The Delight in Activity: On John Guillory's “On Close Reading”
John Guillory | On Close Reading | University of Chicago Press | January 2025 | 136 Pages
John Guillory’s much-reviewed 2022 book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study—an academic text at once dull and electric, pedestrian and abrasive—begins with a series of simple, even little-c conservative, provocations. Drafting on Nietzsche's Gay Science notion that the specialization required to enter a discipline distorts the critical perspective of its practitioners, Guillory wonders whether the literary critic’s commenting on anything outside the text is an obviously fraught gesture. That is, why do literary critics presume the authority to discuss the real world outside the text? How, and where, does the criticism of the text extend into a criticism of society? These questions, familiar in a current era of a widespread skepticism of expertise––an epoch of YouTube populism and the celebration of volk common-sense wisdom—gesture to a broader suggestion: When did criticism evolve from embodying an abstract humanist “knowledge” into a sort of social science? After making these provocations, Guillory takes what feels like a cheap shot, suggesting that criticism’s urge to criticize society rather than the text is the upshot of an “overestimation of aim,” a turn-of-phrase which appears again and again in Professing Criticism. This “overestimation of aim” is, itself, the result of a material crisis, of the widespread devaluation of the sort of work the literary critic performs. In a society where knowledge of the text is devalued, Guillory suggests, then the only way the critic can demonstrate their societal value is to extend the text into society.
Considering this string of cranky provocations (and that the first chapter of Professing Criticism is largely built off a Nietzsche reference), it is perhaps no surprise that Guillory is beloved by a certain type of old-guard academic—one imagines an early modernist close-reading Thomas Browne and spending an inordinate amount of time on the REED database. It is of concomitantly little surprise that Guillory is treated with deep suspicion by more recognizably contemporary critics: Deleuzians and Foucauldians, affect theorists and decolonial studies afficionados and Substack lower-case poets: all those who carry the torch which Bruce Robbins describes in the 2023 Criticism and Politics (the other big state-of-the-field book at the moment) as being lit in the aftermath of ‘60s Civil Rights movements, identifying a relationality between the love-in and the Chaucer course, in turn widening the literary critical purview and inscribing the energy of ‘60s heterogeneity within the rise of Theory and the concomitant turn away from New Critical formalism.
Later in the book, Guillory takes shots at Rita Felski, Bruno Latour, and “postcritique” and elsewhere criticizes the notion of “decolonizing your bookshelf/curriculum.” Nevermind that I take similar issue with the former—if someone can explain to me what entering into “affective intensities of entanglement” with a text is (or likewise how Felski’s history of stellar traditional criticism is somehow different from what I imagine myself to be doing), I’ll eat a shoe. And, in the case of the latter, Guillory’s critique is not the standard conservative defense of the European canon. Rather, he argues that the legacy of colonialism is inextricably intertwined with colonized places; to extricate this legacy from the life of the formerly colonized gestures to a simple “postcolonial” liberalism that risks belying the harrowing influence of colonialism. Decolonizing one’s bookshelf or curriculum is an undialectical rallying cry. And in any case, STEM, business, and technical disciplines are not under the same injunction to decolonize themselves. This impulse, per Guillory, is just another example of the way in which literary critics overestimate the aim of criticism.
These blaring provocations (and Guillory is not stupid, obviously, and he knows what he’s doing when he essays them) have marked Professing Criticism as a work of academic conservatism in the sense that Simon During’s recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Conservative Turn in Literary Studies,” has defined it:
A return to disciplinary bedrock, an insistence that the methods and purposes that first defined the discipline be respected and, in some form or other, resuscitated. The conservative turn also, therefore, revives interest in the discipline’s history. It remembers and reappraises not just English’s pathways and achievements but also its core values.
Guillory’s insistent reminder that we historicize the discipline, treating the old as a valuable way to chart out the new, frequently smacks of reformism, and it’s not hard to see a line linking Guillory’s central arguments with the troublesome urge to “return to tradition.”
