In the 21st century, the practice of close reading has become synonymous with approaching a book as an artifact to decode—the idea that the blue curtains can never just be blue curtains. In Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press), coeditors Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant attempt to forge a path away from this attitude and, in turn, resuscitate close reading as a framework for understanding an author's argument.
Sinykin, who is an assistant professor of English at Emory University, and Winant, associate professor of English and humanities at Reed College, sat down with PW to unpack their argument and give insight on the relationship between English curricula and the book business.
What do you mean when you say you wanted to create a book that was "more useful" than a traditional essay collection?
Dan Sinykin: The essay collection is a fraught genre in academic publishing. They're notorious for selling poorly, and they're notorious for being extremely slow to get the manuscript [for], because of all the cats you need to herd. But what we're doing is creating something that would be useful in the undergraduate classroom.
Johanna Winant: A typical edited collection has roughly 10 scholars writing essays that are drawn from their scholarship, and then a sort of thin container for those. And this is, in terms of organization as well as mission, quite different than that. We cowrote a three-part introduction that's close to 40 pages, and then the essays are very, very short—under 3,000 words—and are not drawn from the scholars' research exactly. Rather, they're about their own relationship to scholarship. We gave them the task of choosing a famous close reading and showing how it works, writing for an undergrad audience. Then there's another 30 to 40 pages of pedagogical materials after [those] 21 essays.
What should the practice of close reading look like, and how does that differ from what's being taught?
DS: In the discipline, the way we talked about close reading]had become anachronistic. It was stuck in the 20th century, and we had advanced the practice of close reading in our scholarship, but our teaching had not kept pace. The project of the book is to bring the teaching and practicing of close reading in the profession back together.
JW: What we really want to clarify that has gotten lost is that close reading is argument. It's a way that anyone at any level can analyze evidence and make a claim about it that makes a difference in how we understand the text. We lay out five steps that most close readings take in the same order.
DS: It's really an element of conversation—you watch a film, you read a book, you want to tell somebody how you feel about it, what you think about it. Close reading is the way you get to do that, and it's based in caring—caring about what someone else thinks, and caring about what you think, and caring about the thing you are reading. If you find people where they're at, if you say, "What's something you care about, why do you care about it?" you can get them to see the desirability of close reading really quick.
When and how did the idea of "close reading" become popularized?
DS: Close reading emerged in tandem with modernist poetry and gained its initial power with the New Critics in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. There was not just a method; there was a sense of valuation that was more explicit, and has become less explicit, that what you're doing when you're close reading has to do with your judgment of work.
How would you describe the type of book that is normally used to teach close reading?
DS: Close reading still has a tendency to focus on work that like literary fiction or lyric poetry, rather than popular works. Part of the reason New Directions survived [as an independent press] is because Ezra Pound told James Laughlin to start a publisher in the 30s, right around the time that New Criticism and close reading were getting big, and New Directions published a lot of the modernists who got picked up in the classroom. Even if you're close reading film, you can go and do a close reading of Transformers, but there is a tendency to feel that it is the more serious artistic work that is more suited to it, which I personally disagree with.
JW: Close reading is when you study something as a text, and some things lend themselves to that traditionally. But I do think you can close read something else that you consider to be worthy of study and argumentation and aesthetic analysis.
Beyond the pedagogical goals, did you feel a a sense of urgency working on this project?
DS: The Trump administration's attempt to destroy higher education is something we intimately feel. We need to fight our own battle of converting folks to understanding why the work we do matters, especially in the humanities. The second thing is AI, and the way that AI has become ubiquitous in the college classroom. When one uses AI, one is not allowing oneself to become the agent of one's own idea. Learning how to make an argument to tell someone what you feel about a work and writing that for yourself, that makes you your own agent of your own thoughts, and close reading is a method to do that. It is possible for an AI to imitate the argumentative structure of a close reading, but it is not possible for an AI to care.
JW: What I'll just add is that it has been an incredibly joyful and heartening experience doing this book. When you do an academic book, you think you're talking to a small audience of fellow nerds, but the audience for this book has been much larger and more enthusiastic. People want the humanities. People want to care about literature. People want to be able to talk to each other about how art works in complex and skilled ways. Even though it's a time of despair, it also feels like a time of real joy and solidarity.
