Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James

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...

An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more. From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet , “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading. Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler

Reviewed by: Fictions of Autonomy by Andrew Goldstone Joseph Lavery Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 224 pp. $65.00. What is gained for a work of art, and what is lost, in claiming that it is autonomous of worldly concerns? This pair of questions motivates Andrew Goldstone’s fascinating new study of modernist literary writing, which playfully expands on Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art to navigate beyond the impasse at which literary autonomy so frequently arrives. On the one hand, we have Adorno’s (or, less palatably, Pound’s) voracious formalism; on the other, the pessimistic determinism of many cultural materialist narratives—though, perhaps because this latter position somehow feels pervasive, it is difficult to think of scholars of whose work it would be an adequate account. But cultural determinism, Goldstone thinks, is an expression of critical bad faith in any case. Witness, for example, the virtuosic pragmatics of Franco Moretti, whose critical demystification insists on describing cultural phenomena as aggregations of form, to avoid abandoning to mere data any possible payoff. And witness, too, “close reading” ubiquitously exhibited as the USP of literary departments struggling to assert their own institutional autonomy, even and especially at a moment when the critical momentum seems to be pushing away from symptomatic, paranoid, deep, or otherwise intrusive reading practices. But Goldstone is no naïve autonomist, either, arguing that such a position risks a pedantic literalism that assumes modernists really thought their work had nothing to do with the world around them. Rather, he compellingly argues that modernist autonomy is not a supremacist ideology aimed at obliterating histories of labor, suffering, or contingency, but seeks instead a relative, and relatively minor, expression of collective independence. One needn’t be a Kantian to sympathize with writers trying to access a social space where the rules of the world might be thought, and felt, differently—and Goldstone’s tone, throughout his marvelously stylish prose, projects a critical, but generous, reassurance. In addition to its crystal-clear expression and the eloquent precision of its own close readings, what makes Fictions of Autonomy sing is its author’s capacity to group authors in ways that somehow feel both intuitive and original. Adorno’s “lateness” graciously intersects with much of T. S. Eliot’s poetic career, preoccupied as the poet was with both the decay of his own body and with the need to assert a poetic personality that might better resist the depredations of time and tradition. Here we find an extraordinary, and wholly persuasive, collocation of Wallace Stevens and Paul de Man as fellow enthusiasts for the curious logical form of tautology, Goldstone not only uniting Harvardian New Criticism with its contestants from the Yale school, but (building on François Cusset’s admirable historiography) placing the [End Page 266] American event of “French Theory” within the capacious frame of modernist literary exceptionalism. I was less convinced that James Joyce and Djuna Barnes shared a model of cosmopolitanism, but was delighted nonetheless that the institutional forms to which Goldstone pays such close attention crisscross that other modern (and modernist) form, the nation state, and that important questions concerning the ethics of modernist cosmopolitanism are placed close to the heart of the drive to autonomize cultural production. An elegant chapter on Wilde’s complex relationship to domestic labor dispenses with the callow consensus that Victorian aestheticism merely abjured the problem of work in the pursuit of shinier pleasures. I wondered whether the more capacious “modernity” might more aptly delimit the temporal claims that are explored here than does “modernism,” and whether Romanticists or Victorianists might not feel that the autonomizing forces of Blackwoods, the Cornhill, or the Germ are given too short shrift. While the author claims that he is interested only in “the meanings of modernist practices in their contemporary contexts” (11), the reader of Fictions of Autonomy is taken briskly from one microperiod to the next, left with the impression that Goldstone’s 1890s are categorically distinct from his 1900s. Is “modernist” really distinguished from “aestheticist” substantially? I would be interested to know whether aestheticism presupposed postmodernism—as Lyotard claimed to think—or vice versa; else whether Wildean...