This reputation, which has followed both book and author like a lost child clutching a stuffed bear, makes it difficult when I––a monistic Deleuzian who does believe in the slick contiguity between criticism of the text and criticism of the society which produced said text, and who even thinks that, as cultural critics, we owe it to ourselves and our students to, like, listen to Nettspend and to understand at least the general vibe of BeastGames—earnestly recommend Guillory’s work as not only totally edifying about the history of the discipline and totally legitimate in its charting of a disciplinary future: but as work that, ultimately, proves to be profoundly affirming and even democratic once you get past his tin ear (he is not a particularly deft crafter of sentences) and catty provocations (these latter being almost always traditionally Marxist, rather than conservative).
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Much of Professing Criticism is broadly spent articulating the history of literary criticism. This begins with arguing that “literature” is itself a moving target, an unstable body which, thereby, suggests criticism to be the equally unstable parasite. Literature is first imagined as just “writing” in general (allowing Francis Bacon to, in proposing an historia litterarum, legibly survey not just imaginative writing, but everything written since antiquity, including scientific or mathematic discourses). It gradually transitions to vernacular writing (thus implicitly opposed to Greek writing or Latin writing, which had hitherto composed the only writing decided as worth reading; this stage likewise implies a literature as a national project). With the development of the novel form and generic modes like the essay and the letter, literature thence gradually winnows into imaginative writing—poems, novels, and plays—and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, with the rise of mass communication technologies, literature becomes writing notable for its “literariness,” thus distinguishing it from genre or otherwise mass-produced (and mass-intended) work. As literature has evolved, so has criticism, moving from a study of rhetoric—or the performance inherent in the transmission of knowledge—to the belles lettres appreciation of good literary writing and designation of taste; and, thence, with the rise of the Academy in the early twentieth century, a criticism which is specifically disciplinarian, formalized, and specialized. The critic comes to occupy a position of expertise. In so doing, literary criticism is importantly reconceptualized as labor, a designation which Guillory wholly cosigns—even though it has ostensibly contorted critics into so many hunchbacked Nietzschean demons.
But Guillory, in correctly presuming that literary study is work, likewise identifies that, like all jobs you’ve ever had that you loved, there is a pleasure in literary criticism. This pleasure is, almost pervertedly (insofar as it implies a concomitant degree of bureaucratization), directly related to disciplinary specialization: “The study of [literature] intensifies both the pains and the pleasures of reading by submitting reading to discipline.” The pains here are the regular pains of any job; Guillory is sure to emphasize that the Nietzschean deformation is at one and the same time an embodied deformation, here invoking the classic shoulder-stooped, nearsighted scholar. I, for example, likewise have one of those email jobs, which is almost a requisite for the serious critic living in the last days of neoliberal austerity; this job does allow me to spend an inordinate amount of time reading and writing, but it in turn probably worsens my posture even further and ensures I continue to spend a great deal of time Looking At The Computer.
The pains of a formalized criticism, though—with Guillory specifically invoking here the nascent academic, the PhD student who (again, like myself, also a PhD and teacher) is inundated daily with article after article, book after book, all articulating the horrible state-of-the-job-market shit we’re all familiar with by now. There is a psychological dimension to the pain of literary criticism: the anxiety over one’s own future, the dread regarding the slow death of the formalized discipline, the fact that a great deal of your own ability to labor is invested in work which, insofar as this work materially allows you to do the work of criticism, often takes priority over engaging with a hot new Verso monograph. The pleasures, one imagines, though, are the pleasures of any job that provides you with both a degree of autonomy and a built-in pedagogical audience. Here Guillory specifies that “disciplinary reading [and, thereby, writing] is a communal practice”; this implies that disciplinarianism is pleasurable for being communal.
In chapter nine, “On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education,” Guillory enunciates that this communality of the disciplinarian discourse community is enveloped in the degree of difficulty that credentialization entails, adhering to the logic of “We-all-went-through-this-together.” One must earn their stripes, pay their dues, prove their mettle—one must pass through the brutal process of credentialization. For the PhD, this includes two years of coursework, followed by a year of examination and teaching, followed by a few years of dissertation writing. But this brute effort is worth it: “Professions have always understood that the value of the credential is established in part because it is difficult to acquire and that this fact establishes a baseline for assessing the credential’s value.” This difficulty facilitates the communality of the discipline. That is, it creates—and guarantees—a community of people who are always capable of meeting you at your level: of understanding you.
