describing a computational study
and the beneits of algorithmic methods, Wilkens concludes: “his
[i.e., the turn to such methods] will hurt, but it will also result in
categorically better, more broadly based, more inclusive, and inally
more useful humanities scholarship” (257). he words are earnest,
but the argument is dubious. Close reading is by no means the only
working method of literary scholars. Moreover, while literary canons —
that is, the works most widely celebrated and referenced in the culture, most regularly assigned in literature classes, and most frequently
discussed in professional journals — commonly relect, among other
things, the tastes and interests of the professiorate, they are not determined by the reading practices of scholars. Most signiicantly, the
mere existence of a literary canon places no limit on the number, the
type, or the cultural status of the texts available for study, whether as
cultural indicators or as anything else.
here are also the simple facts of the matter. As literary studies
have been pursued under the auspices of structuralism, semiotics,
New Historicism, deconstruction, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial criticism, and queer theory, the types and cultural status of
the texts examined by literary scholars and read closely in their classrooms have continuously expanded. hose “texts” now include writings of every form and provenance, whether currently admired or
reviled and whether currently read or unread; and they can in principle (and often do in fact) include any inscription, or image, or artifact
whatsoever. Wilkens suggests that less close reading of individual texts
and more computational studies of large bodies of texts will somehow
address the other “problem of the canon,” by which he presumably
means the past snubbing of popular writings and of works by women
and members of minority groups. But if the ofense is that many worthy or interesting texts remain unread because of past biases, then
what is wanted, surely, is to have those texts read, not just counted.
Wilkens seeks to promote research methods that he sees as undervalued in literary studies. he aim is commendable but his arguments do
not serve it well.
he themes of scale and knowledge in Moretti’s piece also recur
in a recent book by Matthew Jockers titled Macroanalysis: Digital
Methods and Literary History (2013). Jockers is explicit in associating
desirable epistemic aims with the aims of science and proper research
methods with the methods used by scientists. “he goal of science,” he
writes (he adds “we hope”), “is to develop the best possible explanation for some phenomenon. his is done via a careful and exhaustive
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gathering of evidence. . . . Literary studies should strive for a similar
goal” (5–6). Like science, he continues, literary studies should seek the
best methods available for gathering evidence and, again like science,
should welcome big data and scale its methods accordingly.
It was Jockers’s description of close reading as a “methodology”
that I cited earlier. Here is the passage I was quoting: “he study of literature relies upon careful observation, the sustained, concentrated
reading of text. his, our primary methodology, is ‘close reading.’ Science has a methodological advantage in the use of experimentation.
Experimentation ofers a method through which competing observations and conclusions may be tested and ruled out. . . . We are highly
invested in interpretations, and it is very diicult to ‘rule out’ an interpretation” (6). Granting the value of literary interpretation in some
regards, Jockers continues: “But interpretation is fueled by observation,
and as a method of evidence gathering, observation . . . is lawed.
Despite all their eforts to repress them, researchers will have irrepressible biases. . . . Observation is lawed in the same way that generalization from the speciic is lawed: . . . the selection of the sample is always
something less than perfect, and so the observed results are likewise
imperfect” (6–7). Jockers believes that big data is solving these problems
in the sciences. He writes: “Big data are fundamentally altering the way
that much science and social science get done. . . . [M]any areas of
research are no longer dependent upon controlled, artiicial experiments or upon observations derived from data sampling” (7). And, he
argues, big data should change the game in literary studies as well:
Back in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading
books, noting “things” (a phallic symbol here, a biblical reference there, a stylistic lourish, an allusion, and so on) and then
interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale bookdigitization projects, the nature of the “evidence” available to us
has changed, radically. . . . [M]assive digital corpora ofer us
unprecedented access to the literary record and invite, even
demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. he literary scholar of the twenty-irst century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with a few random
“things” gathered from a few, even “representative,” texts. . . .
Like it or not, today’s literary-historical scholar can no longer
risk being just a close reader: the sheer quantity of available data
makes the traditional practice of close reading untenable as an
exhaustive or deinitive method of evidence gathering. (8–9)
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here is much to query here, about Jockers’s view of science as well
as of literary studies, but I will focus on a few central points. First,
gathering evidence for claims is not a good way to describe research in
most scientiic ields, and generating interpretations by reading books
and noting things randomly and foolishly is a singularly bad way to
describe what literary scholars did in the 1990s or at any other time.
