[cbfrench]

When I was in high school, my English classes focused quite a bit on performing that sort of analysis. Then I majored in English at a college whose department was still very much aligned with the New Critical “close reading” methodology. Then I went to a PhD program in a top-ten department.

My experiences: My college experience prepared me very well to analyze texts—to understand their mechanics, to discuss the ways in which they develop meaning out of those mechanics, and to argue for an interpretation on the basis of that. What it did not prepare me to do well was to conduct literary research, which was the point of the PhD program. Nevertheless, most of my grad school professors valued my ability to conduct a close reading of a text because many other students who came from more research- and theory-oriented undergrad backgrounds had difficulty in explicating texts without resorting to extra-textual frameworks.

I ended up leaving the PhD program for various reasons, but I will say that the close-reading skills I developed in college have been widely applicable for me outside of academia. Close reading forces you to interact with a text at a granular level and to be attentive to the assumptions that it is smuggling in through its construction. Some lit folks now prefer to talk about “slow reading,” but it’s mostly the same thing.

I would argue that, given the deluge of text with which any of us is confronted on a daily basis, the ability to slow down and to be attentive to a text is a necessary interpretive skill. Maybe students don’t all need to learn to identify figures of speech and poetic devices, but they should learn how to sit with a text and analyze how it’s put together. For one thing, this makes them more sensitive and acute readers. For another, it ideally can make them clearer and more forceful writers. (It is no accident that many of the greatest canonical writers honed their skills by producing parodies of other great writers: the exercise requires getting into the mind and comprehending the style of another writer in order to understand the choices that (s)he has made.) Good reading is a prerequisite for good writing, and that is partly a function of reading widely, yes, but it is also a function of reading deeply.

Rather than jettisoning analytical approaches entirely, we might be better off teaching students how to read, in the sense of showing them that different texts require different levels and forms of engagement. (Insert here the Baconian adage about the different kinds of books.) Some texts can be skimmed simply to mine for information, while other texts require much more deliberate and analytical reading. Students should develop the skills to perform both kinds of reading. And then there’s also reading that isn’t done for a purpose other than sheer enjoyment, and that should be encouraged too (perhaps by having students, as you say, read some stuff just to share their responses to it). But I think a disservice is done when we treat reading as a univocal act, whether that means we make it all about analysis or all about generating responses to texts.

[xhkkffbf]

THis is a nice defense of it. Why should we valorize the ability to plough through thousands of pages of a Russian novel? Is that any better than reading one paragraph closely? Some books are just too long.