Modernist Close Reading

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itself

Thinking Small

This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation. Sensitive to variations and valances of difference, elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. The chapter examines two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative possibilities: marine biologist Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral.

Queer Surrealism

The fantasy that close reading should be some purer, more total encounter with a text is usefully dispelled by readings that achieve their closeness precisely because they have a specific need for proximity with their particular text. As this chapter shows in developing a queer reading of The Waste Land, that ‘need’ might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. A specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. The transformation of Eliot’s text from an early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily transformation is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it—an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.

Introduction

Literary and cultural studies continue to navigate phases of intense methodological flux and disciplinary self-examination. The Introduction takes stock of the condition of close reading in modernist studies against the backdrop of this broader climate of change. It suggests that the rapport between close reading and the proliferating objects, elastic timeframes, and global contexts of modernist studies today no longer feels guaranteed. And it outlines some of the ways in which the volume will examine close reading’s history as an avenue to acquiring some sense of its futurity at a moment of unprecedented expansion and reconstitution for modernist scholarship.

Nabokov and the Privilege of Style

Nabokov’s prose is often purple, and looks to build itself into permanent structures, even if its run-on riffs maintain a provisional quality, a sense of forms grasped for and experimental and seeking to be adequate to a fraught and cosmopolitan history. This chapter shows that the experience of reading Nabokov (on such weighty matters as political and sexual tyranny, commercialism, nationhood, and exile) can be understood through a form of biographical criticism attentive to history and how it conditions a prose style we live through from sentence to sentence. While there have been energetic conversations in literary studies in recent years about a return to form, it remains the case that stylistic readings—intimately attentive to grammar, metre and lexis—are still relatively thin on the ground. In turning to Nabokov’s modernist artistry, this chapter looks to test the field’s changing views on the critical and contextual importance of prose style against what actually happens on the page.

Slow Revelations

This chapter examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. It examines a small number of examples of the close reading of Joyce’s fiction, trying to identify what happens at the level of interpretation, and also to describe what happens in the language of the critic. A premise of this discussion is that what we think of as close reading, when communicated to us, also implies a practice of writing. As Hugh Kenner, one of the readers under discussion, once remarked: ‘Criticism is nothing but explicit reading, reading articulating its themes and processes in the presence of more minds than one.’ The chapter seeks to discern how the writing of the critic, in thus making reading ‘explicit’, inflects our sense of the literary work.

Close Reading as Performance

Rather than see close reading as just a means to protect the hypostasized text from its social mediation, this chapter proposes that we see it as one of the many ways in which, over the course of the twentieth century, art has moved from an affair of objects towards one of events, whose modus operandi is performance. In fostering this change, unintentionally or deliberately, close reading is actually moving in the same direction as the contemporary historicists, blurring the borders between art and its contextual medium. Returning close reading to its beginnings as the companion to a theory of modernist poetry may not help it sound less elite. But it will, as the chapter argues, make clearer how modernist poetry was partly aware from the start of the material conditions and social mediations of its reception.

Experiencing the Modernist Storymind

The modernist storymind has long been associated with discontinuous and multidirectional time: mind time layered over clock time. This chapter’s argument is that, just as temporal experience in modernist narrative is mobile and pluralist, so too the reader’s spatial imagination is led through dynamic and mobile shifts. Seeing in modernist narrative is not a fixed gaze on a static object; instead, description produces what the chapter terms storied space: not only do different forms of scene construction articulate differently modelled stories but the accumulative space is multi-storied—a palimpsest of spatial models. Drawing on examples from E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf, the chapter outlines three possibilities for narrated space: (1) opening descriptions that narrow or widen views with corresponding alterations in scale; (2) powerful middles sustained through memory as spatial juxtapositions; and (3) spatial configurations accumulating throughout a narrative and generating a layered composite map.

Tom McCarthy’s Modernism

This chapter asks what it is like to read Tom McCarthy’s fiction, what are its peculiar pleasures, and whether the critical instruments associated with the tradition of ‘close reading’ are of any use in describing and explaining these responses. The chapter isolates two larger questions pertinent to this collection as a whole: In what sense can McCarthy be said to be continuing the project of modernism and the rewards and demands it offers its readers? And is there an ethical dimension to reading, and writing about reading, in this way? In the course of answering these questions, the chapter appeals to the notion of the literary work as an event, taking place in the reading process and living on in memorial revisitings of that process.

Bird Girls

This chapter examines the gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the aftermath of high modernism. Turning to Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the chapter argues that these works stage an epiphany that signals a perceived rite of passage promising to move the protagonist into some new form of understanding and experience—though importantly, these epiphanies and what unfolds in their wake are not necessarily characterized strictly by good feeling for female protagonists. Taking the ethics of close reading trauma as its central case in point, the chapter argues that slowly reading difficult texts like McBride’s trains readers to sit patiently not only with the discomfort generated by the intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation but also with the suffering generated by human failing.