Post 1: What is close reading?

When I think about close reading, my own methodology is to read the text, think about certain words and their possible valences, and then situating that interpretation of the text in a historical context. Alternatively, after I read the text, I might think of certain words as part of theoretical question and ask myself how does this text theorize a certain ontological relationship. These are, I think, pretty standard ways to "close read" a text and I think I am being dutiful in abandoning an idea if the research doesn't support it and not performing a paranoid reading. Armstrong's essay, now read for the fourth time, does not quite convince me that I am close reading wrong...but it doesn't make me feel like I'm doing it right either. Plus, there are many possible ways to close read "right,"right?

I am not too sure that I understand the way Armstrong does it, but there is a part of the reading that I think resonates with me on some level and makes me feel like I'm close to understanding what she means. On page 87, she emphasizes the relationship between critic and text as one of distance; to do away with affect in favor of rationality positions the text as Other in relationship to the reader. Seeing the text as inferior privileges the reader's perspective and contexts, closing off other interpretations. To remedy this and introduce her new style of close reading, Armstrong invokes Levinas and says "Text and reader produce a reciprocal network without being involved in subject/object positions which are relations of power" (pg. 93). The word "reciprocal" catches my attention. As we work on the text, the text works on us. But what does that mean? Later she attempts to clarify before bringing in Volosinov: "A reading of Levinas suggests to respond to the text's coercions, to participate in its desires or its panic, is to begin to see how it thinks" (95). Rather than asserting my own thoughts over the text,  perhaps it is better to start with how I react to the text. Do I feel something when I read it and why? The why, as Armstrong demonstrates in her reading of "Tintern Abbey," might be located in the historical context (she suggests that the poem brings up an anxiety felt during the time when men could be "impressed" into military service). So perhaps her method of reading starts differently than the way I am reading now. Maybe her way of close reading suggests the way I look for "clues" to my interpretation is wrong.

I think Armstrong also suggests that the outcome of close reading is different. Armstrong says that her reading of the poem is in the style of the "prolegomenon," and introduction that invites more questions and further discussions. In her closing paragraph she says that "Literary texts-at any rate in our culture-are driven by a linguistic intensity, which is bound to mean that they call up powerful contradictions, psychic and political" (102). I think that traditionally the critic's aim is to resolve these contradictions, to provide a definitive answer and reading. However, what if we wrote pieces that focused on these contradictions and their possibilities? What if we wrote things that invited others to do more work on the texts, thus entering into a kind of collaborative system that allows us to really explore the bifurcations and erasures? The end game of an article wouldn't be to answer a question; it would be to talk about the possibilities of answers and to introduce another question.