Except, in the case of the nascent academic, it actually doesn’t. As Guillory writes on the last page: “[W]e might give some thought to the problem of how to moderate the centrifugal tendencies that make it so difficult to communicate what we do, not only to an abstract ‘public,’ but to others in the university, and even to colleagues in our own departments.” Even to colleagues in our own departments. What? Then what produces the communality—especially considering that we all worked extremely hard to get here, why can’t we all understand one another? Moreover, if I, a Deleuzian, might face difficulty in explaining to someone in my own department how the body without organs lowkey functions as a perfect metaphor for neoliberal austerity and the cleavage between production and consumption, what does that say about public-facing criticism?
The answer is simple, and even generically humanist, though it successfully circumvents the occlusion of material reality that trite humanism typically entails. That is, rather than being always “understood”—the kind of rote humanist language you can find in any straight-to-Netflix series (“I see you,” “I hear you”—do note that it’s okay when Avatar: The Way of Water does this)—you are part of an entirely created group of people who, at bottom, just like and enjoy the same “stuff” as you. This stuff being, of course, writing: represented language, those dead symbols ever incapable of speech.
Thus, for Guillory, “[t]he best works of scholarship . . . are imperishable because their provocation to succeeding scholars inheres in the writing itself.” And, as he argues in the chapter “Composition and the Demand for Writing,” the understanding of the medium—of this “writing itself”—is the result of a years-long immersion in the “stuff” of the discipline. The credentialization endemic to disciplinarianism creates at one and the same time a deep, profound understanding of represented language. In Criticism and Politics, Robbins, drafting off a Foucault lecture, defines literature as a “a set of texts that are chosen to be ‘said’ again and again.” In this light, criticism becomes a mode of response. Note how this gels with one of the earliest and still most significant treatises on rhetoric. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates, invoking the myth of Theuth, articulates that writing is dead; for being a representation of speech, which is a representation of thought, and itself a representation of Formal truth, writing is the most degraded form of communication. Writing is dead, Socrates argues, insofar as it’s unable to speak back. For defining criticism as a dialectical mode that can both revivify and then “talk back” to writing, Robbins implies what all we book obsessives know intuitively: writing is alive, Socrates be damned; it is a living entity that comprises and is comprised of both those source texts which are “said again and again” and the critic who decides to “talk back.”
Though Guillory focuses on the credentialization and formalization provided by the Academy—which is sensible, considering the book’s deeper interest in critical university studies—he later considers and celebrates the rise of predominantly online “little magazines,” which prove that there is no reason “why intellectual engagement with literature has to exist only in the form of a profession, however gratifying professional life may be.” These sites of intellectual exchange—he cites n+1 and The Point—ultimately “disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse.”
So as critics, as serious readers of literature, as people who broadly believe in the significance of the sort of silent attention reading and writing entails––when we “talk back” to writing, we are not literally “talking back to writing.” Rather, we are practicing a sort of second-order speech, entering a discursive arena (maybe “arena” is harsh here; a discursive . . . I don’t know, lounge) in which we are talking back to our colleagues and peers, talking back to and conversing with people who have made the same medium their own life’s work. We are not ventriloquizing the text into saying something it is not “actually” saying; rather, in being so steeped in the stuff, we have come to recognize the malleability of language, its weaknesses and implications, its firmnesses and densities and thicknesses and archival suggestions. Thus, in Guillory’s liberating formulation, the judging of the quality of a piece of criticism is contingent on a celebration of the “poetics of scholarship.” Thinking and writing are no longer kept separate, enacting that central Socratic drama; rather, the one entails the other. This is imaginatively powerful. Writing is no longer rote “communication.” With the rise of ChatGPT-produced writing—which is not going away any time soon—this reconciliation advocates for, ultimately, taking pleasure in reading. And in writing. And in writing about reading, and in reading about writing, and in writing long difficult sentences to help you think through difficult long books, and in reading those sentences. There is a delight in labor: there is a delight in activity, a delight amplified all the more considering the extent to which this activity is frequently unalienated, occurring as it does within a wider critical community.
