Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James

Abstract

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...