Scales of Reading

Abstract

We read according to different scales: fast or slow, selective or thorough, deeply or skimming along. What is at stake in scalar variations like these? Quite a lot, this essay argues. The contrast between close reading and distant reading, as formulated by Franco Moretti, raises provocative challenges for the discipline of literary study. Moretti’s claim that “knowing is not reading” exemplifies the current devaluation — and undertheorization — of the kind of knowledge that close reading produces. “Distant reading” converges with recent critiques of historicism, experiments in machinic reading, and narratives of the “turn away from the linguistic turn” to foreground the epistemological limits of interpreting individual texts. In light of these challenges, I advocate the reexamination of precisely what we learn through close reading. This project, of articulating anew the terms of literary-historical understanding, may be aided by resources of the hermeneutic tradition — although the possibility seems out of step with current “antihermeneutic” ideas. I argue that scale remains a literary event and that units of analysis derive from processes of interpretation. We need disciplinary accounts that incorporate both intrinsic and extrinsic sources of meaning and that explain why experiences of reading have validity as sources of knowledge.