Megan Walsh
The critical concept that interested me most was one that I was not unfamiliar with. In high school, close reading was emphasized as part of a New Criticism-leaning curriculum. However, I have never questioned or considered the potential limitations or relevancy of close reading, nor its connection to New Criticism. Lois Tyson explains New Criticism as a movement characterized by a dedication to the text as a singular entity (130). It moves away from the earlier method of analysis, focus on authorial intent and historical context, and focuses singularly on the work itself (Tyson 130). New Critics emphasize a strict focus on the work in question with no outside knowledge or contextualization; they believe that the text speaks for itself and all other information is irrelevant.
New Criticism holds that in order to analyze and understand a work’s underlying meaning, one must only look for the answers in the text itself by reading closely. Close reading can also mean slow reading, or deliberately and carefully looking for deeper meaning and connections in a text. Even individual words can be analyzed within a text and change the meaning of the overall piece through connotation. Close reading recognizes this and, as a strategy, aims to reach a broader understanding of a text and its relevancy to humanity and overarching themes by analyzing details within the text. The strategy of close reading aims to examine “all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, and so forth, which, because they form, or shape, the literary work are called its formal elements” (Tyson 131). I found that although new criticism has waned in popularity, close reading is still a key part of current literary practice.
However, form does dictate close reading’s relevancy to a certain extent. There may be limitations to close reading that I had not previously thought possible. I realized this while reading Cleanth Brooks’ “An Account of Keats’ Urn”, a close reading analysis of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Brooks draws evidence stanza by stanza to support his claim of a larger connection that justifies the final paradox of the poem as “in character”: “But to return to the larger pattern of the poem: Keats does something in this fourth stanza which is highly interesting in itself and thoroughly relevant to the sense in which the urn is a historian” (Brooks 9). I agree with Brooks in that I believe formally close reading may be necessary to ascertain the overlying meaning of this poem or justify the last few lines. Poetry lends itself to close reading on a formal level. However, Brooks’ writing points out a glaring flaw of the strategy; the double bind of close reading is revealed.
Brooks close reads in order to pick out evidence for his argument, glossing over lines that do not support his claim. It is nearly impossible to close read everything in the poem, but entirely necessary to do so in order to create the unity and wholeness desired by those who uphold close reading. In order to look at the whole text and nothing but the text, and to achieve a singular effect, close reading must be applied to every stanza in order to not miss any chance for analysis that might change the poem’s meaning. After all, if every word counts, doesn’t glossing over lines leave potential analysis out? This is the paradox that created the biggest limitation of close reading for me. I decided to apply this to another work that differed in form, The Great Gatsby, in order to look at Tyson’s example in a different light. To look at The Great Gatsby from a New Criticism lens is to risk close reading for the wrong reasons. To decontextualize Gatsby from the American Dream and the time period is to miss greater themes that characterize the novel. Also, depending on which parts of the novel one close reads, very different types of criticism become necessary. For instance, one could hypothetically perform a close reading of The Great Gatsby which focuses only on Nick’s interactions with Gatsby, thus leading to an analysis centered around themes of hero worship and even homosocial bonding, missing the larger themes Daisy represents in the text and Gatsby’s real motivations.
To go further with this idea, I wondered if it were possible to close read a text in a way that goes completely against its purpose as a work, and I believe that by picking and choosing which passages one reads from, this is a legitimate problem. How much of a given text are we missing by close reading? Is it possible to apply close reading wholly to longer texts, such as Moby Dick, without skipping over parts of the novel? I wondered if close reading could get too close and miss the point of a text. I think that sometimes it may be necessary to get further away from close reading, to contextualize a text and look for broader themes in the novel by looking at a text without a (potentially too narrow) New Criticism lens.
Works Cited:
Brooks, Cleanth. “History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats’ Urn.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 1944, pp. 89–101.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rded., Routledge, 2015.
Poetryfoundation.org. (2019). Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats: The Poetry Foundation. [online] Available at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173742
Creative Reading 