English class teaches students to be afraid of literature
Response to my post on close reading was mostly quite positive, but I did get a little pushback of various sorts from English professors. One of these professors advised me to read John Guillory’s recently-published book On Close Reading.
I love Guillory. I read his book Cultural Capital ages ago, and I found it not just interesting, but also unusually pellucid in its reasoning and its writing style. The man speaks about as clearly as it’s possible for an English professor to speak without losing precision.
Most of what Guillory does these days is basically sociology. He was tenured as an English professor and has a PhD in English, but over time he's turned his eye onto the history and customs of his own profession. He has become a sociologist who studies English professors.
In On Close Reading, he looks at the titular practice, and he asks, Why is it so hard to define what it means to undertake close reading?
He begins by studying where this term arose and how it was used. The fascinating thing is that, according to this book, the term ‘close reading’ is usually imputed to the New Critics—people like Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards—who professionalized literary criticism through their careful analysis of individual lines and passages within literary works. But the New Critics didn’t actually use the term ‘close reading’. They demonstrated their ideas through careful attention to individual words and passages, but they didn't systematize this form of attention into a formal method that could be taught to other people.
Instead, the term arose in the 1960s, in the writing of academics who attacked the New Critics and were mostly derogatory of their method, which these academics called ‘close reading’.1 As in, it was a label created by those who were, if not enemies of the practice, then at least highly skeptical of it.
I was very satisfied to discover that I am not alone in not knowing how to define or explain close reading. Apparently Guillory has the same problem, as does everyone who attempts to write about it:
Despite the prevalence in literary study of the technique called “close reading,” there is, even today, no real consensus about its constituent features. Peter Middleton offers a typical characterization of close reading as “a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions.” The mode of reading that survived the decline of New Criticism was and is, in the terms of my analysis, a minimally formalized technique. Close reading never acquired the procedural formality of other scholarly practices, such as explication de texte or textual editing.
I would say Guillory does a good job of explaining close reading by describing how it differs from textual explication or glossing. These modes of textual analysis were typically used on philosophical or religious texts, and the aim was to bring out the explicit meaning of a text. This kind of explication was often necessary because texts were translated from other languages or required some background knowledge that made the meaning unclear.
The purpose of close reading was different. Its aim was to bring out the implicit meaning of the text:
It puts pressure on the moment of reading when the comprehension of a text’s elemental features turns, or struggles to turn, toward the correlation of those features with larger structures of meaning. The explicitation of what is implicit constitutes an infrastructure for interpretation. This structure is exposed, in the way that modernist architects expose the infrastructure of their buildings. In practical terms, this means that close reading can be exhibited, that it is not identical only to the solitary exercise of reading carefully or slowly.
Close reading isn’t the same as interpretation (i.e. saying what a text really means), but it’s used to prepare the way for interpretation, at least within the academic setting. Close reading involves, in Guillory’s telling, ‘showing the work of reading.’ You describe the experience of reading a passage, and that allows you to make some claim about the implicit meanings of that passage.
I highly recommend the book. Guillory is a wonderful writer and thinker. I think he’s described close reading quite well and has made a great description of the ways in which this technique is a necessary part of pursuing a career as an English professor.
What he has not described is what possible relevance this procedure can have for the reader who is not an English professor.
To me, this seems like an explanation that is at least somewhat-necessary, because…it’s a technique that is being taught even as we speak to millions of high school kids!
Okay, close reading brings out the implicit meaning of a text. Great. But is that actually a good or useful thing for the ordinary reader to do? And is it even practical for a reader to learn close reading when oftentimes they’re not that great at surface-level reading? What exactly is the purpose of teaching this technique to kids?
It might seem churlish to make these claims. I understand that the purpose of English class is to teach people how to write and think, and that the process of writing about their experience of a passage in a text is somewhat useful for teaching people how to articulate themselves well.
But I do think there is a larger lesson that gets taught in English classes, and that this larger lesson is quite pernicious. The larger lesson is that you can only understand literature through close reading!
