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Shows how the method of close reading traveled from the United States to Brazil and Israel, revealing its profound impact on global modernisms and reframing the lasting significance of New Criticism.
Does reading shape who we are? What happens to the relationship between reading and subject-formation as methods of interpretation travel globally? Yael Segalovitz probes these questions by tracing the transnational journey of the New Critical practice of close reading from the United States to Brazil and Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Challenging the traditional view of New Criticism as a purely aesthetic project, Segalovitz illustrates its underlying pedagogical objective: to cultivate close readers capable of momentarily suspending subjectivity through focused attention. How Close Reading Made Us shows that close reading, as a technique of the self, exerted a far-reaching influence on international modernist literary production, impacting writers such as Clarice Lispector, Yehuda Amichai, William Faulkner, João Guimarães Rosa, and A. B. Yehoshua. To appreciate close reading's enduring vitality in literary studies and effectively adapt this method to the present, Segalovitz argues, we must comprehend its many legacies beyond the confines of the Anglophone tradition.
"Segalovitz makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of New Criticism as more than just an old-fashioned method of textual analysis, taught as a historical milestone in literary theory or as a mere relic. Rather, its practices still largely govern the pedagogy of literature … This study provides the much-needed foundation for recent years' attempts to seek alternatives." — Poetics Today
"Whereas reader response theory has often been seen as a reaction to New Criticism's focus on the objectivity of the text, How Close Reading Made Us argues that New Criticism has always involved work on the self. Moreover, this work was explicitly political. For American New Critics and their counterparts in Brazil and Israel, changing the reader's psyche had the potential to change society." — Laura Heffernan, coauthor of The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study
"Segalovitz offers a bold comparative model, one that eschews the tendency to compare 'like to like' in favor of paradox and tension. The juxtaposition of US, Brazilian, and Israeli literatures leads to surprising connections and insights, pushing each tradition out of its hermeneutic comfort zone." — Adriana X. Jacobs, author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Attention as Unselfing: A Comparative Perspective on New Critical Close Reading
Part I: The US: The Haunted Reader
1. Self-Deadening: Cleanth Brooks and the Living-Dead Reader of New Critical Theory
2. "I Wrote This Book and Learned to Read": Sound, Fury, and William Faulkner's Negative Audition
Part II: Brazil: The Unsavaged Reader
3. Unsavaging: Afrânio Coutinho's Nova Crítica and the Problem of the Brazilian Exact Reader
4. Exact and Exhausted Reading: Clarice Lispector and Catching the Apple in the Dark
Part III: Israel: The Unlocalized Reader
5. Unlocalizing: The Tel Aviv School and the Israeli Crisis of Social Disintegration
6. Maximalist Reading Gone Wild: Yehuda Amichai and Creative Unintegration
Epilogue: New Critical Studies
Notes
Bibliography
Index