Brooks and the Collegiate Public, Reading Keats Together

Reviewed by: Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) modernism and close reading David James, ed. Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-close-reading-9780198749967?q=modernism%20and%20close%20reading&lang=en&cc=us 272 pages; Cloth $77.00 This collection of eleven essays by distinguished scholar-critics is skillfully edited and helpfully introduced by its editor David James, an expert in the new modernist studies, among several other sub-fields in literary and cultural studies. The question the collection raises is whether or not we know what close reading is, has been, or may be in the future. The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which presents different historical case studies of what close reading has been seen to be and whether and how if needed those perspectives should be revised. The second part presents potential futures for close reading of modernism as close reading combines with other kinds of critical approaches, including queer surrealism, stylistic analysis, feminist sexual ethics, hedonic perspectives on contemporary revisions of modernist [End Page 51] novels, cognitive studies of narrative space, and possible ecologies of critical interpretation. Max Saunders argues that rather than the usual simple picture of Richards and Empson inaugurating and perfecting British Practical Criticism and the New Critical Southern Agrarians perfecting the American close reading practice, we must revise our simple picture and incorporate more decidedly the work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) as well as the work, literary and editorial, of Thomas Hardy and Ford Maddox Ford. This correction of the origin of close reading allows us now to see that the possibilities inherent in it go beyond the perfection of academic exercises as encouraged by the famous and influential 1939 anthology edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry. Rather than a critical mode of complex albeit "organic" encapsulation, close reading can be better seen as an opening up of texts to an array of critical responses that are yet still close readings. Saunders is particularly good when discussing Paul De Man's "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" in which Empson's seventh type of ambiguity explodes the would-be infinite multiplicity of perspectives supposedly contained by the "organic" form of the text as the perspectives do not simply oppose but contradict one another. This critical slant on close reading gets repeated and enriched throughout the first part of the volume as Peter Howarth plumbs more specifically and comparatively the ground-breaking work of Richards and Empson, Graves and Riding, as reading performances every bit as literary as what they read. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan do the same for the second generation of closer readers, as explication becomes the name for close reading during and after WWII in America and Britain. Joseph Brooker demonstrates how Hugh Kenner's fast-paced flickering aperçus when reading Joyce and Fritz Senn's slow revelations of this author not only argue for close reading as its own literary art-form or performance but also for including the theory-based new schools soon to emerge across the critical world. Finally, the first part of the collection ends with Jean-Michel Rabaté's close reading of Derrida's critical reading of Foucault in the latter's History of Madness, and Foucault's belated response to Derrida, in which not only can Rabaté find Derrida's case against Foucault to be reinforced but more surprisingly, perhaps, there is new evidence for how Derrida misread Freud on the death-drive [End Page 52] in the course of The Postcard. "[Derrida] bypass[es] the fact that the pages he has quoted state a thesis that Freud rejects explicitly. Indeed … he turns around and exclaims: 'It cannot be so.'" In this nuanced manner, "When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name?" is the highlight of the first part of this collection, and concludes with a brilliant critique, careful, astute, discriminating, of Badiou's reading of Beckett. What Rabaté makes visible is what Paul de Man too often just claimed is the blindness and insight structure of critical or revisionary reading that...

The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismRace and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

Close Reading: A Preface The Editors, SubStance In an article entitled “Conjectures on World Literature,” published in 2000, Franco Moretti writes against the persistence of literary approaches based on the notion of national literatures. To break out of the confines of this perspective would be to open oneself to the project of a world literature, mentioned by Goethe in a conversation with Eckerman—that is, to understand the context of literary production in terms of something like a world market, akin to the one Marx would theorize in his writings on capitalism.1 Goethe’s ambition, suggests Moretti, is an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of literary scholars who, because they restrict their readings to their immediate geopolitical boundaries, fail to see that in the modern world (whose dawning Goethe presciently perceived), cultural circulation in its literary form exceeds national borders. One of the primary targets of Moretti’s argument is a type of literary criticism that has held sway in the American university roughly since the Second World War—namely, close reading: The United States is the country of close reading. […] But the trouble with close reading (in all its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. […] [Y]ou invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. (57) Moretti’s analysis is ultimately aligned with the sort of richly provocative neo-Marxism that underlies much of what we have come to call Cultural Studies, and it takes a now-familiar position on the question of the canon: close reading restricts our perspective on the canon, the formation of which is always an implicit or explicit decision about the value of literary texts to be read and taught. It is no longer possible to argue with the critical perspective that sees the canon as an ideological tool, constructed in large part by critical readers and teachers. But can one condemn close reading simply by associating it with a tendency to narrow the canon? Moretti returns to the activity of close reading at the end of his article, in a metaphorical opposition between trees and waves (for English-speaking readers, the old saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees” produces a certain ironic undertone here). The tree is the old philological [End Page 3] model of Indo-European culture, a way of imagining literary culture in the form of branches on a tree whose relations to a common trunk can be revealed by the project of historical philology. The task of philology is to discover continuities beyond apparent diversity. Without close reading, philology’s project is definitively dead. Moretti then invokes the wave metaphor to describe those world market phenomena that go beyond the diversity of the branches of the philological model, creating larger cycles and producing relations that differ fundamentally from the philological relations at stake in close reading. Moretti ultimately admits, however, that both sets of phenomena must be addressed by literary studies: The products of cultural history are always composite ones: but which is the dominant mechanism in their composition? […] There is no way to settle this controversy once and for all—fortunately: because comparatists need controversy. They have always been too shy in the presence of national literatures, too diplomatic: as if one had English, American, German literature—and then, next door, a sort of little parallel universe where comparatists studied a second set of literatures, trying not to disturb the first set. No; the universe is the same, the literatures are the same, we just look at them from a different viewpoint. (68) It is not so easy, after all, to throw out close reading. Despite Moretti’s quest to identify phenomena and cycles that can be analyzed in ways unrelated (at least directly) to those used by close readings confined within national literatures, he knows that we cannot do without this kind of focused scrutiny. The contrast between the cyclical, dynamic character of waves and the rooted growth of a tree mirrors the difference between serial, quantitative history and microhistory, the New Historicism, or the case study. For the latter, what’s important...

Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts (principally from the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic traditions) as well as the philological strategies applied to classical works such as the Homeric epics in the Greco-Roman tradition, or the Chinese 詩經 (Shijing) or Classic of Poetry. Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman law and the canon law of the Christian Church, and they also find expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books. As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the center of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past one hundred years or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late 1960s. This article provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant nonanglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.

What is the actual relation between close reading and non-close methods of textual analysis? Connecting Edward Lee Thorndike’s The Teacher’s Word Book (1921), C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s universal language (Basic English), and Richards’s inaugural theories of close reading, the essay demonstrates that the inception of close reading was shaped by its era’s statistical analyses or “distant reading,” particularly the genre of the word list. The second part of the essay tracks the subsequent divergence of close reading and statistical analysis by considering two exemplary developments: research into the measurement of “readability,” and Cleanth Brooks’s notion of “the heresy of paraphrase.” Ultimately, the essay aims to fine-tune discussions of close and distant reading that have been occasioned by the digital humanities and suggests that literary studies can once again learn from, and contribute to, the field of reading research.

AsbtractThis article does exactly what the title suggests: It reads Derrida’s idea of close reading into Doug Lemov’s idea of close reading by close reading Lemov’s definition for close reading. Building on work that considers poststructural approaches in reading classrooms, I engage Lemov and Derrida in a conversation about the meaning and uses of reading as a classroom practice. This approach asks questions about who gets to read, where, and in what ways. Within this conversation, I aim to open new considerations of reading in classrooms in public schools in the U.S. The article concludes with some possibilities and risks of pursuing these ideas, focusing on the potential of new inquiries into the ‘right’ to read.

Digital studies of drama have tended to emphasise the written text and network analyses. As theatre scholars, we have approached the field from a different perspective by focusing on levels of presence. This includes the embodied presence of not only the speaking characters, but also the non‐speaking characters and the imagined characters mentioned by characters present on stage. This in turn includes another embodied presence, namely that of the audience, which actively engages with the text in performance and gives presence to these imagined characters. We also emphasise the implicit performance, the spatiality of the play and the maintenance of the temporal dramaturgical structure. The study is based on the 37 plays of the Danish‐Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), published during the period 1723–1754. Holberg's comedies were heavily influenced by Italian commedia dell'arte and stock characters, or masks, were central to his plays. In this article, we discuss the question of how we can analyse levels of presence in drama texts via digital drama analysis, both from a historical and dramaturgical point of view. Our article points to a number of potentials as well as shortcomings of digital drama analysis and to the necessary synergy of close and distant reading.

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

This research paper delves into John Keats's concept of Negative Capability, a pivotal idea in the Romantic literary tradition, which emphasizes the poet's ability to remain in uncertainties and mysteries without the irritable reaching after fact and reason. Originating from Keats’s letter to his brothers in 1817, this concept challenges the Enlightenment’s rationalist approach, advocating for a more intuitive and imaginative understanding of human experience. The primary objective of this study is to comprehensively analyze Keats’s articulation of Negative Capability, its manifestation in his poetry, and its broader implications within the Romantic tradition and subsequent literary movements. This study enhances the understanding of Romantic literature, offers insights into Keats's poetic philosophy, and highlights the enduring influence of Negative Capability on modern literary theory and creative practices. The research employs a qualitative methodology grounded in close reading, historical analysis, and comparative analysis. Primary texts include Keats’s letters and major poems, while secondary sources encompass critical essays and scholarly works on Keats and Romanticism. The analysis reveals that Negative Capability is central to Keats’s major works, such as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn." These poems exemplify Keats's embrace of ambiguity, beauty, and transience, reflecting his resistance to rational explanations and his celebration of the unknown and the mysterious. The study also identifies the concept’s influence on later literary movements, particularly Modernism and Postmodernism, which similarly grapple with themes of uncertainty and existential doubt. John Keats’s Negative Capability represents a profound acceptance of life’s uncertainties and the mysteries of artistic creation. This study underscores its significance in Keats's work and its lasting impact on the literary landscape, reaffirming the importance of embracing ambiguity and the transformative power of art.

