Close Reading and Its Alternatives provides an up-to-date and consolidated history of the literary and analytical technique and philosophy of close reading. It offers an essential guide to the features and genealogies of close reading, and how it intersects with literary theories like feminist criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, digital humanities, game studies, and more.
Divided into five parts, the book contains 21 influential essays on close reading and on alternative methods that have arisen in the past few decades. These primary texts are contextualized by and analyzed in six original and insightful introductions. These works combine to trace the invention of close reading around the time of New Criticism. The book then shows how close reading evolved when it is taken up by poststructuralist thought, such as Marxism, deconstruction, and New Historicism. Turning to the twenty-first century, the volume explores the rise of the critiques of close reading that are distinguished by their attempts to offer alternative methods: distant reading; reparative reading, just and surface reading, and thin description; and too-close reading.
Close reading is inescapably central in the field of literary studies, and beyond. This comprehensive resource will enhance understanding and enrich the reading experience of students and teachers of literature.
Table of Contents:
General Introduction: Close Reading and Its Alternatives - Mun-Hou Lo; Part I Inventions of Close Reading—Around the New Criticism; Introduction to Part I - Mun-Hou Lo; 1. Criticism, Inc. (1937) - John Crowe Ransom; 2. What to Say About a Poem (1963) - W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.; 3. The Language of Paradox (1947) - Cleanth Brooks; 4. The Formalist Critics (1951) - Cleanth Brooks; 5. Selections from a Glossary of the New Criticism (1948-9) - William Elton; Part II Inflections of Close Reading—After the New Criticism; Introduction to Part II - Mun-Hou Lo; 6. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (1973) - Clifford Geertz; 7. On Interpretation: Symptomatic Reading and the Transformation of the Text (1981) - Fredric Jameson; 8. The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism (1983) - Paul de Man; 9. Teaching Deconstructively (1985) - Barbara Johnson; 10. Professing the Renaissance: Culture, Historicity, Textuality (1989) - Louis A. Montrose; 11. Reading for Form (2000/2006) - Susan J. Wolfson; Part III Alternatives to Close Reading—Distant Reading; Introduction to Part III - Mun-Hou Lo; 12. Conjectures on World Literature (2000) - Franco Moretti; 13. Foundation of Macroanalysis (2013) - Matthew L. Jockers; 14. Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science (2016) - James F. English and Ted Underwood; Part IV Alternatives to Close Reading—Reparative Reading; Just and Surface Reading; and Thin Description; Introduction to Part IV - Mun-Hou Lo; 15. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You (2003) - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; 16. Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot (2007) - Sharon Marcus; 17. Surface Reading: An Introduction (2009) - Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus; 18. Close Reading and Thin Description (2013) - Heather Love; Part V Alternatives to Close Reading—Too-Close Reading; Introduction to Part V - Mun-Hou Lo; 19. Preview: Hidden Hitchcock and Too-Close Viewing (2016) - D. A. Miller; 20. Now It’s Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading (2015) - Frances Ferguson; 21. Getting Too Close: Video Games, “Anal Rope,” and the Perils of Queer Interpretation (2019) - Bonnie Ruberg; Index
About the Author :
Mun-Hou Lo is Associate Professor at NUS College, National University of Singapore.
