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Close Reading and Its Alternatives provides an up-to-date history of the literary and analytical technique and philosophy of close reading. It offers a guide to it's features and genealogies, and how it intersects with theories like feminist criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, digital humanities, game studies, and more.
List of contents
General Introduction: Close Reading and Its Alternatives - Mun-Hou Lo;
Part I Inventions of Close Reading-Around the New Criticism; Introduction to Part I - Mun-Hou Lo; 1. Criticism, Inc. (1937) - John Crowe Ransom; 2. What to Say About a Poem (1963) - W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.; 3. The Language of Paradox (1947) - Cleanth Brooks; 4. The Formalist Critics (1951) - Cleanth Brooks; 5. Selections from a Glossary of the New Criticism (1948-9) - William Elton;
Part II Inflections of Close Reading-After the New Criticism; Introduction to Part II - Mun-Hou Lo; 6. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture (1973) - Clifford Geertz; 7. On Interpretation: Symptomatic Reading and the Transformation of the Text (1981) - Fredric Jameson; 8. The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism (1983) - Paul de Man; 9. Teaching Deconstructively (1985) - Barbara Johnson; 10. Professing the Renaissance: Culture, Historicity, Textuality (1989) - Louis A. Montrose; 11. Reading for Form (2000/2006) - Susan J. Wolfson;
Part III Alternatives to Close Reading-Distant Reading; Introduction to Part III - Mun-Hou Lo; 12. Conjectures on World Literature (2000) - Franco Moretti; 13. Foundation of Macroanalysis (2013) - Matthew L. Jockers; 14. Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science (2016) - James F. English and Ted Underwood;
Part IV Alternatives to Close Reading-Reparative Reading; Just and Surface Reading; and Thin Description; Introduction to Part IV - Mun-Hou Lo; 15. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You (2003) - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; 16. Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot (2007) - Sharon Marcus; 17. Surface Reading: An Introduction (2009) - Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus; 18. Close Reading and Thin Description (2013) - Heather Love;
Part V Alternatives to Close Reading-Too-Close Reading; Introduction to Part V - Mun-Hou Lo; 19. Preview: Hidden Hitchcock and Too-Close Viewing (2016) - D. A. Miller; 20. Now It's Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading (2015) - Frances Ferguson; 21. Getting Too Close: Video Games, "Anal
Rope," and the Perils of Queer Interpretation (2019) - Bonnie Ruberg; Index
About the author
Mun-Hou Lo is an associate professor at NUS College, National University of Singapore.