Eagleton, Terry. 2006. How to Head a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. $59.95 he. $19.95 sc. 192pp.Terry Eagleton's How to Read a Poem is a how-to book with an agenda. Smart, witty, and provocative, How to Read a Poem argues that critics and their need to redirect their attention away from poetry's content and contexts and back to its formal elements. As a manual for close reading poetry after theory, it is instructive, though not without some troubling limitations.Eagleton begins with a disclaimer reminiscent of his After Theory. Theory did not, he asserts, do literature in. On the contrary, many of the preeminent theorists were scrupulous close readers, and careful attention to literary texts never really went away. Close reading is not the issue, he writes. question is not how tenaciously you cling to the text, but what you are in search of when you do so (2). While Eagleton has much to say about theory in this book, he is primarily concerned with practice, and the book's strength lies in his leading by example-his admirable close readings of poetry. When Eagleton reads poetry, he searches for the ways its formal qualities convey and complicate meaning. In this respect, his procedures are reminiscent of the work of WK. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks and, more recently, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom.So readers will not find new methods of close reading in How to Read a Poem. However, like The Verbal Icon or How to Read and Why, How to Read a Poem is more than a primer; it is a form of polemic, and as such it begs the attention of an audience besides the students and the general reader for whom Eagleton claims it's intended. Eagleton devotes the first third of his book to defining poetry and the function of literary criticism. It is worth quoting him at length here, from a passage that provides insight into what he values in poetry:The modern age has been continually divided between a sober but rather bloodless rationalism on the one hand, and a number of enticing but dangerous forms of irrationalism on the other. Poetry, however, offers to bridge this gap. More than almost any other discourse, it deals in the finer nuances of meaning, and thus pays its dues to the value of reasoning and vigilant awareness. At its best, it is a refined product of human consciousness. But it pursues this devotion to meaning in the context of less rational or articulable dimensions of our existence, allowing the rhythms, images and impulses of our subterranean life to speak through its crisp exactitudes. This is why it is the most complete sort of human language that one could imagine-though what constitutes language, ironically, is exactly its incompleteness. is what there is always more of. (Eagleton 2006, 21-22)The most complete sort of human language that one could imagine, a supremely refined product, holding in balance the rational and irrationalthe poetry that Eagleton will teach us to read, the poetry that best repays the kind of close analysis he advocates, is formally subtle, intelligently earnest or seriously ironic, steeped in traditions that, in most cases, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot favored. It is about something in particular, something that matters, and it inevitably draws attention to its own making. By this definition, it follows that How to Read a Poem will be a valuable resource for close reading of poets such as Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot; Auden and Yeats appear frequently and favorably in the book. However, of Byron, Poe, Stein, or any of the poets will find little help here. I imagine Stein, for example, beginning with that last phrase, Language is what there is always more of, and moving forward in directions that Eagleton's definition cannot account for. It seems safe to say that Eagleton has chosen not to account for them because he doesn't believe they count for much. Swinburne and Tennyson are offered up as examples of the beautiful and shallow in poetry, with no consideration of the fact that their purposes and thereby their poetics might be fundamentally different from those of Wordsworth and Hopkins, whom Eagleton admires. …

<i>Enumerations: Data and Literary Study</i>. Andrew Piper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+243.

This study examines the psychological symbolism in Keatsian poetry using analytical psychology. John Keats ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is steeped in psychological, symbolic, and analytical perspectives, which are essential components of Jungian psychology/archetypal analysis. The current study aims to scrutinize the psychological and symbolic perspectives of Keats’s poem to understand the depth of psychic integration and archetypes in the text. This study analyzes ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by deploying Carl Jung’s concepts of syzygy or complementation of psychic energies of anima in the males and animus in the females. The term syzygy signifies a union of opposites like anima and animus and the conscious or collective unconscious. This process of complementation or complementary opposite of integration in the ode has symbolic interaction between the conscious male persona (animus) and the collective unconscious female persona (anima). Based on a close reading of the poem from a Jungian perspective, the current study provides a psychological understanding of poetic creation by underlying the conscious acts and thinking of the author as psychic interactions. This study aims to understand the symbolic representation of opposing psychic energies in Keatsian poetry. Moreover, the study analyzes the interpretation and the balance of male and female energies in Keats' poetry mean for the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, and its effect on the poetic creativity and inner peace of the author. Thereby, the study elaborated that Keatsian poetry is a true depiction of Jungian psychology.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

The current study investigates whether the mode of reading practice has an effect on the degree of readers’ empathic response to social drama, using Enda Walsh’sChatroom(2015), tackling contemporary adolescents’ problems, as an experimental example. The experiment conducted in this paper hypothesizes that in contrast with casual reading, the conscious techniques of close reading are more effective in promoting participants’ empathic engagement with the dramatic text and improving their capacity of problem discovery and solution. Accordingly, the close reading of social drama can reinforce social integration and work as an antidote to the ostracism of one social group from their community. Moreover, the L2 students’ stimulated empathic response is translated into a written output which is richer in quantity and quality.

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in <i>Major Barbara</i> and <i>Pygmalion:</i> Shavian Sisters)