Ben Knights is the
Director of the
English Subject Centre.
His most recent book is
Masculinities in Text
and Teaching
(Palgrave 2007).
Jonathan Gibson is an
Academic Co-ordinator
at the English
Subject Centre and
also writes and
researches in the
areas of Early
Modern and
Renaissance Studies.
This English Subject Centre round table in September 2007 – instigated by Mark Rawlinson of the University of Leicester – was a response to the alarm expressed by many colleagues in the higher education community over the perception that the close reading skills of undergraduates are in decline. Alan Brown and Adam Piette provided short reflective talks, and the day, which ended with a session in which three small groups each designed a ‘close reading’ module, included an intensive period of group work on specific poems (Kipling’s ‘The Dykes’ and Simon Armitage’s ‘Not the Furniture Game’). The opportunity to spend time with colleagues practising the skills which were under discussion was a particularly warmly welcomed aspect of a rich and productive event. This part of the day was an opportunity not just to do some close reading but also to reflect upon what that process involved – what presuppositions and knowledge (many of them not necessarily shared with our students) we’d brought to the task. It was also a salutary way of experiencing at first hand the anxieties and excitement of a seminar/tutorial from a student’s point of view.
An underlying principle concerned the indivisibility of subject knowledge and pedagogic practice: that in sharing with students our own working practices and intellectual strategies we take part in the perpetual actualisation of the subject (1). Indeed, ‘close reading’ has been predicated on a long-standing – though now perhaps residual – insistence within English literary studies that there is no gulf fixed between the specialist knowledge of academics and what students can work out from a text, given confidence, argumentative stamina and a modicum of knowledge. And yet, as Alan Brown forcibly reminded us, there has, all the time, (and not least since practical criticism gave way to critical practice in the 1980s) been a paradox submerged beneath the apparent democracy of the text-focused classroom: that ‘English’ did in fact have designs on the formation of the subjectivity of its students, and that its teachers and examiners did possess a hidden knowledge or ‘true judgment’ to which students could only aspire to conform (2). Many forms of close reading therefore lead to students attempting to guess what is in the tutor’s mind, or, in some cases, adopting a stance designed to demonstrate their superiority to fellow students. The situation at A Level – and a lot of the time in universities – might be described as a kind of ‘cultural obedience’: inviting the production, in response to the actual or implied question ‘what did you think of this, then?’ of formulaic appreciations of texts which students had no intention of reading in their own time.
Participants looked back frequently to the origins of close reading in the work of I A Richards and the new critics, highlighting the embeddedness of the original practice of close reading in teaching. Alan Brown stressed the fact that Richards was interested less in the establishment of criteria for ‘good’ interpretation than in the close reading of poetry as a mechanism for the ordering of the mind. Adam Piette looked at the legacy of the American New Critics, whose work implied a hierarchy of readers ranging from less to more skilled, with themselves – an elite of poet-critics – at the top.
Many forms of close reading therefore lead to students attempting to guess what is in the tutor’s mind
Whether or not close reading should involve judgments of literary quality was touched upon briefly. One participant described an exercise in which he and his students analysed and compared ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poems – and uncovered a striking unanimity about literary value. Other participants tended to want to distance the critical act from value judgments, in a number of different ways – indeed, it was argued that the encounter with a text in a seminar should engage with the text beyond the issue of liking or disliking. Another colleague distinguished between different types of value judgment, saying that while she found asking students ‘Do you like it?’ in a seminar was counter-productive, asking ‘Is it good?’ could be a useful starting point. She pointed out that students’ enthusiasm for a text could wax and wane in the course of a seminar. It was also quite possible for students to simultaneously dislike a text and enjoy analysing it – a practice, it was suggested, that was valuable in teaching them about the differences between reading for pleasure and reading as a literary critic. Models for this approach could be found in the analytical (rather than ‘appreciative’) approach to texts currently taught at English Language A Level. The importance of picking up and extending immediate student responses to text was highlighted by several participants: ‘not liking’ something in a text was often student shorthand for not understanding something. Another participant described a dramatic contrast between two halves of the same module: the first half was taught in a very ‘top-down’, theory-heavy manner, with the result that some students were completely alienated; in the second half of the course, a second lecturer’s student-led approach – built on brainstorming sessions with the students – was much more successful in building student commitment.
‘not liking’ something in a text was often student shorthand for not understanding something.
