digital digs - Latest Comments in close reading, open composition

Re: close reading, open composition

digital_sextant — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:25:00 -0000

I'll ponder this in more detail on my blog when I finish the book, but your post here could serve as an apt response to Mark Bauerlien's THE DUMBEST GENERATION.

Re: close reading, open composition

digitaldigs — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:39:41 -0000

I understand where you are coming from Skydaemon. But I think I need to clarify a few things.

Your definition of close reading is a useful one. However, in my post, close reading is a term of art within English Studies that references a particular set of interpretation practices. It is much like sounds, and at least on the undergraduate level, it's the practice that results in essays with many quotations followed by particular kinds of analysis/critique of those quotations. The critical methods might vary depending on the theory at work (e.g. new criticism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, etc.), but they all share this close reading approach.

I don't see open reading/composition as an abandonment of the premise of communication. Generally, as writers, at the very least, we have the subjective experience of trying to convey some intention or message to our intended audience. Similarly, as readers, we have the subjective experience of trying to understand what a text is telling us. (We can explore how that subjective experience is produced and its relationship to the production of compositions at another time.) For 99%+ of messages this process is mundane and unproblematic. That's one of the reasons why symbolic behavior (talking, writing, etc.) is such a powerful evolutionary-cum-technocultural adaption.

Close reading in English Studies, from New Criticism onward, has never been for that kind of communication because it is a way of interpreting texts where the meaning is obscured (e.g., in a poem). Now it is arguable that meaning is indeed obscured, especially when one is going to rule out the argument that meaning is intentionally obscured by the author (which, while somewhat perverse in conventional settings, could happen, of course).

So students read a poem and can't understand it. What does that mean? It's much like you suggest, Skydaemon. The students are not the "legitimate audience" for the text. So it is not that the meaning is generally obscured; it's just obscure for those who don't know the proper way to read the text. A literature course is supposed to educate students to legitimize their readings, and new criticism was really a hack, a short cut to helping students produce legitimate readings given their abject ignorance of high culture.

When we move into the postmodern/cultural studies era, the sought-after meaning in the text shifts in a variety of ways where English scholars start investigating the cultural, material, and ideological forces at work in literary texts. Again, as with New Criticism, authorial intentions are moot. And, again, students lack the appropriate reading techniques to produce interpretations appropriate for the disciplinary context.

In our defense, I think all disciplines do this: they look at (pieces of) the world and produce knowledge that often makes little sense outside their disciplinary context. It would be hard for me to look at the discourse of economics or psychology and tell you if something is "true" or even useful. That said, I do believe, and have written here before, that I think the humanities, and English in particular, needs to connect back to the larger culture in a more powerful way.

But let me get back to the point you make. Your example of readings of the Art of War is apt. Obviously Sun Tzu isn't here to pass judgments. So the Art of War is popularly adapted as corporate strategy. How should we read this text? What happens if we read the text without access to the Taoist philosophy that runs through it? Meaning cannot possibly be "in the text" because meaning is a cognitive event registering in your consciousness. As a reader, one might have an ethic of trying to understand the meaning the author is trying to convey (of listening as I put it in my post above), but it just can't happen in the text itself.

Now I could take the Art of War, randomly select words or passages, and then write a poem inspired by them. That would be a composition based on a reading of Art of War. It might even be a great poem. And someone else might read that poem and gain insight into Sun Tzu. It's possible.

But generally we wouldn't accept that as an act of interpretation. (Umberto Eco, btw, has some good work on the limits of interpretation.)

What counts as a legitimate interpretation is a reflection of context. Read a novel for a library book group and go discuss it. What you say there won't fly for a literary interpretation paper in a college course. And your college course interpretation is likely to get eye-rolling (or worse) in your book group. Similarly a reading of Art of War as corporate strategy is unlikely to please your online Taoist discussion group. In none of these cases are we trying to be dishonest about our understanding of what the text is saying. Nor are any of these readings necessarily "wrong."

