Reed College
This talk begins in literary studies by showing how close reading, the fundamental tool of textual analysis, is dependent on actual proximity to a text: we must be able to touch it. But the reason for that, this talk argues, is not one that’s unique to literary studies but rather should be understood as an aspect of epistemology across a broad range of disciplines beginning at the start of the twentieth century. In the advent of modernity, established ways of knowing fell into doubt or fell away, and attention to inductive reasoning reemerged. Depending on inductive reasoning, making sense of the world based on direct empirical experience, generalizing and predicting based on particulars, has been but need not be understood as a crisis nor an occasion for skepticism. Indeed, it’s an opportunity to recognize that disparate methodologies across the university share a foundational practice: we must examine our objects as closely as possible. Close reading is not a limit case but an exemplary one to show what happens when we look at something carefully, when we touch it, when we let it touch us. We make sense of the world by, as a prerequisite, trusting ourselves and trusting this closeness.