Professing Criticism’s very final notes are powerful and resonant. After 400 pages, at the end of the totemic, destined-to-be-debated work of historiography and theory, Guillory writes that “the epistemic claims of literary study, though dependent on facts and on research, are founded equally on the epistemic principle of understanding, the kind of knowledge that in its simplest expression takes the form: ‘I know what you mean.’” For Guillory, “understanding is knowledge: I know what you mean” (emphasis his). This is the type of knowledge that literary criticism is capable of producing. A deep, even inarticulate, understanding, a poetic knowledge of not only the way the text works, but also of the way that the world which produced the text works: and, thereby, a truly dialectical understanding of how the text works in the world.
This is the quiet climax of the performance: a 400-page tour-de-force which, after performing the requisite rhetorical moves of criticism and theory, is now able to gesture to itself and go, “see”? It is an immediate instantiation of the point of criticism. It is a defense of the act of criticism, whatever form it may take. It is an assertion of the value in what we, academics or public-facing critics or casual readers, do every day when we decide to read, and then likewise decide a book has changed us. An essay cannot be gist-ified into a few takeaway nuggets. A novel can’t be thought through with a quick Wikipedia skim intended to gloss “social-historical context.” Yes, in order to really “know what someone means,” you probably have to do a bit of prerequisite work. But that work you do allows for a deeper comprehension and production of knowledge than is possible without it.
Guillory ends the book:
This is a world in which some of us can specialize in the study of cultural artifacts, and within this category to specialize in literary artifacts, and within literature to specialize in English, and within English to specialize in Romanticism, and within this period to specialize in ecocriticism of Romantic poetry.
One can imagine Guillory using the archetype of the Romantic Poetry Ecocritic as a snarky example in the first chapter, deploying said archetype to argue against the overestimation of aim that deformation has wrought. So, when he ends with this figure, I find it, frankly, quite moving. For it represents Guillory’s celebration of all the knowledge that is capable of being produced, whether or not he himself is capable of producing it.
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Compared to the monolithic Professing Criticism, Guillory’s newest book, On Close Reading, is thin, clocking in at 86 pages of essay (including 110 footnotes: Guillory is a licentious footnoter, and huge swaths of the pages of both books considered here are occupied by the diminutive typeset) and 40 pages of annotated bibliography, prepared by Scott Newstok of Rhodes College and whom Guillory acknowledges as being a “a collaborator on this project in a measure difficult fully to convey.” If Professing Criticism settles on the significance of the gesture of acknowledgment, then On Close Reading can be read in light of this. That is, rather than mount a theory of close reading or wholly augment the de Manian theory to which Guillory seems to mostly subscribe, Guillory is more focused on a pedagogical exercise. Guillory argues that close reading is a technique; specifically, as technique, it is the bedrock of the work of the critic. The question is not to defend the practice, whose status as bedrock to criticism is, to him, a foregone conclusion. The question, as such, becomes about the transference of this technique. How do we teach people to “close read”? How can we give people the confidence to utter Professing Criticism’s final rallying cry: I know what you mean? And what, moreover, is the social value in imparting this skill?
Guillory’s first step is to recuperate close reading from the clutches of New Criticism—think of the criticism practiced by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and I.A. Richards. Close reading, as an activity and technique, is often imagined as part and parcel of the New Criticism. In a footnote, Guillory cites Paul de Man who, in The Resistance to Theory, succinctly describes the New Critical approach to the literary object: “[Students] were asked…to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history.” The New Criticism’s infamous disregard of context—arguing instead that “singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them”—aligns with the unfortunate metaphor of depth that is implied in the phrase “close reading.” It is easy to link an immersion into the text with a disregard for the world and people outside the text.