Lest you say this lesson is false, I myself was taught in a number of literature classes that the proper way to read a book was to read with a pen in hand, take notes, underline symbols, mark the rhetorical devices, and analyze the book’s formal structures. I was told that this was the best, and sometimes only, way to appreciate literature and understand what literature has to offer.
For a long time, I felt that you couldn’t really appreciate literature unless you were able to undertake some formal analysis of it. And as a result, I felt like literature wasn’t really for me. I was only meant to read simpler things, like sci-fi novels, and all this literature stuff was for people who were good at English class. I didn’t major in English, even though I loved to read, precisely because I was so ashamed at always being told my readings weren’t good enough, weren’t deep enough.
When I finally started reading literature on my own, it was because I’d become tired of feeling stupid. I was an aspiring writer, but I felt inadequate in front of these Great Books, and I didn’t like that feeling. So I just started to read.
I knew right away that I could only read these books my own way. If I was going to read them at all, I’d have to read them the same way I’d read a science fiction novel. Just open the book and start reading.
And that’s what I did.
But when I entered an MFA program a few years later, I discovered something really funny. I was the only non-white student in the program, at least my first year. And I was the only person who hadn’t majored in English as an undergrad. And…I was also the only person who truly loved old books. And I don’t even mean that I was the only person who loved really old books like Milton and Donne and Shakespeare. I’m saying that I was also the only person who loved Charles Dickens and Willa Cather and Edith Wharton and Henry James. Interest in these fairly-recent Anglophone authors was extremely low amongst my cohort.
I remember one time an incoming applicant talked about how he loved G.K. Chesterton, and my classmates thought it was strange and made fun of him later (he went elsewhere). Another classmate complained quite frequently about Henry James and about the Henry James class she’d taken as an undergrad. In another seminar, students had to read the first volume of Proust, and there was an equal amount of complaining. One time a National Book Award-winning author came and he asked everyone their favorite writers—I said, “Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Henry James”, and he chided me! He said it was important to read contemporary writers too. Obviously I had read plenty of contemporary writers, but they weren’t my favorite. He had won a National Book Award, and the truth is…he felt threatened, because he, like most writers today, didn’t really love old books.
This experience is not unique to me. Anyone who’s been to an MFA can attest to the same thing. Yes, you might take this as an opportunity to make some cheap, easy knock against MFA programs, but…the people who matriculate at these programs almost always have undergraduate degrees in English from top-tier universities. They are almost always people who claim to love literature. They’re almost always people who excelled at close reading and all these other tools of literary analysis. Yet these exact same people are bored by old books. Why is that?
Maybe it is precisely their education that is to blame!
What is the difference between them and me? The differences are twofold. First, I didn’t major in English, so I didn’t learn close reading or any of these interpretative tools. Second, I have often read a vastly larger quantity of older books than they have. Not only do I enjoy these books much more, but I often understand them much better too.
These people, when they have any sense of what’s in old books, often have a lot of received notions about them that aren’t necessarily accurate. For instance, they think Lolita is about an old, debauched Europe encountering a young, innocent America. That’s not true—it’s about a very intelligent, very playful man lusting after a somewhat-unformed preadolescent girl. They think Huckleberry Finn is about the allure of uncivilized life, which is more true, but it’s also about the dangers of the wild, and of living outside the law, and the ways it puts you at the mercy of anyone who comes along, whether that’s foolish Tom Sawyer or the wily Duke and King.
In other words, people who have English degrees often have a lot of notions about books, but they don’t necessarily have a genuine, direct experience of those books. And that’s because during the time they were reading these books, they were often being graded and evaluated on them. Their main experience of reading these books was fear—fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of seeming stupid. As a result, they have an essential insecurity when it comes to literature, and this insecurity leads them to avoid older books and gravitate towards contemporary books instead (because those are books whose critical opinion is unstable, so you can have an opinion about them without the opinion being ‘wrong’).
In other words, English class, even at the college level, doesn’t necessarily teach the skills it purports to teach. It teaches you something, but the form in which that thing is taught tends to get in the way of people actually learning to love and understand literature.