Reviewed by: Shakespeare Closely Read; A Collection of Essays: Written and Performance Texts ed. by Frank Occhiogrosso Angela Eward-Mangione Shakespeare Closely Read; A Collection of Essays: Written and Performance Texts. Ed. Frank Occhiogrosso. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. Pp. vii + 158. $60.00 (cloth). The need for a volume that closely reads Shakespeare derives primarily from an impetus to revisit formalist criticism in a postmodern world—one that sees a proliferation of new Shakespearean performances on stages and screens in nearly every part of the globe. The sheer quantity of new performances staged each year demands a method of documentation and analysis that exceeds the scope of the conventional play review. To approach Shakespearean performance criticism, scholars must conjoin their analysis with literary criticism. This is the position taken by the Introduction to this volume, in which Frank Occhiogrosso names “close reading,” the principal methodology utilized by the New Critics from the 1930s to the 1960s (1), as the approach the volume’s contributors will use in their discussion of Shakespeare’s plays. Occhiogrosso explains that New Criticism and close reading make us aware of the centrality of language to a text; thus, close reading often sets the stage for a critical Feminist, Marxist, or [End Page 157] Deconstructionist interpretation (2). Yet, referring to close reading, Occhiogrosso contends that “some things once considered central have been left behind” (2). He indicates that a number of recent publications, however, have argued for the need “to retain close reading” (3). Occhiogrosso’s Introduction implies that most current scholarship on Shakespeare does not feature close reading, an implication that some readers may find debatable. The book’s eleven essays were originally written for a seminar called “Close Readings of Shakespeare” that Occhiogrosso organized and conducted at the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008. Shakespeare Closely Read is divided into two sections, the first of which “closely reads” written texts. Occhiogrosso’s contribution, “‘Music Plays and They Dance’: A Close Reading of Romeo and Juliet, 1.5” stands out as particularly significant: it carefully examines the famous ball scene at Capulet’s to analyze how Shakespeare uses dramatic structure and staging to create paradoxical irony, a form of dramatic oxymoron (19–20). The stage direction at line 26—“Music plays and they dance”—which appears in both quarto and folio texts, is important for his argument, because nowhere later in the scene is it countered by any direction indicating that they stop dancing and retire (20). It is thus reasonable to assume that the dance continues through the remainder of the scene. The presence of the dancers on stage—presumably upstage—forces all the characters that have speaking parts into the downstage area (20). Noting the absence of stage directions indicating Capulet’s exit and/or Romeo’s entrance (21), Occhiogrosso observes how the juxtaposition of Capulet’s “speech of age” (“How long is’t now since last yourself and I / Were in the mask?” [33–34]) with Romeo’s “speech of youth” (“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! / For ne’er saw true beauty till this night” [53–54]), read in conjunction with the absence of evidence that the two can hear one another, shows us “dramatically the irony of people so close and yet so far apart, a dramatic oxymoron” (21). Shakespeare, by “jamming together into a tight space so many incongruities, dramatically creates in us the feeling, the perception, that although these characters are close enough to touch each other, in several senses of the word, they are still worlds apart” (24). John Russell Brown’s essay, “Shakespeare’s Secret Language,” closely reads dialogue and stage direction in King Lear. Discussing the commentary from his volume on King Lear in the Palgrave Shakespeare Handbooks series, Brown argues that “textual references to physical actions carry with them further ‘secret’ instructions” to make the audience “see feelingly” (4.6.140). For example, if the stage direction for Regan to “‘pluck [Gloucester] by the beard’” is to make sense Regan will “repeatedly ‘pluck [Gloucester] by the beard’ in act 3, scene 7 at lines 35–36 and 38–41” (39). According to Brown, close contact...

The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field’s rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed—even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading’s conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. The volume brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close-read. The volume responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading’s methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies’ geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading’s perpetual development and diversification.

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.

Benjamin Redux Gerhard Richter Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00. Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2 It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit. The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4 Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one...

