The underlying premise of close reading is that the literary object or any text is autotelic. An autotelic object is one whose purpose is in rather than outside itself - the self (auto) itself is the purpose (telos). As a technique or method of literary criticism, close reading treats the literary text as self-sufficient and self-referential. The technique of close reading entails an attentive and sustained engagement with the text. It scrutinizes the text as a self-contained object and analyzes its structure and elements for meaning. It is best understood by a reference to its counterpart in French literary criticism - 'explication de texte', which, translated simply, means an explication of the text. The focus here is simply and exclusively on the text with no reference to anything outside the text. The text is examined for its style, structure, imagery and other aspects.
The thrust of close reading is on the singular and the particular as opposed to the general. It engages in a detailed analysis of the constituent elements of a text such as the syntactic order, individual words and the discursive and formal structures that enable the unfolding of the implicit ideas. However, the first principles of any such method of close exegesis is that the text is infinitely rich in meaning and no single instance of close reading exhausts the whole range and depth of the meanings hidden in the text. The task of any enterprise in close reading is to pry open the text through linguistic analysis and unearth its implicit and explicit meanings.
Although literary close reading is as old as scriptural exegesis, it only emerged explicitly in the critical consciousness in the early twentieth century with Critics like I. A. and William Empson. The practice of close reading was further entrenched with the emergence of the New Critics in the next generation. Richards's autotelic (deeming the literary object to be autonomous) approach to reading is illustrated by his classroom method of testing his students' critical abilities by presenting them a text to analyse and withholding all authorial and contextual information - thus creating a critical space for a 'pure' encounter with the text. He posited that an adequate critical response necessitated a closer aesthetic interpretation of the literary text as an object free from all contextual and authorial presuppositions.
One of the critical concepts that Richards proposed was that of ambiguity - a concept that was further developed by his student William Empson who was also a forerunner of the New Critics. Empson's two critical masterpieces are 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' and 'The Structure of Complex Words.' Empson is best known for his analysis of poetical language. His studies mine the layers of suggestion, irony, argumentation and, above all, linguistic ambiguity in literary texts. He showed that a literary text can be mined for a rich variety of interpretations. Empson's project was not mere semantic refinement. He was committed to revealing the deep truths - the human and experiential reality - communicated or intimated by the great works of literature.
Empson was deeply influenced by Ludwig Witgeinstein's philosophy of language. Witgeinsten's proposition that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given langauge-game. His philosophical views of language also profoundly influenced the American New Critics. New criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory which posited the literary object as autotelic, that is, self-contained and self-referential and a potential mine meanings and interpretations when subjected to close reading. The New Critical project was to seek to establish how the text functions within the bounds of self-referentiality and autonomy. Another formative influence on the school of New Criticism was Eliot's critical writings. Eliot's ideas as enunciated in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' where he argued that a work of art must be evaluated in by the standards of the past or a simultaneous order of works (the tradition) and his concept of an 'objective correlative' - as articulated in his essay 'Hamlet and His Problems" - positing a connection between the words of a text and their correlative states of mid, events, and experiences shaped the critical philosophy of the New Critics. Equally influential were his evaluative judgments and his characterization of poetry as impersonal.
New criticism can be best understood in its reaction to its predecessor schools of literary history an philology whose critical enterprises were guided by a philological, comparative approach and biographical contextualization. The New Critics deemed this approach too subjective that veered away from the text and its aesthetic qualities by focusing on extraneous factors such as authorial intention and 'morally elevating qualities' and 'beauties.' A typifying stance is the one taken by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay 'The Intentional Fallacy' in which they argue that an interpretative focus on the authorial intention or the 'intended meaning' is a hermeneutic fallacy. A similar attack on conventional literary criticism was mounted by them, but this time on readerly responce. This approach discounted the personal/emotion reaction of the reader for the purposes of literary analysis and granted legitimacy only to pure textual criticism. Only the formal elements of the text such theme as established by an analysis of the rhyme, meter, plot and characterization, and ambiguity, irony, paradox and text were gist for the critical mill.