The slippage of close reading into New Criticism, though, holds more sinister implications than shoddy or dull scholarship (a colleague once described the central rhetorical move of New Critical scholarship as pointing out an ambiguity and then going, “Now, isn’t the text richer for this?”). The New Criticism’s profound anti-humanism—viz., its Conservatism, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, sexism, and anti-Communism—can be, as academic Andy Hines locates most convincingly in “The Object of New Criticism,” an essay from his 2022 book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University, directly linked with its approach to the literary object. As Hines suggests, the New Critical move to treat the literary object as a closed text ultimately re-fetishizes the text. Treating the text as an organic “whole,” replete with paradox, ambiguity, and irony, is to elide material production and the relations contained therein—specifically troublesome in the context of American/Agrarian New Criticism, inasmuch as the southern printing presses which printed Agrarian New Critical texts were overwhelmingly staffed by underpaid Black laborers. Likewise, it elides the stratified social relations and historical positionings that produced not only the raw artifact—the book you’re holding in your hands—but which likewise provided the raw material, the living subject matter contoured by the writer.
The implications here are profound and require extraction. In treating the text as something that just “appeared” and in turn occluding the labor/historicized relations behind said text, New Criticism reproduces the formal logic of the commodity fetish, extending it to the literary object. This is ironic: for, as Guillory himself notes, the New Criticism critiqued the artistic creation only insofar as it could be distinguished “from the products of industrial creation.” Despite hoping to transcend the onanistic ephemera of consumer culture, New Criticism reinscribed what is perhaps consumerism’s most axiomatic myth.
Surveying a range of New Critical books and essays allows Guillory to argue—convincingly, mind you—that the type of close reading critics and academics perform is quite different from what the New Critics imagined themselves doing, which form of criticism is far closer to a “belletristic” agenda: appreciation and judgment appear as the endgame of New Criticism, not the production of knowledge. There is no I-know-what-you-mean here. Amusingly, Guillory even notes that the phrase “close reading” does not appear in any of these books, and only becomes an academic meme in the ‘80s—long after the nominal heyday of New Critical formalism.
Having defended close reading from charges of New Criticism, Guillory gets into the nitty-gritty, articulating a way of understanding close reading which, in turn, allows us to more deeply understand much of the argument forwarded in Professing Criticism. Guillory begins by differentiating between techné and technique. Techné is understood as the art of “all productive practices, all making––in the context of the word’s Greek origin, everything from the making of drinking vessels and houses to the making of poems and plays.” Technique becomes the act of making, rather than the art: we understand it more clearly as a means, rather than the end. For Guillory, the art-of-making (techné) is directed toward the “improvement” of the act-of-making (technique). One can make narrative, for example; the technique here would be writing, or orating, or even typing; I do admittedly find the book to be most weak when adumbrating this distinction; Guillory—a profligate over-writer—is shockingly brief and vague here, expending maybe a page on distinguishing what becomes a pillar of his argument. However, in drawing out the latent implications, we can articulate Guillory’s democratic vision.
We can begin tracing said vision by putting this argument into conversation with Professing Criticism, a sensible move insofar as, as Guillory writes in the acknowledgment, the writing of the latter and genesis of the former occurred simultaneously. So, in the case of criticism, the “techné” at work is the art of making knowledge. The “technique” at work, though, is Guillory’s most exciting intervention into the theory of close reading. First, Guillory names (in a footnote) and then complicates the theory of close reading forwarded by Jonathan Kramnick in Criticism and Truth (the other other big state-of-the-field book at the moment). For Kramnick, close reading is, despite its name, an act of writing: it is “an expert practice of writing prose and making text, of weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” Crucially, it is a “craft knowledge.” “Close reading is craftwork in a literal sense. It is something one does or makes with one’s hands, and its mode of attention is a kind of dexterity.” Kramnick compares this imagination of close reading to a sort of basketweaving, a tactile and embodied knowledge that (like Guillory’s final move) one just knows is correct when they see it done well—or, in Kramnick’s terminology, when one feels it done well, imagining a carpenter “feeling” a sofa and determining its correctness with a greater degree of accuracy than can the layperson.
