Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

The past two decades have seen a burgeoning commentary on the subject of “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. In the previous decades—from the later 1960s to ...

(This is the last post in a three-part series on this topic. You can see Part One here and Part Two here.) This week’s question is: What is “close reading,” is it important and, if so, how should I ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...