New criticism focused on a careful analysis of the nuances and interrelation of language and form, thus claiming to address the work in all its complex unity. However, this ostensibly apolitical and isolationist stance of the New Critical aesthetics was challenged toward the end of the century by postmodern critics such as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler etc. However, the primary tenet of close reading that emphasized the textuality of a literary work over all other things was maintained even by the postmoderns as is evident from Jacques derrigda's essay 'Ulysses Gramophone' in which he dedicates more than eighty pages auditing the word 'yes' in James Joyce's Ulysses creating an extravagant work of close reading.
The thrust of close reading is on the singular and the particular as opposed to the general. It engages in a detailed analysis of the constituent elements of a text such as the syntactic order, individual words and the discursive and formal structures that enable the unfolding of the implicit ideas. However, the first principles of any such method of close exegesis is that the text is infinitely rich in meaning and no single instance of close reading exhausts the whole range and depth of the meanings hidden in the text. The task of any enterprise in close reading is to pry open the text through linguistic analysis and unearth its implicit and explicit meanings.
Although literary close reading is as old as scriptural exegesis, it only emerged explicitly in the critical consciousness in the early twentieth century with Critics like I. A. and William Empson. The practice of close reading was further entrenched with the emergence of the New Critics in the next generation. Richards's autotelic (deeming the literary object to be autonomous) approach to reading is illustrated by his classroom method of testing his students' critical abilities by presenting them a text to analyse and withholding all authorial and contextual information - thus creating a critical space for a 'pure' encounter with the text. He posited that an adequate critical response necessitated a closer aesthetic interpretation of the literary text as an object free from all contextual and authorial presuppositions.
One of the critical concepts that Richards proposed was that of ambiguity - a concept that was further developed by his student William Empson who was also a forerunner of the New Critics. Empson's two critical masterpieces are 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' and 'The Structure of Complex Words.' Empson is best known for his analysis of poetical language. His studies mine the layers of suggestion, irony, argumentation and, above all, linguistic ambiguity in literary texts. He showed that a literary text can be mined for a rich variety of interpretations. Empson's project was not mere semantic refinement. He was committed to revealing the deep truths - the human and experiential reality - communicated or intimated by the great works of literature.
Empson was deeply influenced by Ludwig Witgeinstein's philosophy of language. Witgeinsten's proposition that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given langauge-game. His philosophical views of language also profoundly influenced the American New Critics. New criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory which posited the literary object as autotelic, that is, self-contained and self-referential and a potential mine meanings and interpretations when subjected to close reading. The New Critical project was to seek to establish how the text functions within the bounds of self-referentiality and autonomy. Another formative influence on the school of New Criticism was Eliot's critical writings. Eliot's ideas as enunciated in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' where he argued that a work of art must be evaluated in by the standards of the past or a simultaneous order of works (the tradition) and his concept of an 'objective correlative' - as articulated in his essay 'Hamlet and His Problems" - positing a connection between the words of a text and their correlative states of mid, events, and experiences shaped the critical philosophy of the New Critics. Equally influential were his evaluative judgments and his characterization of poetry as impersonal.
New criticism can be best understood in its reaction to its predecessor schools of literary history an philology whose critical enterprises were guided by a philological, comparative approach and biographical contextualization. The New Critics deemed this approach too subjective that veered away from the text and its aesthetic qualities by focusing on extraneous factors such as authorial intention and 'morally elevating qualities' and 'beauties.' A typifying stance is the one taken by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay 'The Intentional Fallacy' in which they argue that an interpretative focus on the authorial intention or the 'intended meaning' is a hermeneutic fallacy. A similar attack on conventional literary criticism was mounted by them, but this time on readerly responce. This approach discounted the personal/emotion reaction of the reader for the purposes of literary analysis and granted legitimacy only to pure textual criticism. Only the formal elements of the text such theme as established by an analysis of the rhyme, meter, plot and characterization, and ambiguity, irony, paradox and text were gist for the critical mill.
New criticism focused on a careful analysis of the nuances and interrelation of language and form, thus claiming to address the work in all its complex unity. However, this ostensibly apolitical and isolationist stance of the New Critical aesthetics was challenged toward the end of the century by postmodern critics such as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler etc. However, the primary tenet of close reading that emphasized the textuality of a literary work over all other things was maintained even by the postmoderns as is evident from Jacques derrigda's essay 'Ulysses Gramophone' in which he dedicates more than eighty pages auditing the word 'yes' in James Joyce's Ulysses creating an extravagant work of close reading.
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