Modernism and Close Reading

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...

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

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...

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

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 Life after Texts, the Life within Them

Reviews Mein); Raabe's engagement with Schopenhauer (Soren Fauth), Schiller (Gabriele Henkel), and Thackeray (JeffreySammons); references toWolfenbuttel (Herbert Blume), aswell as rereadings of selected works from theperspective of the period's family journals (Christof Hamann), Homer's epics (Heiko Ullrich), Clemens Lugowski's theory of the novel (Heinrich Detering), and the twentieth-century detective novel (Julia Bertschik). Not all contributors succeed in significantly advancing often well-established knowledge; some resort to rather extensive commentary, others summarize findings or extend lines of enquiry developed more extensively elsewhere. The editors' brief preface wisely resists the temptation of retrospectively imposing coherence on this successful collection of interesting chapters, which often demonstrate the wider relevance of contemporary Raabe research fornineteenth-century literary and cultural studies overall. University of Nottingham Dirk Gottsche The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilkey Benn, Brecht, and Doblin. By Larson Powell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. vii+256 pp. $65; ?35. ISBN 978-1-57113-382-3. For Larson Powell, 'the intellectual techno-rave' is decidedly over. Against the 'thinkliness' of cultural-studies accounts of the world and the text, grouped together here as so many 'Imaginary Theories', Powell poses the 'thingliness' of the natural world. Drawing on Adorno's aesthetics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Luhmann's systems theory, he protests against the exclusion of nature, technology's repressed other, from studies ofmodernity. A diverse theoretical manifesto (variously referencing Kant, Bataille, Kafka, Langs Metropolis, Eagleton, and Jelinek) is followed by studies of fourmodernist writers. These begin with Rilke's short work on painting, Worpswede, inwhich landscape is seen to recede in anticipation of the indifferent Thing of the Dinggedichte. Throughout, Powell's locating of the subject within nature offers refreshing challenges to widely held views, for instance of Rilke's destabilized lyrical subject: the poem Archaischer Torso Apollos' is shown to offer a potential retrieval of voice in the famous imperative to change. The place of the subject figures equally in the comparative reading of Benn's Tkarus' with Goethe's 'Prometheus' and Nietzsche's 'Dionysios-Dithyramben'. Here, Benn's autopoietic subject is situated within modernity's destructive self-referentiality. But it is theDoblin chapter that offers themost pointed critique of technology's fantasies?repeated by contemporary theory?of sovereign self-construction. Addressing itself to a postcolonial and natural Real, Doblin's Die drei Spriinge des Wang-lun is presented as handling more irreducible traumata than those thematized by an academy locked in 'self-styled subversion'. The concluding chapter on Brecht turns to a different mode of subversion: Luhmannian terminology adds to the established political reading a definition of his poetry as second-order observation, which can index and challenge systemic blind spots. MLR, 105.4, 2010 1185 The backbone of the book, Powell's critique of the 'technological sublime' and the related prevalence of 'rhetorical figurality' in cultural studies, is delivered with an often extraordinary rhetoric of its own: Lyotard's sublime is likened to 'self-parodying camp', and JudithButler's gender performativity to 'the "lifestyle" sections of the newspapers'. Meanwhile a theory of gender underlies the project, as Powell comments on Rilke's 'emancipated' Madchen and Nietzsche's hysterical Ariadne. But the gendering of nature and the articulation of psychoanalytic theory around familial models require further critique. The lack of paternal authority inWang-lun is diagnosed as a cause ofmania; this apparent valorization of the (hetero)norm carries through in repeated references to nature's motherliness, and one aside that casts all transsexuals as psychotic. Powell's theoretical agenda occupies as important a place as the subsequent textual analyses. In this sense, those reading for the poetry may be frustrated. However the close readings that do feature are illuminating: an examination of syntax and movement in Rilke's 'Der Ball' elucidates Lacan's extimacy, and Benn's rhythms,metaphors, and metonymies are related indetail to his competing subject-positions. Although its theoretical density may appear forbidding, the book will be of interest to those working on the radical potential of the 'other' (for instance nature) to disrupt totalizing systems. Moreover, as a manifesto for reading literaturewith, or indeed as, theory, it isworth the challenging read. Newnham College, Cambridge...

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...

Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Visualization research and practice that incorporates the arts make claims to being more effective in connecting with users on a human level. However, these claims are difficult to measure quantitatively. In this paper, we present a follow-on study to use close reading, a humanities method from literary studies, to evaluate visualizations created using artistic processes [Bares 2020]. Close reading is a method in literary studies that we've previously explored as a method for evaluating visualizations. To use close reading as an evaluation method, we guide participants through a series of steps designed to prompt them to interpret the visualization's formal, informational, and contextual features. Here we elaborate on our motivations for using close reading as a method to evaluate visualizations, and enumerate the procedures we used in the study to evaluate a 2D visualization, including modifications made because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Key findings of this study include that close reading is an effective formative method to elicit information related to interpretation and critique; user subject position; and suspicion or skepticism. Information gained through close reading is valuable in the visualization design and iteration processes, both related to designing features and other formal elements more effectively, as well as in considering larger questions of context and framing.

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Literary and cultural studies continue to navigate phases of intense methodological flux and disciplinary self-examination. The Introduction takes stock of the condition of close reading in modernist studies against the backdrop of this broader climate of change. It suggests that the rapport between close reading and the proliferating objects, elastic timeframes, and global contexts of modernist studies today no longer feels guaranteed. And it outlines some of the ways in which the volume will examine close reading’s history as an avenue to acquiring some sense of its futurity at a moment of unprecedented expansion and reconstitution for modernist scholarship.