Close Reading: A Preface

Abstract

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...