More signiicantly here, close reading never igured in literary studies
as a “deinitive,” much less “exhaustive,” way to gather evidence. In
the case of a critical study focused on the thought, style, or achievement of one or more particular authors, the close reading of texts written by those authors would have to be central to any claims made. But
even there, and certainly where broader historical or cultural claims
are involved, it would be remarkable for a literary scholar not to consult and invoke other documents and other types of data. he digital
library is exceedingly handy for accessing such materials, but scholars’
shelves have not been otherwise empty up to now. Jockers is saying
that literary historians “can no longer risk being” something that they
never have been: that is, “ just close readers.”
Second, the fact that some way of doing things is now possible
does not make it necessary, as in Jockers’s term “demand.” Where big
data is pertinent and computational processing would be useful, literary scholars should take advantage of both. But there is no research
imperative built into the size of some potential data set. New methods
enable new questions to be posed and old answers to be sharpened or
corrected. But in any ield of knowledge production, signiicant questions come out of ongoing interests and problems, not usually just
methods as such. Digital libraries and powerful search engines have
already become research tools for most literary scholars. hose who
are still in a cave on these matters are well advised to become familiar
with such resources and with the types of projects they enable. It is
understandable that those already working on such projects would
want to urge others to explore such resources as possible avenues to
interesting new research for themselves. But Jockers seems to be urging or cautioning more than that in his “like it or not” address to his
colleagues. What people in literary studies are apt to hear him saying
is that the existence of those “massive digital corpora” has made their
current way of doing things inappropriate, impractical, and “untenable” and that they should be doing instead what he does.
A third point is important here. Jockers suggests that computational methods and big data allow researchers to avoid or mitigate
the subjectivity and bias built into human observation and also what
he calls the “law” of generalizing from less than exhaustive data
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sets. But the idea or ideal of objective observation, like that of complete data sets (in efect, inspecting every swan before concluding
anything about the color of swans), has been efectively challenged
by a century of empirical and theoretical work in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. Jockers is not alone among contemporary literary scholars in his enthusiasm for, but rather old-fashioned view of, “science.” (he persistent singular suggests a dubious
conception of these heterogeneous practices as something programmatic and monolithic.) For all the talk of “paradigm shifts” among
digital humanists, literary Darwinists, and advocates of cognitive
cultural studies, the notion of science to which they appeal tends to
be fundamentally pre-Kuhnian (see Smith 2016).
My allusion is, of course, to homas Kuhn, whose account of
paradigm shifts in the history of chemistry and physics challenged
simple progressivist views of how the natural sciences develop (Kuhn
1962). Even more pertinent here, however, is Paul Feyerabend’s once
scandalous, now celebrated, volume, published in 1975, titled
Against Method. To the central question posed by philosophers of
science —what method leads scientists to new discoveries and successful theories? —the prevailing answer was Karl Popper’s “conjectures and refutations,” or the so-called hypothetico-deductive
method (Popper 1962).4 Feyerabend’s answer was, [A]nything goes!
Contrary to outraged misreading of his argument, he was saying not
that scientists are capricious but that they are inventive, resourceful,
and opportunistic (his examples included Galileo, Newton, and Einstein). Feyerabend’s major point in Against Method is that there are no
rules for success in science: that is, no speciiable, generalizable way to
make discoveries or to produce persuasive, useable theories. he trouble
with telling literary scholars to be “like scientists” in their methods
is not that it is scientistic (though it is that as well) but that it tells
them nothing in particular.
Jockers’s worries over the methods used in literary studies are
largely misplaced. he fact that a critic’s interpretation is based in
part on his or her observations as an individual reader does not compromise the interest or usefulness of that interpretation. he same is
true of a scholar’s historical account or theoretical claim. Of course
that individuality — and inevitable, but not necessarily pernicious,
bias —leaves the interpretation, claim, or account open to dispute
by other readers or scholars. At the same time, however, the grounding in personal observation and experience opens the possibility of
shareable insights and of connection to shareable experiences,
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which —largely, if not wholly —is what motivates our interest in a
literary interpretation as such. And, along with connections to broader
intellectual issues and other concerns, that grounding and that attendant possibility — of shareable insights and of connection to shareable
experiences — are also what sustain the value of much historical and
theoretical research in the humanities as such.