The idea of "open composition" is really about changing the discursive, communal practices and expectations of English studies. We practice close reading (this term of art). It has had its uses. But, in my view, it is a practice that is increasingly disconnected from the discursive networks we find elsewhere in the world. And I think we need to be more closely connected with those networks or we will find ourselves increasingly irrelevant.

Open composition is an opening gesture toward thinking about how English can study texts beyond close reading.

Re: close reading, open composition

Skydaemon — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:30:46 -0000

I'd like to take this topic in a whole bunch of directions, but I'm having trouble sorting out the contradictory views I hold within myself on this one.

I dislike the idea of both close and open reading. I feel like they both contradict my values in different ways.

On the one hand, I prefer to think of close reading as a combination of staring intensity and in the spatial sense. Literally the distance of your face from the page and how hard you're staring. Likewise with the inherent problems of close reading. If you stare too closely at a text you get a crosseyed reading, and what you see isn't really there at all except as a blurry hallucination.

I like what I define as close reading, but I have a line I draw - the crosseyed line - where I essentially discard anything beyond that. This line for me has to do with the author's intended argument, and the legitimate audience's actual readings. It's a bit fuzzy whether I'd include non-intended audience readings as legitimate or not. I do not accept readings fabricated out of whole cloth and untied to any audience. Nor do I accept readings which are inherently the agenda of the reviewer rather than the author. To the extent that close readings include these crosseyed readings, I dislike the brand. Somehow I would prefer this to be re-defined in a way that excludes those sorts of analysis. If you can't even identify a legitimate audience that would actually read it the way you analyze it, you're staring too closely.

I should note that I don't need to know who the author was to determine what his intended argument or audiences were. That should be deducable from the text itself.

On the other hand, I dislike some of the ideas of open reading as well. Particularly the fatalistic determinism inherent in saying that your argument and meaning can only exist as a function of the author's culture and time. That you are somehow doomed to be trapped in the myopia of your own people and time. I simultaneously am not sure that's true, while also recognizing that it largely has been true to date. Certainly, an author might assume cultural or time specific axioms without declaring them. But I'm not convinced that a complete argument couldn't be constructed in some cases to be timeless, or authorless.

The text that springs to mind as a good example is The Art of War. Largely timeless, and authorless. In fact, the principles are so coherent, as to be possible to adapt to analogous situations it wasn't intended for without loss of effectiveness. You could apply the text to corporate warfare, or political battles as easily as to military war. A great example of timeless thought, as it has been abstracted to its core principles and axioms. Would the text be less valuable if written by a mercantalist shopkeeper instead of a tactician? Not in the least.

One of my inherent beliefs can be summed up in one of my little sayings. "Truth has no provenance." It also sums up one of my beefs with open reading. If a coherent and complete argument lands before you, it cannot matter who wrote it, or what motivations they had when writing it. Even if that individual wrote the argument in the manner of a devil's advocate and does not personally believe it, or even if that individual was really an insider in the opposing argument camp, that does not lessen the strength of it. Truth must be capable of standing alone, independent of source. It also points out the inherent foolishness of abdigating the responsibility for verifying truth. Anonymity highlights the ridiculousness of authority as a basis for truth. The depth and accuracy of argument _is_ the expertise inherent in it, not a name behind it.

This for me, goes to the core of the value of the internet as it stands now. The idea of pseudonymity and writing on the internet depends almost totally on this and it is forcing a turn for the good on society at large. But in an anonymous world, how does open reading work?

I do like the idea of open reading being used to evaluate texts in relation to other texts, and hence to seek the kernel of truth amongst texts rather than confining it to the attempts of a single author. I very much like that aspect of open writing - the idea of a web of ideas which the work rests in. I also like the idea of separating or removing the author from consideration.

To the extent that open writing demands examination of the author or time, I dislike it... unless the author is writing on the topic of that culture or time. I have less of a problem with it in the context of anonymous authors though.

But then again, we get into problems with the ambiguity of language and shifting meanings over time. The fact that we don't record those shifting meanings in a chronological dictionary map doesn't help. Honestly, my own preferences get muddled here, but it's too big a topic to delve into all at once.