Everything about Close Reading totally explained
In
literary criticism,
close reading describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they're read.
The technique as practiced today was pioneered (at least in English) by
I.A. Richards and his student
William Empson, later developed further by the
New Critics of the mid-
twentieth century. It is now a fundamental method of modern criticism.
Close reading is sometimes called
explication de texte, which is the name for the similar tradition of textual interpretation in
French literary study, a technique whose chief proponent was
Gustave Lanson.
A truly attentive close reading of a two-hundred-word poem might be thousands of words long without exhausting the possibilities for observation and insight. To take an even more extreme example,
Jacques Derrida's essay
Ulysses Gramophone, which
J. Hillis Miller describes as a "hyperbolic, extravagant… explosion" of the technique of close reading, devotes more than eighty pages to an interpretation of the word "yes" in
James Joyce's great
modernist novel Ulysses.
Literary close reading and commentaries have extensive precedent in the
exegesis of religious texts. For example,
Pazand, a genre of
middle Persian literature, refers to the
Zend (literally: 'commentary'/'translation') texts that offer explanation and close reading of the
Avesta, the sacred texts of
Zoroastrianism. The scriptural commentaries of
Talmud offer a commonly cited early predecessor to close reading. In Islamic studies, the close reading of
Koran has flourished hugely producing an immense corpus. But the closest religious analogy to contemporary literary close reading, and the principal historical connection with its birth, is the rise of the
higher criticism, and the evolution of
textual criticism of the Bible in Germany in the late eighteenth century.
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