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John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques.
 
At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading?
 
For Guillory, these puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all. These critics were most urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. Guillory understands close reading as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.
 
Guillory’s short book will be essential reading for all college teachers of literature. An annotated bibliography, curated by Scott Newstok, provides a guide to key documents in the history of close reading along with valuable suggestions for further research. 

Makes the case for close readings of small scenes appearing in works of literature, scholarship, film, and visual art, showing how close attention to details can reveal the meaningful sociological action that often occurs on the margins.

Why do certain images, stories, and scenes impress upon us so strongly, inviting us to linger over the nuances of their meaning? In Scenes and Their Senses, sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici seeks to uncover the deeper meaning behind twenty “scenes” that have captured her theoretical imagination over her lifetime. Some of these come from classics of sociological theory or literature—Geertz, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Zola—and some are more contemporary, including the films Good Will Hunting and Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom ofLiberty. She seeks here to understand each scene less as examples of a given condition or conundrum and more as worlds in themselves.

As Wagner-Pacifici shows, close attention to the forms and flows of these minor, often quiet scenes reveals how meaningful action occurs in what might appear to be the margins or interstices of the bigger, noisier story being told. Providing an entry point to larger social conditions, relations, and change, the scenes analyzed here evoke sociological themes of belonging and exile, strength and weakness, cleanliness and pollution, reality and fantasy, courage and cowardice, and vision and obscurity, among others. As an ethnography of texts recalled from previous readings and revisited by the author, the scenes highlight the role of memory in sense-making. Furthermore, the activation of the scenes as a focused point of sustained contemplation functions as a remarkable bridge between method and theory.