here is a long story to tell —longer than proper to claim space
for here — about the diferences of epistemic aim, achievement, and
value in the humanities and the sciences.5 But it is clear, I think, that
a central question here is whether scholarly and critical methods in
literary studies are properly assessed by reference to research methods
in a ield like geology —the speciic science that Jockers invokes in an
opening anecdote as having led, during a dinner conversation with a
representative scientist, to his embarrassment at being unable to
defend the ways in which research was done in his own ield. More use
of big data or computer algorithms by literary scholars will not solve
the methodological problems that Jockers sees in literary studies. he
problems, if that is what they are, are built into standard scholarly
practice in the ield, the legacy of classical humanistic practices reinforced by various contemporary approaches. he only way to end the
embarrassment at what literary critics and literary historians do would
be to persuade them to do something else instead, something more
like social science research. hat seems, in fact, to be what Moretti
proposes in the name of “distant reading” and what Wilkens, Jockers,
and others are promoting in the name of “digital humanities”: not,
perhaps, to cease doing traditional literary study altogether but to start
doing less of it and to do more research in which the data consist of
large numbers of texts and the questions asked and answered are independent of the interest —literary or otherwise —of any of those texts.
Less is more: perhaps. Moretti calls the exchange he proposes —
less close reading for more genuine knowledge —“a little pact with
the devil.” Pacts with the devil, even what look like little ones,
deserve scrutiny. Famously, one ends up getting less than one bargained for and losing more than one thought.
Moretti is right to describe close reading as “a theological exercise”; not, however, in the sense, as he suggests, of the reverential
examination of a text but in the sense of an expansive commentary
on one. In literary studies, a close reading, whether in a classroom or
a journal article, is typically the occasion for more general observations and often for quite wide-ranging relections. hey may be
observations about the style or genre of the text at hand, or about its
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author, or relections on the era in which it was written. But they are
often observations and relections —more or less subtle, more or less
original — about related human circumstances and experiences. And
even when not especially subtle or original, they can afford some
insight into, and a sense of connection with, the circumstances and
experiences of people who are otherwise remote. Contrary to charges
raised across the years, the practices promoted by the New Criticism
did not require that readers “forget history” or “ignore the outside
world.” Full-dress close readings, now as ever, can be showy or strained.
hey can also be dim, thin, derivative, or pedestrian and, when motivated by a history of injury, sulky or venomous. But now as ever,
they can ofer those who hear or read them potentially illuminating
engagements with regions of language, thought, and experience not
otherwise commonly encountered.
“Close reading” makes a neat contrast to “distant reading,” but
not a pertinent one for promoting the value of computational methods for literary studies. My inal example here is a pair of short passages in a recent coauthored book titled Digital_Humanities. Referring to the tools necessary “to thoughtfully and meaningfully sift
through, analyze, visualize, map and evaluate the deluge of data . . .
the digital age has unleashed,” the authors write: “One way of navigating this process is through distant reading: a form of analysis that
focuses on larger units. It is a term that is speciically arrayed against
the deep hermeneutics of extracting meaning from a text through
ever-closer, microscopic readings” (Burdick et al. 2012, 39). A page
later, they amplify this: “Close reading has its roots in the philological
traditions of the humanities, but for more than a generation has often
been equated with deep hermeneutics and exegesis, techniques in
which interpretations are ‘excavated’ from a text through ever-closer
readings of textual evidence, references, word choices, semantics, and
registers” (40).
Both descriptions are awkwardly phrased, perhaps relecting
ideas inserted at various times by each of the ive authors who collaborated in its production. But especially notable, I think, is the
oddness of some of the language used to describe the activities associated with close reading. We generally speak of inferring or identifying meanings and of ofering or suggesting interpretations, not of
“extracting” or “excavating” them like teeth, oil, or corpses. Also
odd are the phrases “ever-closer” and “ever-closer, microscopic.”
Close reading often involves attention to features such as word
choice or, in connection with rhyme or alliteration, individual
sounds or letters. But there is nothing like a microscope lens being
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focused “ever-closer,” as if obsessively or maniacally. Like the rather
violent “extract” or the creepy “excavate,”6 such language makes the
practices so described sound distinctly unpleasant, rather unnatural,
and certainly very alien.
More significantly here and contrary to the contrast being
drawn, attention to microfeatures does not distinguish the practices of
close reading from those of distant reading or the digital humanities.
