Close reading was one of the ways English Literature was formulised into a subject and made examinable in the 1st half of the 20th century - looking at close reading as an institutional process.
Lecture 2 – Close Reading
Slides Notes
1 Close reading was one of the ways English lit was formulised
W2 - into a subject and made examinable in the 1st half of the
Close 20th century - part of its institutionalisation process
Reading
2 Taught English lit at Cambridge after world war one - a late
I.A. adopter of Eng. lit as a subject. In 1910s - 20s transformed
Richards how Eng. lit was studied
(1893- Carried out experiments in literary appreciation with his
1979) undergraduates, which he wrote up in the now famous book
called Practical Criticism (1929)
He was an unintentional instigator of close reading due to
experiments he carried out with his undergraduates.
He made them read short poems without any contextual or
authorial information, then he evaluated their responses and
drew conclusions about their reading practice.
Lots of people how taught Eng. lit came from different
subject origins.
He gave them 13 poems w/o saying who they were by - at
the time this was very rare. He wanted to see what students
would make of poetry without prejudice or bias that comes
with know the context behind them. Blind readings left
students stuck with how their attention should be directed
to.
Asked students what the poems were about and their
purpose? They had difficulty establishing the sense or
meaning of the poems and even.
3 Far more than we like to admit, we take a hint for our
Richards - response from [the poet's] reputation. Whether we assent or
On judging dissent, the tradition view runs through our response like a
literary wire upon which a climbing plant is trained.
value I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement
(1929) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001 p.305
Believes it seems hard for people to judge literary value
without any clues as to who the author is.
4 The most disturbing and impressive fact brought out by this
Richards - experiment is that a large proportion of average-to-good
Reading (and in some cases, certainly, devoted) readers of poetry
poetry frequently and repeatedly fail to understand it, both as a
blindly statement and as an expression. They fail to make out it's
prose sense, it's plain, overt meaning, as a set of ordinary
intelligible, English sentences, take quite apart from any
, further poetic significance. And equally they misapprehend
it's feeling, its tone and its intention. They travesty it in
paraphrase.
Richards, practical criticism, p.22
He found his students didn't have much idea about how to
read a poem, and really struggled even to say what the
poems basic meaning was.
Misapprehending its feeling etc...
w/o clues they had no clues as to what poems are "good" or
not. Basing the "goodness " of a poem on his own opinions -
must bare this bias in mind
His experiment inspired the future study of literature >
further suggested that we needed to focus more on the
process of reading and what goes into deciphering one - he
didnt mean to formulate a methodology by then it was taken
up as such later on.
5 Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, W.K.
The Wimsatt > These are all people who are part of the New
American Criticism movement alongside Wimsatt.
'New Critics' They all promoted and practiced close reading. Some being
(1930s - poets themselves.
1960s) What in Richards was an experiment became for these
people a critical method. Deliberately giving their classes
poems without any information, and then helped them in
the prose of establishing what these poems meant and how
they worked.
Richards work became influential for the "new critics " in
America > by the middle of the century they made Richards
experiment into a method. Made poems complicated verbal
and literary objects - the study of how the details of a poem
all work to fit together
6 Given essay by Wimsatt is an example of how to teach
Close poetry in the classroom
Reading case Wimsatt in his essay = slow motion rendition of how to go
study about reading a poem w/o going wrong. Laying down rules
of close reading as a practice.
7 "i am in no sense unfriendly to this grammar of criticism or to any one of
Ozymandias the terms of which it is composed" BUT "it would be an awkward procedure
to introduced one human being to another with allusions to commonplace
anatomy, labels, creed, race, or type of neurosis."
The tech grammar of a poem isnt all that close reading is about
8 With the analysis of Ozymandias:
Wimsatt's 3- 1. EXPALATION - the finding of the explicit meaning - literal meaning:
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