Blog Post 1

            Despite the difficulty and frustration I encountered in getting through this week’s reading, I think Warner, Sedgwick, Armstrong, and Moretti’s questions about what constitutes close- or distant reading are important to consider. Because we take criticism and critical reading for granted as the method of our profession, it is certainly worthwhile to   not only how we read critically, or why we read critically, but what we are excluding by insisting on reading critically or closely. Warner’s initial description highlights extremely common reading practices, surely performed by amateur and professional readers alike, and tells us they are considered uncritical. What I hope his ultimate argument is (though it was not clear to me) is that these more surface level reading methods can be seen to hold value and add to criticism. Sedgwick says the critic’s tendency is to become consumed with a kind of competitive paranoia which drives them to uncover the truth in a text. Her alternative is to attempt reparative which would take less of a negative approach. Part of what was frustrating, but was also a relief, is that I think Warner and Sedgwick’s concerns are a little dated.

            As I mentioned, Warner lists many concerns at the beginning of his chapter about how certain types of reading are considered inferior and are stifled in classrooms because they are considered uncritical. For example, Warner writes that students “identify[ing] with characters,” “fall[ing] in love with authors,” “warm[ing] with pride over national heritage,” “tak[ing] reassurance in the familiar,” and overall just having emotional or sentimental reactions to texts, are not things students should be doing as critical readers. They should be simultaneously more distant (less sentimental) while getting closer to and deeper in the text. On the one hand, these are definitely things that casual readers one might find in The Avid Reader are probably doing when they read. On the other hand, English students and teachers on campus are also doing these things when they read.  In my undergraduate education I learned that if you don’t have anything “smart” to say about a text, it is perfectly fine to start with, “I liked it” or “I hated it” and then use that as a starting point to find out why. Maybe Warner wasn’t allowed to talk like this in his English classes, or maybe I’m not understanding what he’s saying at all, but I have found that it is perfectly acceptable to approach texts with emotion and feeling rather than critical distance and reason. Or maybe he and Sedgwick and their conversation around close-reading are partly responsible for why I can claim these experiences.

            Sedgwick’s insistence on the negativity and ruthlessness of paranoid scholarship I also find rather foreign. But I’m willing to grant that she may be who I have to thank for that. As a scholar, while I certainly have developed a degree of paranoia in trying to be sure I account for others’ voices, I am under no illusions that there is a single truth in any text to be found or that any one reading will completely overturn and make unnecessary the readings that preceded it. What she’s describing sounds very deconstructionist, and though that method of scholarship is fun and can be useful and enlightening, it 1) does not always need to have a negative end and 2) I think it is unlikely that someone would argue it is the only way to read a text. When one thinks of scholarship as collaboration rather than competition, paranoia isn’t required because it’s acknowledged that the one true reading doesn’t exist. The only paranoia I experience is in worrying that I will think I have found the key to a text and then be unable to imagine more than one perspective.

            I think Warner and Sedgwick have called attention to something very important—a kind of snobbery which inhibits original thought instead of engendering it. They both invite readers to approach texts with emotion and feeling. For me, this feels like the more honorable approach to literature if only because presumably every professional student or teacher of literature was led there by a positive and probably emotional experience with a text. Our preferences and appreciation enhance scholarship more than they take away from it.