Reviewed by: The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 by Emily C. Bloom Eileen Morgan-Zayachek The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968, by Emily C. Bloom , pp. 205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. $80.00. Emily Bloom's The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 analyzes the work of four Anglo-Irish writers—W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—who independently contributed to the British Broadcasting Corporation in the mid-twentieth century. The four authors central [End Page 156] to her study were but a few of the writers from Ireland who gravitated toward radio and specifically the BBC during the era of World War II. Bloom finds in their adaptations and original writings for radio a complex set of negotiations that transform our understanding of radio's impact on both literature and on literary modernism. Indeed, The Wireless Past is a highly intentional effort to improve on previous scholarship and reorient critical inquiry. Bloom's analysis proceeds from the recognition that scholarly approaches to radio broadcasting and modernism have remained a "fringe pursuit" by radio enthusiasts rather than a subfield of modernism studies, largely because questions about radio writers' identities and about the intertextuality between forms—literature and radio especially—have not been sufficiently engaged. The Wireless Past similarly seeks to correct a perceived overreliance on methods of analysis derived for use on printed literature, such as close reading, that do not apply well to sound broadcasting. Critical treatments of Irish writers' broadcasting contributions have also impeded understanding—specifically of the crosscultural and transnational implications of literary broadcasting—by focusing almost exclusively on the Irish contexts for developments in broadcasting. Bloom offers a means of getting beyond these critical shortcomings, modeling critical practices that duly examine how Anglo-Irish writers used radio broadcasting to engage and adapt literary forms and traditions, and transcend the boundaries of national culture. Bloom demonstrates how through their broadcasting projects they furthered a type of modernism she dubs "radio modernism" which had its own, distinctive "radiogenic" aesthetic that was defined by their simultaneous impulse toward revivalism and innovation. The writers central to The Wireless Past have not typically been studied as a group, owing to the differences in their aesthetics and careers. For Bloom, they serve as exemplars of radio modernism. They understood the instability of national identity through their own lived experiences: the "homelessness" and "displacement" they experienced in the decades after Irish independence and surrounding the World War II—combined with their shared interest in imagining transnational audiences for their work—made them, according to Bloom, uniquely qualified to perform modernist radio experiments at the BBC. As a foundation for The Wireless Past, the twin assumptions that these Anglo-Irish writers experienced the same displacement, a displacement that yielded the understanding of identity as being "essentially unstable" seems to partake in a form of essentialism that requires, at the very least, the social and historical contextualization that Bloom advocates and practices. She does not probe this starting point, but she does acknowledge how some readers may accuse The Wireless Past of reproducing hegemonic structures in reading Irish literature in the context of the British Broadcasting service. She also appropriately recognizes that access to [End Page 157] broadcasting opportunities at the BBC were not uniformly distributed among Irish writers: the privileged Anglo-Irish minority generally had greater access to BBC jobs than other Irish writers, and some of the Anglo-Irish played gatekeeping roles at times. The principal concern and main achievement of The Wireless Past is to show how these writers made radio a generative space at midcentury. Rather than succumb to the widespread anxiety among writers that radio would diminish or even extinguish the public's interest in literature (which Bloom explores thoroughly in the chapter "Elizabeth Bowen's Spectral Radio"), these writers tested the new media's capacity to engage and revise literary texts and forms. In this way their work demonstrates how electronic spaces were opening up to writers and enabling the possibility of new relationships with the literary past. Bloom succeeds in showing how their "radiogenic" aesthetics were never intended as...

Abstract: Laura Riding's Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), written with Robert Graves, is typically remembered for helping introduce "close reading" as a methodized practice of formal textual analysis; yet the work's actual influence has been curiously hard to locate in history. This essay argues that, in fact, the interpretive methods in Riding's late 1920s prose works fit only uncomfortably within standard parameters of close reading. By examining the diversity of Riding's alternative approaches—which include creative paraphrase, parody, ventriloquism, and interlinear gloss—this essay contributes to a recent rethinking of both the critical genealogies and the textual methods of close reading.