We recall Moretti’s inaugural description: “Distant reading . . . allows
you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the
text: devices, themes, tropes —or genres and systems” (emphasis added).
And in fact, the tagging and counting of very small textual units igures centrally in many digital humanities projects, including studies
by Moretti himself.
For example, in an article titled “Style, Inc. Relections on
Seven housand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)” (2009), Moretti
displays the results of a study correlating the length, grammatical
structure, and other features of those seven thousand titles with the
number of novels published in each decade. He goes on to note historical trends in the occurrence of those features, including, in the
later decades, when increasing numbers of novels looded the market,
the use of the indeinite article (a) versus the deinite article (the). his
diferential usage, he suggests, as in the titles A Mummer’s Wife versus
he Inidel Father, signaled to prospective consumers that a particular
novel ofered, respectively, either a progressive or a conservative point
of view on social developments. Moretti elaborates the suggestion
with considerable subtlety (noting, for example, that a is unrestricted
and leaves the future open, whereas the is restricted and grammatically oriented to the past) and teases out the connotations of other
microfeatures of those titles in an analysis that might have left Empson gasping with admiration.
Of course, Moretti’s interpretation of the data he has gathered
can be challenged. His account of the implications of a and the is
based at least in part on his subjective observations, here as a practiced reader and writer of the English language, and diferent explanations of the historical trends he identiies could be and have been
ofered.7 What is signiicant for the present argument is, irst, that
that would be true, mutatis mutandis, of the interpretation of the
results of a study in any ield, whatever the size of the data and however rigorous the computations: that is, the grounding of the interpretation in the inevitably limited observations of an individual
human being. But, second, as I noted above, that kind of grounding
is also what makes an interpretation potentially compelling and
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gives it interest for, and appropriability by, fellow human beings.
You could see it as an exchange: less putative (and, I would say, spurious) objectivity for more actual interest and usefulness. A pretty
good bargain, I think.
he law of literary history that Moretti discovers (or corroborates
or illustrates) in the Critical Inquiry article is that stylistic features of
literary texts —titles, in this case —relect market forces. Hence the
“Inc.” in his own title, “Style, Inc.,” which recalls the title of John
Crowe Ransom’s essay, “Criticism, Inc.,” and may involve a glancing
allusion. Ransom, we remember, was suggesting that criticism is the
proper “business” of literary studies, and he noted that his readers
might ind the term “distasteful.” Contrary to the old genteel-humanist view of art and letters as deinitively remote from commerce, Moretti
is suggesting that literature is a business like everything else. He means
it provocatively, but his Critical Inquiry readers are not likely to ind the
association of art or letters with the market either distasteful or surprising. It has been some years —nearly a century —since literary studies
was the “solemn treatment of very few texts.”
A Look Back and Ahead
If you live a long time, you accumulate a lot of data. I ofer here
some general observations on method in literary studies. As I noted
above, the succession of “approaches” in the ield over the past century is not, in my view, a sign of futility or failure. What it relects,
rather, is a history of ongoing eforts by literary scholars to make
their teaching and research responsive to developments within and
beyond the academy, eforts that have been joined —and sometimes
undercut —by the operation of dynamics that are general and recurrent enough to be called laws of history, at least of academic history.
One such law is Everybody always overdoes everything. Professional
pressures —inspiration energized by competition —push scholars into
exhibiting the methods and virtues most conspicuously valued at the
moment, and these tend be escalated and intensiied to the point of
exhaustion of the material, absurdity of the method, or pathology of
the virtue.8 A second law or set of forces, giving weight to perennial
calls for reform or revolution, is the existence of chronic tensions
between fundamental but opposed impulses and styles: for example, in
literary studies, between populism and elitism, moralism —including
political moralism — and formalism, and subjectivism and positivism. A third law follows from the interaction of the irst two: Everybody complains of being misrepresented and caricatured, and everybody is
misrepresented and caricatured. Bush complained of the New Critics’
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“cavalier” dismissal of historical scholarship;9 and Ransom’s treatment of it was pretty glib.
he developments to which scholars were responding during the
twentieth century were quite signiicant. Literary study was one thing
when a small number of Christian men were teaching the professionally aspiring sons of fellow professionals. It became another when
members of an expanding professoriate were teaching students from
middle- and working-class families or, later, when a sizeable number
of faculty were women and a sizeable number of their students were
from racial and ethnic minorities. And the ield is yet another thing
now, when faculty and students are more likely to encounter texts on
screens than anywhere else, and everyone is scrambling for positions,
funding, and status in a shrinking quarter of the academy.
