Close reading, in foregrounding reading as a kind of laborious and dramatic production, entails a degree of performance. And thus comes Guillory’s most affirming assertion, concerning the replicability of the performance of criticism. Close reading is, ultimately, a performative technique embedded within the piece of criticism; in Guillory’s... See more

So, Guillory’s most exciting suggestion is that close reading is a writing that foregrounds the process—or labor—of reading. With close reading reconceptualized in this light and situated as the bedrock of criticism, this then allows us to codify criticism as that which makes the process of learning and the production of knowledge more visible.

Guillory’s complication is a little more specific. The technique to which the techné of making-knowledge is applied is not justwriting; nor, however, is it just reading. It is, more definitively than Kramnick’s definition, the dialectical play between. It is a reading that gestures to a future writing, the base melody over which the critic cannot... See more

For Kramnick, close reading is, despite its name, an act of writing : it is “an expert practice of writing prose and making text, of weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” Crucially, it is a “craft knowledge.” “Close reading is craftwork in a literal sense. It is something one does or makes with one’s hands, and its mode... See more

That is, rather than mount a theory of close reading or wholly augment the de Manian theory to which Guillory seems to mostly subscribe, Guillory is more focused on a pedagogical exercise. Guillory argues that close reading is a technique; specifically, as technique, it is the bedrock of the work of the critic. The question is not to defend the... See more

A return to disciplinary bedrock, an insistence that the methods and purposes that first defined the discipline be respected and, in some form or other, resuscitated. The conservative turn also, therefore, revives interest in the discipline’s history. It remembers and reappraises not just English’s pathways and achievements but also its core... See more