Here’s another example:
During my MFA, I took a class taught by a poet who believed strongly in meter and form. She assigned us to write poetry in iambic pentameter. My own attempts never scanned correctly. Outside of class, I read several books, recommended by this professor, on how to ‘hear’ the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that constitutes metered poetry in English, but I never got it. I concluded that I just had a terrible ear.
Eight years later, I got interested in reading Chaucer in Middle English. I learned how to pronounce Middle English vowels (it’s not hard), and I spent four months reading Chaucer in the original, muttering the lines to myself as I read.
Afterwards, I discovered something strange: suddenly, I could hear meter.
Not in any formal way—I probably couldn’t go through a sonnet and ‘correctly’ mark off the stresses. But I understood meter on a deeper level. I understood that stresses aren’t absolute—they are relative. Sometimes you have two syllables together, and the stress is very similar, or only slightly different. Sometimes the stress on a syllable is determined by the words next to it, so that a syllable that might be stressed in one place isn’t necessarily stressed in another place. I learned how to hear when a metrical stress pattern broke down—to the point that I started correcting my daughter’s children’s books when they didn’t scan correctly (here’s an example, from a lesbian picture book that always drove me crazy—the first screenshot scans well, while the second page doesn’t).
(In reading, I’d change the above lines to “Mommy spins me all around / Mama slides me to the ground”)
My point is, I couldn’t explain what I know. But…I am confident that I have some knowledge of meter that I didn’t possess before.
And if someone asked me, “How do I learn meter?” I wouldn’t give them exercises. I wouldn’t make them read some books on meter. I’d tell to do what I did. Download The General Prologue app and learn the rhythms of Middle English, then go and read seven hundred pages of Chaucer aloud to yourself.2
In my opinion, whatever literature has to teach is most easily learned by simply reading a lot of it. Yes, it’s hard to read older prose. When you first encounter 19th-century writers, they seem very fusty and mannered. To most readers, something like the first line of Last of the Mohicans (“It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet”) is quite impenetrable, and the heart quails at the idea of reading an entire book of this stuff.
But…you don’t learn to enjoy older writing by doing a lot of analysis or explication or close reading—you learn to do it by doing it. The more you read older prose, the better you get at reading it. And the better you get at reading it, the easier you’re able to pick out subtleties. For instance, the way Cooper writes in Last of the Mohicans is purposefully somewhat archaic, somewhat more mannered, than was typical of his time (something that becomes obvious if you read his earlier novel, The Pioneers).3 In Mohicans, he is purposefully attempting something a bit grander in scope, a bit more Romantic, and that’s why he reaches for the icy passiveness of “were to be encountered” and the elevated diction of “adverse hosts”.
Sure, it might be possible to imagine an edition of Last of the Mohicans that carefully explained these facts to me, and which contextualized its differences from the previous book, but even with all the explaining in the world, it would be meaningless to me if I hadn’t read enough 19th-century novels that I could appreciate those differences for myself.
That intuitive and often unspeakable knowledge is the essence of what we get from literature. And yes, when you’re inexperienced in reading literature—or in reading literature of a certain type or from a certain region—you often lose some portion of the meaning. The first 19th-century novels that you read are the novels you’ll read least well.
But…I really question how much of that meaning can genuinely be supplied by the efforts of the professoriate.
Professors do their best, but nothing can really replace just reading a lot of books.
And, as I explained earlier, English classes tend to make people less interested in reading the kinds of books that you’d read in English class. Because people come away from English class feeling like, “Reading these books is very hard. It requires a lot of prior knowledge. It can only be done under the guidance of a professor. And as a result…it’s really not something I can do outside of class.”
I know that’s not what professors intend, but that’s the message that people come away with. And as a result, people don’t do the thing you really actually need to do, which is…read a lot of older books.
On Close Reading
John Guillory’s book only came out a few weeks ago, so I suppose this post also constitutes a review of his work. This book is maybe a hundred pages long. I read it in a day. He’s a pleasure to read: he’s so clear and so cogent and so honest. He doesn’t bullshit you. If something is vague, he says it’s vague. If there’s a contradiction, then he notes the contradiction. His writing, through its very honesty and clarity, provides the best possible defense of the academic humanities.
