Close Reading and the Market Nicholas Brown

Why do we read literary texts closely? There are plenty of other things to do with literary texts, many of them more fun, some of them even interesting. But the interesting ones, though they may help us in our close reading, or may indeed challenge, limit, or secure its conditions of possibility, belong to other disciplines: psychology, linguistics, sociology of art, anthropology, area studies, history, religious studies, philosophy, neurobiology, and so on. Inasmuch as the literary object is peculiar enough to warrant its own discipline—and we cannot yet dismiss the claim that it does not—that discipline is close reading. Questions about the way we read “now” are always beside the point, for the reason that the way we read now is they way we have always read—provided we understand that the domain of this “always” is limited to the rather young “we” of literary studies as a discipline. What additional qualifiers attach to reading as a slogan do not add much: since there is nothing to read but the textual surface, “surface reading,” for example, is simply a synonym for reading. 1 Such slogans are presumably ginned up to generate disagreement, which would be useful for everyone except that in order to count as a disagreement, there would have to be something to disagree about, and that something would be, for both avowed surface readers and any conceivable interlocutor in the discipline, how to account for the words on the page, in other words the meaning of a literary text. Which is to say, more practically, that nobody disagrees about how to go about disagreeing. If you disagree with someone’s reading of a literary text, no amount of methodological critique will save you the work of doing your own. But why do we read literary texts closely? We read literary texts closely because that is how they are meant to be read. Literature is a social machine, what will below be called a universal, and like all such machines is of historical origin. To be specific, literature is invented in the aftermath of the Kantian revolution—particularly in the wake of its elevation of aesthetic judgment to a keystone position—at the turn of the nineteenth century, in the circle around Friedrich Schlegel. “Where philosophy leaves off,” writes Schlegel, inaugurating the age of