Close Reading, Closed Writing

So pervasive and persistent is the "close reading" as an assignment at the university level that it is tempting to consider it as a synecdoche for the English essay. Certainly, there are many types of literature assignments-the research piece, character study, and so forth-in even the most conservative or restricted programs. But there is something integral about this one. The close reading is basic to the pedagogic practice we tend to value most highly, the detailed discussion that takes place in the seminar session. It occurs as an assignment in a number of guises and a variety of contexts, most particularly in the essay and in the examination sight passage. In a discipline that timetables "mastery" of material first, and theoretical inquiry later if at all, it is often the closest we come in the classroom to the deliberate, or even incidental, inculcation of skills or explanation of methodology, the closest we come to articulating what a reading practice is or might be and the reasons for it. Because it is so common that it is taken for granted, so institutionalized that it is invisible, so central to our concerns that it provides a most basic text, the close reading assignment functions as an index to English in the academy. What is said and not said about it, how it is placed and displaced, hold clues to how we view work in English studies and the construction of those studies as discipline and profession, inquiry and institution. This article is written from a Canadian, and specifically English-Canadian, perspective. Without trying to postulate an all-purpose disciplinary model, it might be suggested that in English Canada there is a particularly interesting mix of paradigms that predominate in Britain and the United States respectively. Each is a latent content where the other is manifest, however. The "greats" or "author and society" questions typical of British examinations, for example, require at base a new critical-style close reading (Longhurst 152), even as new critical approaches in the United States academy are often justified through Leavisian appeals, although they may not go by that name. Both have in common a notion of the mimeticism of literary study, of a reflective relationship of reader to author and work, which is found, and perhaps founded, in the writings of I.A. Richards. While the close reading with its concomitant assumptions has come under fire from all quarters, it persists in our practices, and especially pedagogic ones. Here, the concern is less to criticize the close reading than to analyze this institutionalization and intractability.