I have been thinking consciously about close reading for a little while now. I say “consciously” because close reading had for a long while been the thing I did almost without thinking, the thing I did when I started a new project, the thing I did when I was stuck or frustrated. I have internalized close reading through and through and through. In my undergraduate days, the objects of my two faculty crushes left me love-struck by the way they appeared to wrest meaning (and meaningful meaning, mind you) from a text, from word to word, device to device, image to image. I thought I finally understood what Keats meant about the Grecian urn when I listened to these performances (and of course I later understood they were performances, not spontaneous declamations), and when they eschewed claims to any virtuosity of interpretation, arguing instead that the text’s intrinsic unity made it all possible, I was hooked.
To say I was hooked is to characterize the degree to which this line of thinking pierced me – so much so that I bit unthinkingly. I don’t want to say that I was duped, though, because that would imply that the rest of my narrative will feature my slow maturation, my growing up in critical practice. Graduate school, and the theory crushes I had during that time, did not involve shedding my close reading ways for more sophisticated and nuanced accounts. I became enamored of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, I think, because as critical practices both share an investment in the work of reading. Freud is as much a close reader as Derrida, in other words, if by close you’ll accept the synonyms of attentive, acute, sometimes overdetermined, often skeptical, and, in a strange way, sincere. To be sure, Freud’s readerly eye is always trained on certain effects in order to argue for the workings of the psyche: the point of his essay “The Uncanny” is not to produce a piece of literary criticism, but to treat Hoffman’s “Sandman” as a literary instance of a broader phenomenon. But as Neil Hertz and others have argued, it matters that Freud’s theorizing of the uncanny rests on the meticulous care with which he treats Hoffman’s wild ride of automatons and burning eyes. Meanwhile no one would call Derrida a literary critic – for all his investment in writing’s inhabitation of speech his corpus isn’t especially riven through with interpretations of literary texts – but the manner of his attention has its own tics, tendencies that are just as driven by the view that language, whatever its facility in the work of representation, makes irresistible demands.
I could put it another way: that the close reading that hooked me as a baby English major destined me to find Freudian psychoanalysis and deconstruction attractive. These attractions have for me been the attractions of language as an interface that keeps me in its thrall even as I wield it: even as I read in it.
I have often told graduate students that my short, obsessive attention span is my greatest weakness as a scholar. The literary historical model is not a good fit for me, and I wondered long and hard in graduate school why I could not commit to one period, when I so admired and envied the erudition I observed in my professors. The research project I’m working on currently, however, has made me begin to think that I am not so much the dilettante or interloper. This project is, it turns out, about close reading, about a particular moment when it bumped up against the radical politics of the North American women’s liberation movement. The print culture of the that movement – embodied in feminist independent presses, in feminist activist magazines, in the Women in Print movement – turned on a particular view of reading as a vehicle of consciousness-raising. On this view, reading was said to foster woman to woman identification in a manner parallel to consciousness raising sessions, where individual stories crystallized collective gender awareness. In other words, there’s a theory of reading’s identificatory potential, of a closeness achieved in reading, in the feminist print culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. And if that weren’t exciting enough, the proximate intimacy of this closeness, modeled on consciousness raising sessions, crops up precisely in the language, the metaphors of reading that prevail in the newly emerging feminist literary criticism: in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which is if anything a series of bravura close readings that even Camille Paglia would admire; in Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, in Carolyn Heilbrun’s discussions of androgyny, in Nancy Miller’s female plot. Would you believe that many of these scholars joined consciousness raising sessions during their graduate school days? As I work on this project I’m tickled by the convergences like these because they confirm, I believe, that I’m not crazy. But even better: I’m still doing close reading.