Over the course of the century, in literary studies as in other
fields, the responses to changing institutional conditions and to
broader changes, including intellectual developments, commonly led
not to revolutionary overturns but to shifts of relative dominance, and
there were always extensive residues of prior practices. he ield was
never “taken over” by the New Criticism or by any other single movement, and it remained —not unhappily, I think —eclectic. he parade
in the street was noisy and colorful, but up in the libraries, historians
continued to write literary history, editors continued to produce editions of literary works, and, in both libraries and classrooms, almost
everybody read at least some texts more or less closely.
Some changes of practice in literary studies proposed by advocates of the digital humanities would be revolutionary, and the developments they observe and cite as requiring these changes —from the
technological to the neurological —are, in their eyes, no less so.10 Talk
of “seismic” and “tectonic” shifts is pervasive. Clearly, though, the
interest and utility of close reading do not vanish in the face of digital
libraries or ubiquitous computation. On the contrary, in the century
upon us, where channels of communication are not only increasingly
computerized but also increasingly corporatized and where texts of all
kinds are turned to manipulative ends with digitally multiplied efectiveness, the ability and disposition to read texts attentively, one by
one (in addition, of course, to digital sophistication), is likely to be an
advantage. hat textual ability and disposition also remains more generally crucial. he hope of receiving such reading is what keeps most
of us — scholars and critics as well as poets and novelists —writing,
and the actual, even if only occasional, fulillment of that hope is what
keeps much textual production, literary and other, going. It is a practice that we all have a stake in preserving.
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Notes
1. he talk was delivered at the Heyman Center, Columbia University, for
a Digital Humanities Workshop series titled “On Method.”
2. Brooks continues: “In this matter the textbooks that had been put in
their hands were almost useless. he authors had something to say about the poet’s
life and the circumstances of his composition of the poem under study. . . . But the
typical commentary did not provide an induction to this poem — or into poetry
generally. he dollop of impressionistic criticism with which the commentary usually concluded certainly did not supply the need” (593).
3. Although they rebelled against the dominance of biographical scholarship, they did not, as is sometimes said, “banish the author.” As would be clear
from any page of criticism by Empson, Eliot, or Ransom, authors were very much
in evidence, but as artists, not as mere historical igures or biographical subjects.
4. he echoes of Popper in Moretti’s title (“Conjectures on World Literature”) and in Jockers’s concern with literary interpretations that cannot be refuted
are not accidental. Popper’s inluence, direct or indirect, is evident throughout
both their arguments.
5. For the longer story, see Smith 2006, 108–29; and Smith 2016.
6. heir quote marks on the latter term are not explained.
7. See Trumpener 2009. Moretti replies in the same issue of the journal.
8. In an instructive chapter in a volume of he Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, Wallace Martin notes that, by the 1950s, the New Critics themselves worried about the “proliferation of over-ingenious interpretations” and that some people
felt that “New Criticism had dwindled into a pointless routine” (2000, 316). Martin
adds: “Yet it is worth recalling that scholars had registered the same objection to scholarship in the 1920s; driven by the conventions of the disciplines to make a ‘contribution to knowledge’, writers [it was said] proposed ‘preposterous interpretations.’”
“Admittedly,” he comments, “there had been a change in the provenance of interpretative activity. Instead of asserting that Bottom [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] was
James VI, the modern exegete would discover an archetype or a paradox” (316).
9. “Cavalier” is the term Bush uses in a rather strained set of puns (1949, 17).
10. For an arresting follow-us-or-die set of views, see Saklofske, Clements,
and Cunningham 2012. he authors write:
Taking a wait-and-see attitude that cautiously preserves the status quo is
akin to choosing an unnecessary slow death over the possibility of an innovative cure. In an era of budget crises, enrolment uncertainty, and an
increasing lack of connections between university-level career preparation
and professional practice, it would be foolish to ignore an opportunity to
reinvent [the humanities] and reconsider existing paradigms and practices.
Digital humanities represents an already-established movement away from
the doom-inviting stasis of the secondhand conservatism of universities
that know the Net Generation has come, and yet decline to build the education system Net Geners both want and need. (329)
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