1 4 Y O X F O R D E N G L I S H I N T H E S I X T I E S A L A S T A I R F O W L E R F. W. Bateson is commonly thought of as the compiler of the fivevolume Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1941–77), but his achievement was much more than that. As perhaps the only Oxford tutor of his generation who grasped the full scope of literary criticism, he is of incalculable local importance. He had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard in the late twenties and observed the rise of the New Critics – Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom – whose ‘‘close reading’’ superseded the scholarly tracking of sources, influences, and historical contexts. The New Critics’ habit of drawing moral and political conclusions directly from the self-contained literary work seemed to many unsound; Bateson returned to Oxford with strong reservations about them. During World War II, Bateson had been a statistical o≈cer in local government, well accustomed to navigating oceans of print. He was one of the few tutors who had worked outside academia. After the war he made himself au fait with European and American developments in criticism, omnivorously reading literature and its contexts. Used to keeping many strands in play, he made himself a contextualist in a new sense. 1 5 R Visitors to Bateson’s house in the hilltop village of Brill might find many signs of his diverse interests. Taking the sun at his open door, behind him a Victorian elephant on wheels, by his side his wife, Jan, pacifying wasps with a jar of jam and water, he would explain how Brill had served as an observation post during the siege of Oxford in the English Civil War. Or as the doyen of local historians, he might show visitors over the windmill. In the university, Bateson was a patron and an enabler. At the Critical Society he liked to air preposterous views until his gadfly provocations met humiliating rebuttals. The heated objections would turn his ruddy complexion blush-red. Once he applied Coleridge’s definition of poetry as ‘‘the best words in the best order’’ to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, rearranging lines to show their lack of inevitability. How much of this coat-trailing was mentoring, how much masochism? Bateson founded Essays in Criticism, a journal that still survives , still ignores critical fashion, still maintains a high level of scholarship. He conceded that F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was the better journal of criticism. But this betrays his tendency to overrate judicial criticism. Of the two journals, Scrutiny more often fell into dogmatism and loss of proportion. As general editor of the Longman [later Pearson] Annotated English Poets, Bateson dispensed significant patronage. By choosing beginners as editors – Christopher Ricks, for example, and John Carey – he changed their lives. What would Carey be without his editions of Milton’s shorter poems, or Ricks without his two Tennysons? Above all Bateson kept his editors up to the mark, giving them tutorials, in e√ect, on editing. Bateson’s essay ‘‘The Literary Artefact’’ made us aware of Fredson Bowers and modern bibliography. And Bateson himself brought contemporary American and European criticism to our notice by enabling us to meet U.S. critics. We had scarcely heard of genre theory before a visit by R. S. Crane, the Chicago theorist. Lionel Trilling, too, was brought into our orbit. No accident that Trilling was the most contextualist of the New Critics, as witness his Mansfield Park essay in Encounter (1954). Trilling had a better sense of historical context than to claim, as Wimsatt and Beardsley did, that ‘‘the history of words after a poem is written may contribute meanings which if relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention.’’ 1 6 F O W L E R Y In the 1950s, European structuralism was a closed book to the Oxford English faculty: even R. A. Sayce’s seminars made little impression. Although Bateson was no believer in structuralism, he...

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. …

This chapter explores the practices that guided the New Critical classroom, focusing on the renowned pedagogue Cleanth Brooks and the tense negotiations of authority that came into play in teaching poetry through “close reading.” Treating Brooks’s own classroom teaching alongside his modeling of pedagogy through criticism, this chapter reads his landmark study of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in The Well Wrought Urn as a dramatic text, in which he models close reading as a nostalgic and communal practice. This “close reading” practice is infused with social and moral purpose, idealistically figuring present as well as future scenes of reading as sites of social inclusion, even while summoning some of Agrarianism’s more conservative historical fantasies. At a time of explosive and potentially alienating growth in the American university, Brooks’s model of close classroom reading is resistant and communalizing, drawing a poem near to its readers and also drawing those readers near to one another.

I wish in opening to thank Prabhu, Esowanne, and Adéèkó for the many windows that they opened onto Calibrations with their remarks. However, rather than attempt a point-by-point response to their many insights, I want instead to spend some time delving into my own formation as a literary critic as a preamble to attending to some of the points they make. This seems to me apposite in the context of thinking about the theoretical dispositions that went into the book, something that Adeleke Adéèkó perceptively identifies in his piece as sharing an impulse with the recent works of Achille Mbembe and Olakunle George, among others. One of the central elements of my education was the place given to close reading. It is only later that I discovered that the New Criticism heavily influenced this. But what did it mean to be taught close reading in the context of an African education? And how did I move from there to the point of Calibrations in terms of my critical and theoretical interests? From its inception in the work of I. A. Richards, William Empson, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, and others, New Criticism was a reaction against Indo-European philology on the one hand and a certain kind of historical scholarship that had a strong interest in sociology and biography on the other.1 The focus on the text as such was meant to rescue it from obscure and extraneous considerations. Central to the close reading inspired by the New Criticism was an attempt to identify ambiguity, irony, and paradox as different levels at which the text signaled tensions within its structure. A methodological implication that derived from this focus was that the external world of politics and society was effectively bracketed out of consideration. Furthermore, the aesthetic object, most often a poem, was elevated to a superior ontology and became the privileged gateway for knowing the world. Indeed, the aesthetic text acquired an almost sacred and awe-inspiring status. Nowhere was this elevation better expressed than in R. P. Blackmur's comment in his essay on the poems of Wallace Stevens. He pauses after quoting a section of "The Death of a Soldier" to state that "to gloss such a poem is almost impertinent," before going on to provide his opinion. In the African education that I had, these New Critical tendencies were manifested in an attenuated form in the classroom, and were not unrelated to the Commonwealth literary criticism we were exposed to and that went side-by-side with the [End Page 122] New Criticism. Commonwealth criticism had two contradictory sides to it. On the one hand it sought to expose the literature of the newly independent nations and therefore had to take account of social and political aspects of that literature. Yet on the other hand, the social and political aspects were to be discerned only as residual dimensions of national, ethnic, or cultural spirit captured within the writings themselves. The pursuit of the national/ethnic/cultural spirit was conjoined to what was essentially a kind of ethnographic and documentary sensibility. Thus, writing of Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People, one early reviewer could say that the novel was "worth a ton of documentary journalism" (qtd. in Larson 16). Coupled to close reading and Commonwealth critical tendencies was also a concern with identifying the distinctive aspects of African literature. At the heart of the debate about what constituted an authentic literature was the place of orality. The rationale for the ethnographic grid of African literary criticism derived partly in the interest in orality and literacy that marked a dominant trend in social anthropology and other academic fields from the fifties through to the seventies. As the work of Eric Havelock, Parry and Lord, Marshall MacLuhan, Jack Goody, and others gained recognition, a new paradigm in the social sciences began to gain shape. The interest of these writers in tracing what...