Personally, I don’t think English professors are bad or useless people. Much of what they do is extremely useful. Guillory is an English professor, and his work is great.
Similarly, I’m currently reading Herman Melville’s Typee, and the Penguin Classics version has an incredible introduction, which contextualizes the book both within Melville’s career and within the broader contemporary genre of naval travelogues. The introduction was written by John Bryant, a Melville scholar. My version of the book is from an edition that was also assembled by Melville scholars—it compares the manuscript of the book and three different published versions to arrive at a version of the text that restores whatever expurgated sections they believe have literary value. It’s decidedly not the version Melville published, but these scholars have satisfied themselves that it’s the version he would’ve published, if there hadn’t been commercial pressures to censor himself, and I am happy to trust them on that.
One thing that Guillory notes repeatedly in his work is that the category we call literature is something created by language-studies scholars. That it is language-studies professors who define the terms of what constitutes literature (oftentimes imposing the ‘literature’ label on something that wasn’t necessarily considered a highly-wrought aesthetic object in its own time). And that, to me, is a very valuable function. If they hadn’t decided Melville was literature, I never would’ve encountered him—he’d be lost to my eyes. Similarly, when they decide something is literature, they often put in the extra work to fill in the missing context and to create readable editions of the work. Without academia, we wouldn’t necessarily have all these readable editions of the classics at all.
I’m reading another of Guillory’s books, Professing Criticism, where he talks about “professional deformation”—the damage done to a professional’s psyche by the process of specialization. And I think the professional deformation of becoming an English professor is that you feel possessive over your subject matter. You become very invested in creating a field of mystification under which you are a person with a privileged understanding of literature.
This process is necessary in order for English academia to exist at all, but…it also does damage to the profession, because it means literature starts feeling off-limits to regular people. And since English academia only exists because regular people have respect for literature, there suddenly becomes a conflict between the two necessary preconditions for the profession. English professors want literature to be venerated, but not necessarily read (at least not without their help).
I agree that what English professors do in their research careers is quite valuable. But I think what they do in the classroom is quite damaging to the institution of literature. They’ve succeeded so well in convincing people that literature can’t be understood without specialized knowledge that…now nobody even tries to understand it, unless they have specialized knowledge.
It’s a seemingly-insuperable problem, honestly, and will probably lead to the end of the secular humanities before too much longer.4
The Metropolitan Review
, , and have launched a new journal, The Metropolitan Review. I’m in there with a review of Percival Everett’s James.Of course, in most books, you expect some feeling of everyday life at the beginning of the book—some sense that there is an actual world that is functioning here—but in this book that is unnecessary, because this book is fundamentally about some other book. We don’t really need to be that engaged in James’s life, because…really…we’re reading this book to see what it might have to say about the contents of a different book entirely.
I didn’t love the book, but after I filed this review I was inspired to re-read Huckleberry Finn, which was great.
Definitely subscribe to the Metropolitan Review—the conceit of the journal is: “What if, instead of doing fancy literary reportage and making high-flown statements about The Way We Live Now, a journal actually reviewed books honestly?”
Updates to “Which publisher has the best line of classics reprints?”
I’ve gone through the comments to my post from two weeks ago, and I’ll post those notes in two days, in lieu of this week’s tale.
Much of the research that Guillory uses seems to have been assembled by Rhodes College professor Scott Newstok, who maintains an archive here on the subject.
My impression is that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan poets are actually not the best for teaching you to hear stress patterns, because vowel sounds were slightly different in the early modern era (they were somewhere midway between Middle and Modern English), so Shakespeare doesn’t scan as well, to the modern ear, as it probably did originally. The beauty of Middle English is that the vowel sounds are so different that you’re almost forced to pronounce them correctly or it doesn’t work at all.
The first line of The Pioneers is “Near the centre of the State of New York lies an extensive district of country whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys.” This still reads as quite formal to the modern ear, but to me it seems much more conversational and simple. Words like ‘hills and dales’ and sly jokes like ‘to speak with greater deference’ are much more chatty than anything you’d find in Mohicans.
