Close Reading Archive

Pointing to our article, Close reading in literary criticism and statistical analysis, Scott Newstok writes:

I hope you might find of interest John Guillory’s forthcoming book on close reading in literary studies. To this volume, I [Newstok] have contributed a bibliography, which will eventually be supplemented by an online archive of excerpted scholarship.

And here it is: the Close Reading Archive.

I pointed this to Thomas Basbøll, who adds:

The book looks interesting and the topic is quite timely, given the enthusiasm that I’m seeing out there for letting AI “read and summarize” texts that students find “difficult”. In the future, colleges may distinguish themselves by the amount of on-site reading and writing they require of the students.

For example, this year I’m teaching a course that concludes with a 3-hour 1000-word essay based on a short text. It won’t be a “close reading” assignment as such (it’s a course in innovation management) but it will require similar skills.

I’m ordering the book for library. (Even business school students can benefit from learning about the humanities!)

Btw, I enjoyed Scott’s book How to Think Like Shakespeare (thanks again, Scott, for sending it!).

Harold Bloom once said that Shakespeare is “the rock on which (postmodern) resentment of the canon must founder.” It’s possible that close reading can be something similar for AI.

P.S. I looked up Guillory’s book on Close Reading in the library and they didn’t have it—I guess it hasn’t come out yet—but I did happen to come across a journal article pointed to me by the library look-up system, an article entitled “John Guillory’s Distortions,” by Michael Clune, who like Guillory and Newstok is a professor of English. The article appeared last year in a journal called “Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture.” I was curious and took a look—it’s a criticism of Guillory’s 2022 book, “Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study.” I didn’t find Clune’s article at all persuasive. You can read it and make your own judgment; to me, my impression after reading Clune was that Guillory in that earlier book (which I have not read) had some interesting things to say, to which Clune was responding defensively and unconvincingly. But you can take a look and make your own judgment.

We’re getting pretty rarefied now: here I am criticizing an article by Clune that is criticizing a book but Guillory whose subject is the academic criticism of a bunch of books that almost nobody wants to read. I guess that’s what people are talking about with the expression “angels dancing on the head of a pin.” Oddly enough, though, I find the topic interesting, partly because I do enjoy reading literary books (although mostly not from “the canon” of Jane Austen, Henry James, etc.) and I’m interested in how the status of literature in our society has changed and I’m interested in the idea of writers as public intellectuals. I recognize that these are minority interests.