A number of suggestions emerged from the module design exercise at the end of the day. First of all, that we should articulate (to ourselves and to our students) the skills and conceptual repertoires on which we draw. If we are aspiring to build ‘disciplinary consciousness’ we should not ‘smuggle in’ close reading, but foreground it, and offer students ‘kit bags’ for thinking about figurative language, device and linguistic choice. Stylistics and systematic language study are among the sources of such equipment, and we need to bear in mind that in many universities we have students who will have taken A Level English Language. While we can and should ask initial open questions of the ‘what did you notice?’/‘what do you think?’ variety, we have to do more work on how to build on the initial responses we receive, on drawing in the less confident or articulate members of the group, and on safeguarding co-operation. There was a plea for modules which foreground close reading to be taught by experienced teachers. It is dispiriting for students if terminology that has excited them in a close reading course cannot be applied on modules taught by other lecturers. One group suggested that close reading should be thoroughly ‘embedded’, playing a key role in every module on a degree. Another (Utopian) idea was for a year group to reassemble in a final-year module to bring together and interrogate, in unseen close reading, knowledge gathered in previous years.
It was also strongly put to us that the close study of form, device and linguistic choice could only benefit from engagement with Creative Writing – itself a form of close reading. Even if our goal is not the teaching of creative writing in itself, one way of releasing the grip of anxiety generated by the apparently authoritative text is to use authors’ drafts or variant texts, or to engage in forms of transformative writing – to invite students to write their own versions or variant texts as a way of getting to grips with style, genre and linguistic choice (3). It was felt that Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) could be a potentially invaluable tool in enabling students to unpick texts at their own pace, or to supplement class activity in focusing on the effects of different approaches, students collectively building up layers of interpretations. The teaching of reading ‘pencil in hand’ can readily be translated to forms of annotation and hypertext. It was realised that many of the suggestions made implied making more use of formative assessment than recent regimes tend to encourage, or teachers have time to mark. But there was enthusiastic support for the portfolio of drafts with commentary as a form of summative assessment which could enable students to sustain and move through a cyclical process of reading, writing and revisiting.
Classically, of course, practical criticism and new criticism are characterised as approaches brought to bear on context-free texts, usually poems (‘the words on the page’). New critical readings are, however, heavily dependent on a wide-ranging cultural knowledge that is arguably more inaccessible than ever before for the majority of today’s students. It is clear, then, that the teaching of close reading must also involve the teaching of cultural contexts of various types. But, at the same time, as teachers we have to try to find ways of providing or pointing towards historical and contextual knowledge without skewing the discussion. Sensitive teaching avoids overwhelming people with specialist knowledge, but equally should not hoard knowledge as though it were only suitable for an inner circle of knowers.
Communal close reading (as modelled in the group exercise on the day) seemed to be something favoured by many participants. The module plans produced at the end of the day involved several exercises of this sort, for example, the use of ‘peer-assisted-learning’ (tutorless groups of students). These plans also showcased ways in which comparing responses to a text with those of other students can be powerfully aided by modern technology: on a discussion board, for example, or via an annotation exercise on a wiki.
the close study of form, device and linguistic choice can only benefit from engagement with Creative Writing
All in all, there seemed to be little appetite for a ‘return’ to the practical criticism of the past. Rather, participants were keen to embed the teaching of close reading within a 21st-century curriculum. Several spoke of the need to apply the techniques of practical criticism to ‘non-literary’ as well as ‘literary’ texts. We were reminded how much close and careful reading – while we were urged to be wary of the reductivism of treating it as a ‘skill’ – is actually practised in a variety of professions. Also, as Adam Piette pointed out, close reading is actually a core activity of many strands of ‘theory’ (think of De Man, Derrida or the New Historicists). There seemed to be a drawing-back from the old idea that practical criticism is something that, in zooming in on a student’s mind in isolation, is a good way of ‘sorting out the sheep from goats’. The feeling of the day seemed to be, rather, that close reading is a desirable element in an English degree that has been skimped on in recent years and that can be incorporated into degree structures without becoming an inquisitorial tool. Despite qualifications and reservations, what emerged (not least from the period of practice) was a sense that ‘close reading’ is coming back to centre stage. That, in any case, it has never gone away as a core element in the teaching repertoire. And that participants shared an enthusiasm for close reading as a pedagogic form, provided it was conducted in a suitably generous spirit.
In summary (and at the risk of over-simplification), the following recommendations emerge.
• Teach close reading, and from the very beginning of the programme! But be explicit about why and how you are doing it.
• Involve all your colleagues: practice close reading across the curriculum.
• Don’t be purist. Don’t flinch from drawing on the analytical tools provided by stylistic analysis, or the use of methods of creative response, or from the medium provided by the VLE or
the wiki.
• Theory and close reading are not incompatible.
• History and close reading are not incompatible.
• Support students in learning to move between wide reading and detailed,
‘up close’ reading.
Notes
1 See, for example, Susan Bruce, Ken Jones and Monica McLean, ‘Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production of a Discipline’, Pedagogy 7.3 (2007) 481–500.
2 Cf. Alan Brown, ‘On the Subject of Practical Criticism’, Cambridge Quarterly 28 (1999), 293–00327; Robert Scholes, The Crafty Reader (Yale UP, 2001).
3
Rob Pope, Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies (London: Routledge, 1995);
Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson, Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies (London: Continuum, 2006).