Forum:Canon versus "The Great Unread" Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson When we embarked on editing the Goethe Yearbook, we brainstormed ideas about formats for disseminating research that would usefully complement the stellar articles that appear annually. Our interest turned to the forum, a robust format that has fostered lively debate elsewhere (e.g., Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation) and has recently been popularized by our colleagues at the German Quarterly. Naturally, we zeroed in on a topic that is still underrepresented in the Yearbook but that has begun to alter the ways in which we approach the study of Goethe and, more broadly, the eighteenth century—within our comparatively small field in North America, as well as in Germany and in adjacent disciplines invested in the period (e.g., comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, genre studies, English, Atlantic studies, and history). We are, of course, speaking of Digital Humanities (DH). In the process of identifying experts in the field, we discovered that a few years ago graduate programs in German (at Yale, the University of Chicago, and Konstanz) had devoted a short course to the topic that inspired the title of our inaugural forum. As we approached potential contributors, we posed a series of questions, intended to spark not direct answers, but to serve as an impulse for reflection: What is the canon? How do we define it and how has it been reenvisioned beyond DH? What is the relationship between "mining" thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship "merely" based on the interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does "close reading" versus "distant reading" affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the nineteenth century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the "great unread"? Nine colleagues who are engaged in the theory and practice of DH scholarship responded to our call. The scope of their work is impressive, providing detailed yet suggestive overviews of DH methodologies, insights into the importance of DH and its ability to recuperate historically marginalized writers, case studies of temporary canonicity, and challenges to canonical approaches to the Goethezeit. In framing the debate, we kept in mind the larger context of German studies, while assuming an uncontested relevance of literature and textual studies, certainly among the readers of the Goethe Yearbook. And while we [End Page 187] recognized the pitfalls of posing canonical literature as "read" in opposition to a virtually boundless spectrum of texts that can be analyzed only as data, we hoped to prompt a less polarized discussion about the imagined impact of DH and "computational criticism" on our field. We wanted to create a section that allows scholars—whether they are newcomers or well-versed in DH, interested in or deeply skeptical about data—to glimpse the innovative field's rich opportunities, its first instances of obsolescence, even its evident shortfalls; our goal is to allow our readers to decide for themselves whether to read broadly, which directions to pursue further, or whether to disregard the field completely. We invite continuous engagement with the contributions, not to succumb to a trend, but to continue the dialogue. The following essays impressively show that our aim for open discussions was spot-on. The contributors not only address ways in which DH can broaden an understanding of our field, but they also identify new challenges that arise; quite a few returned to the original meaning of "the great unread" in Margaret Cohen's formulation, namely the fact that canon formation has always implied a curtailing of tradition (as opposed to the texts produced in any given period). Each contribution reveals, in unique ways, not only that possible definitions of and approaches to DH are about as manifold as its projects and practitioners, but that the field has begun what we may call its own historicization; it now encompasses digital preservation, humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks...

One repays a teacher badly if one remains nothing but a pupil. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1 ‘Ah, what am I?’ sighed the master, shaking his head. Henry James, ‘The L...