Luckily, the religious nationalists stand ready to take their place, as I wrote about in a previous post.
How about some pushback from a non-English professor?
I see this kind of argument regularly — that teaching students to analyze fiction, looking for meanings that aren't readily apparent at the explicit level, turns them off books and reading. I don't deny that a lot of people report this experience. But it honestly confuses me, partly because I personally can't relate at all, but partly because this argument so often comes from STEM people. Analysis and inquiry are supposed to be your bread and butter!
For me, and for I think a lot of people who love reading, noticing things like symbols, subtext, allegories, etc is part of the pleasure of reading fiction, and makes reading a richer and more meaningful experience. And I also don't buy the argument that critics are routinely finding things that aren't there just to make themselves sound smart or torment poor high school students. If you read, for example, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and don't draw the connection between the industrialization of the idyllic pastoral landscapes and the rape of Tess, you're missing a lot of what the book is saying. And in the Lolita example — yeah, it's about a verbose older man lusting after a prepubescent girl. But the Europe-vs-America stuff is there too. The great novelists were typically quite intentional about things like this — but also, the unintentional things, the assumptions they make because of their historical period and point of view, are revealing too. There is real pleasure, there is excitement, that comes with noticing this stuff. And close reading, to me, is about asking these questions at the sentence and paragraph level. Why this word and not that word? Why is the author using animal metaphors for this character and machine metaphors for that one?
When I encounter arguments about how trying to teach students analytical ways of reading fiction turns them off, I think about how different the discourse is for film. No one seems to complain when people talk about how a director might use camera angles or lighting or sound to convey something that's not explicit in the action or dialogue. Or how certain objects become laden with meaning because of how and where they appear in the story. Hitchcock fans will happily talk about the meaning of the color green in Vertigo and never question that the director is using it with intention (unlike "blue curtains"). I never hear people say that discussing this stuff turns people off watching movies, or that it's a bunch of fakery that people feign in order to sound intelligent. A quick visit to reddit will reveal that people even talk like this quite happily, and in excruciating detail, about their favorite TV shows! And for the most part, these aren't people with academic training in film criticism. They're lay viewers who are eager to wring every last bit of meaning they possibly can from the things they love, and are constantly looking for new ways of doing that.
So I wonder if there isn't something else going on behind these complaints. Perhaps it's simply that someone who is bored by a particular novel is being asked to treat something they're not interested in as though they're deeply interested in it — like the distaste that comes with feigning love. And not very many people have a natural affinity for old things and a desire to probe 19th-century thought. But I saw a comment somewhere (probably twitter) that most people don't remember how to solve quadratic equations or the steps of the Krebbs Cycle or anything else they learned in high school, but they do remember the books they read.
I'm biased, since I'm in a graduate program for English literature, but I do wonder how universal your claims about English education are. I did not hear about "close reading" once until I went to college, and then only in English-major-only courses. Some professors told us that we needed to underline or highlight passages, but I seldom did this and was never penalized for my lack of discipline.
Most of the literary instruction I've received during my formal education has been threefold: one, it's given me time, structure and motivation to read far more books than I otherwise might have; second, I've learned about the history of ideas and how literary texts have participated in that history; and I've learned some formal stuff, like how to recognize a sonnet or free indirect style. This learning has been for me a gateway into more enjoyment, not less, although in moments of finals-adjacent stress, I do remember feeling as though some of the joy had been sucked out of reading for me. And I do remember other students saying stuff to the effect of: "I used to really love reading, but after being an English major, I'd just rather watch TV."
With all of this said, there is probably good reason to believe that my experiences put me in a distinct minority. On Substack, there's a ton of--not quite vitriol, but anger and dissatisfaction with English classes, university English departments, and so on. People don't seem to like what the institution has become, and it's not because they believe that literature isn't worth time or serious study.
I suppose for me the question all of this raises is: what does good institutional teaching about literature look like? How can classes be designed that bring about enjoyment and love rather than resentment, fear, or anxiety? Or is that simply not a possibility?