Week One - Close Reading - Lauren Peterson

For Michael Warner’s text this week, “Uncritical Reading,” I’ve continued to think about what it means to have a practice within academia that often goes unexplained. Warner asserts that “critical reading is the folk ideology of the learned profession, so close to us that we seldom feel the need to explain it” (14). What results from this assumed aspect of academia are definitions that do not really tell us anything about critical reading at all, such as the example Warner lends from Cornell University’s mission statement. When we make the move to actually defining the critical-reading work we ask of ourselves and our students, things get messy. When Warner moves to definitions, they do not seem to address reading: He asks, “Is critical reading really reading at all?” while discussing its frequent association with “critical thinking” (15). Warner’s own tracing of the “history, extent, and limits of the culture of critical reading” point to, from what I am understanding, a need to analyze or understand the “reading situation” (33). While Rowlandson’s discontinuous reading of biblical passages, as shown interestingly by her writing, may appear “uncritical” because it does not observe the text as a whole (a rule outlined in Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book) an understanding of her “reading situation” shows the faultiness of these rules. I am wondering here if I am misreading how Warner uses “reading situation.” I believe his modifiers—“enframing metapragmatic construal”—need to be placed with “reading situation” to show that Rowlandson’s reading is not “uncritical” (32). From this explanation, I think that Warner is getting partly at what’s at stake: the agency of the reader.

Since I am here discussing assumptions and definitions of “critical reading,” I want to think more about the kind of definition that Warner leaves us with: “Critical reading is the pious labor of a historically unusual sort of person” (36). I’m thinking more now about why Warner uses the word “pious.” Framing this within the paragraph, this definition is not Warner’s suggestion, but one that actually names what is meant, if we historically trace this concept, when we say “critical reading.”

Warner’s text is in conversation with Sedgwick’s text clearly in his analysis of paranoid and reparative reading, with reparative reading also going outside the “rules” of critical reading in its commonality with “rhetoric of attachment, investment, and fantasy about their textual occasions” (17). I think also that these essays speak to one another in their attention to assumptions. As I am parsing out what “strong theory” entails, I think that framing it within a kind of popular assumption helps. Sedgwick explains that strong theory has a “reach and reductiveness” to it (134). This is why, I believe, Sedgwick questions psychoanalytic theory “centrally organized around ‘sexual difference’” (132). She continues by suggesting that the “history of psychoanalytic thought offers richly divergent, heterogeneous tools for thinking about aspects of personhood, consciousness, affect, filiation, social dynamics, and sexuality…” (132). What Sedgwick and Warner are both on the same page about, I think, is this richness of tools that can be lost--when strict rules are applied to “critical reading,” for Warner, or when other forms of theorizing, such as reparative reading, are made less important, for Sedgwick.

This “divergent” richness is what Isobel Armstrong’s text speaks to, as well, in her inclusion of other forms of meaning-making, or what constitutes meaning: “A more expanded notion of what thinking is would enable one to accept that a ‘narcissistic’ moment of identification may be an essential response to texts and a prerequisite of critical reading” (102). It’s interesting here to think about this quote in conversation with Warner’s discussion of Rowlandson and his initial questioning into the definition of critical reading, especially since Armstrong notes a “more expanded notion of what thinking is…” (emphasis mine). In this quote, Armstrong moves from thinking to critical reading—something that, as examined above, is similar to what brings Warner to question if critical reading is “really reading at all.” The difference here, however, is Armstrong’s use of the word “prerequisite.” In other words, she is not equating this more inclusive way of meaning-making with critical reading.

Franco Moretti, in “Conjectures on World Literature,” calls similarly for a divergent richness of tools: “But I actually think that it’s our greatest chance, because the sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different” (55). This different tool is "distant reading" that uses an "explanatory matrix" (56). I am tempted to say that this explanatory matrix sounds like a potential "strong theory," but I don't think it's that straightforward. I also don't think that Moretti's "distant reading" is in opposition to "close reading." Rather, I am tempted to say that the distant reading allows Moretti to get closer to world literature. He argues, “if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!) close reading will not do it” (57). His discussion of trees and waves explains his reading approaches (“national literature, for people who see trees; world literature, for people who see waves” (68))--that “they both work” (67). They both work together for Moretti, but not always “equally well” (68). This reminds me of Sedgwick. Near the end of her piece, she writes that camp may be “seriously misrecognized when it is viewed…through paranoid lenses” (149). By showing which tools work better for which tasks, I think Moretti is actually making a similar move to Sedgwick, Warner, and Armstrong (if I can place them together here).