Guillory’s complication is a little more specific. The technique to which the techné of making-knowledge is applied is not just writing; nor, however, is it just reading. It is, more definitively than Kramnick’s definition, the dialectical play between. It is a reading that gestures to a future writing, the base melody over which the critic cannot help but imagine the descant. And, simultaneously, it is a writing that incorporates—or retroactively imagines—the reading that once occurred and prompted said writing. Note, too, the ways in which this echoes Paul de Man’s famous formulation that close reading (and, thus, criticism itself) is an “allegory of reading.” Guillory’s intervention is to underscore the labor involved. In quoting at length “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” an 1893 essay by Arthur Symons, Guillory shows us how Symons’ “reading occurs in the background of his writing and remains there.” Though Symons discusses Mallarmé’s style, treatment of language, and deployment of decadent symbolism, his argument is “notable for what is absent from it: any quotation from the poems, any reference to particular words, phrases, or lines that would support Symons’s assertions.” In this emblematic piece of criticism, the labor involved is elided.
So, Guillory’s most exciting suggestion is that close reading is a writing that foregrounds the process—or labor—of reading. With close reading reconceptualized in this light and situated as the bedrock of criticism, this then allows us to codify criticism as that which makes the process of learning and the production of knowledge more visible. Thus, if we follow Guillory’s string of suggestions, we can imagine good criticism as that which, at the very least, strikes a democratic posture: it is that which draws, even invites, one in; which essays a polite conciliation: which shows you—yes, you—both what and how it means. This is not the austere, recondite thing that DFW and Franzen et al. liked to castigate Theory as being. Nor is it the ivory-tinged and abrasively rhizomatic object groypers and soyjacks on X like to imagine it as. There is always the chance that you don’t understand something, yes. But the anchoring rhetorical move of good criticism is that it shows you how the critic thought. This is profoundly democratic and opens up criticism as something to be produced by and engaged with within those public arenas Guillory enunciates in Professing Criticism. Criticism is an object, yes, same as any piece of writing is; however, in rehearsing the drama of discovery it accomplishes what the New Criticism could not: it de-fetishizes both itself and thereby the literary text which is the object of criticism. Writing is no longer the upshot of the Muse, an Ionic synthesis of the singular Romantic Genius with Pure Form. Rather, it is brought back into the real, made to be the representation of the process of thought. The analytic and the anaclitic are each sown within the other.
Although he elsewhere defines close reading as “rare” in that it most often occurs in the academy, this is not a foregone conclusion. Close reading, in foregrounding reading as a kind of laborious and dramatic production, entails a degree of performance. And thus comes Guillory’s most affirming assertion, concerning the replicability of the performance of criticism. Close reading is, ultimately, a performative technique embedded within the piece of criticism; in Guillory’s formulation, close reading is an “instrument” that “plays the literary work.” Such a formulation allows him to further recuperate close reading from New Criticism (one cannot play an instrument fascistly; such a designation depends on what is being played) and also forward that a close reading does not automatically render the work of criticism “good” (both close reading and playing an instrument “can be done in virtuoso fashion or as a mediocre exercise”). But it also allows him to define close reading as a “modeling technique.” It is something you learn by watching, by earnestly and critically engaging with; it’s something you get better at by practicing, frequently alone—and often, for the obsessive, deep into the silent dark of a sodium-lighted early morning. Criticism has its own methodology of reproduction built into it. By showing you how criticism constructs itself, the aspiring critic does not need discursive x-ray vision or to see a collection of essays as so many articulated skeletons standing discretely atop a blue void. All you need is a little time.
Thus, Guillory’s engagement with and celebration of older modes of criticism is not a misplaced nostalgia for a past that never existed, as Bruce Robbins polemically suggests in Criticism and Politics. It is, rather, a properly dialectical imagination. Thinking through the problematic posed by traditional modes of humanist criticism requires one to strike an oblique critical pose: to look at it from the corner of your eye, rather than oppose it head-on. So, rather than concluding this with a sentiment naming yet another takedown of old humanisms and antiquated critical postures, I propose that building new humanisms––which is what we are doing, or at least what I like to imagine we are doing––demands a responsible, mannered dialectical approach which envisions the seeds of a new humanism already sown into the gone-fallow body of the old, allowing us to reimagine (and thereby recuperate) the “antiquated” as, instead, perhaps, the “vintage”—with all the ambivalent nostalgia and prelapsarian freighting such a phrase inevitably calls forth.