Nearly a hundred years ago, the English writer IA Richards coined a phrase that has become a mainstay of literary studies. “All respectable poetry,” he wrote in Practical Criticism, “invites close reading.” Richards would never again use the phrase, but it has become synonymous with a type of reading that his critical method influenced.
In On Close Reading, John Guillory mines the origin and evolution of this rather imprecise phrase – and why its ambiguity might be a problem.
A formidable historian of academic criticism, Guillory published Cultural Capital in 1993, an examination of the so-called canon wars that inflamed literature departments in the final decades of the 20th century. Thirty years later, he released Professing Criticism, an inquiry into the purpose of literary criticism in the academic realm. On Close Reading, published this January by University of Chicago Press, is a concise inquiry into a strand of the broader concerns of that book.
