Modernism and Close Reading

The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed--even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read. Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.

Table of Contents:
Introduction PART I: HISTORIES OF MODERNISM AND CLOSE READING 1: Max Saunders: Modernist Close Reading 2: Peter Howarth: Close Reading as Performance 3: Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: Poetry Explication: The Making of a Method 4: Joseph Brooker: Slow Revelations: James Joyce and the Rhetorics of Reading 5: Jean-Michel Rabaté: When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name? PART II: FUTURES FOR CLOSE READING MODERNISM 6: Jesse Matz: Queer Surrealism 7: Vidyan Ravinthiran: Nabokov and the Privilege of Style 8: Paige Reynolds: Bird Girls: Modernism and Sexual Ethics in Contemporary Irish Fiction 9: Derek Attridge: Tom McCarthy's Modernism: Close Encounters of a Pleasurable Kind 10: Melba Cuddy-Keane: Experiencing the Modernist Storymind: A Cognitive Reading of Narrative Space 11: Hannah Freed-Thall: Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading

About the Author :
David James is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Author, most recently, of Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Discrepant Solace (Oxford University Press, 2019), his edited volumes include The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Modernism's Contemporary Affects (Modernist/modernity, 2018). For Columbia University Press he co-edits the book series Literature Now.

Review :
Modernism and Close Reading is a valuable addition to our current reading method debate. It comes at a time when a reassessment of the past is crucial if our discussions are to be productive and historically grounded. The book counters the dismissal of close reading as a relic of the modernist past and shows this method to be essential to the future of literary studies. This landmark collection of essays takes the seemingly established combination of modernism and close-reading and probes it until new conceptual and theoretical genealogies emerge...This is a book with real things to say about the history of criticism, the quality of attentiveness, and their relationship to the practice and study of modernism right now. It is going to be an inescapable book for some time to come The collection is highly serviceable for all academics not only as a handy refresher—or a primer for what some literature departments might have removed from their curricula—but also for its invaluable look into the very recent developments in the discipline. One of the many strengths of Modernism and Close Reading is how it stages and instrumentalizes this challenge—how it organizes all those moving parts but without comprising complexity or specificity. This volume does not shy away from conceptual or disciplinary messiness... For those interested in modernism, close reading, or the history of criticism—for those willing to immerse themselves in the innumerable, still expanding relations entailed therein—this collection is absolutely worth reading.