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Ep. 25. Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century
109 Plays6 days ago
In this episode, I talk to Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant about their edited book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (2025).
Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and Johanna Winant is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College.
Episode notes
- William Carlos Williams, 'The Red Wheelbarrow'
- Winant, 'The Claims of Close Reading'
- 'No Crisis', LARB
- 'Close Reading is a Conversation', The American Vandal
- Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain
Book recs:
- Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, The Leopard
- Solvej Balle, On The Calculation of Volume, Vol III
- Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal
- Mark Haber, Lesser Ruins
- Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid
Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Find Johanna on BlueSky and Dan on BlueSky or Instagram. Please leave feedback here.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the show for readers, writers, and anyone interested in how language works.
Meet Dan Zinikin and Johanna Winnin
00:00:10
Speaker
In today's episode, I talked to Dan Zinikin and Johanna Winnin about their book Close Reading for the 21st Century. Welcome, Johanna. Welcome, Dan.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hi, so glad to be here. It's delightful to be here. Thanks so much
The Concept and Importance of Close Reading
00:00:23
Speaker
for doing this. I saw your book a real long time ago on social media when was first announced and was like, I need this in my teaching and my life.
00:00:31
Speaker
And it really doesn't disappoint, which is why want talk to you both. On this show, where I usually talk with a writer about their practice, we kind of analyze a passage together and we
Feelings on Close Reading
00:00:40
Speaker
do close reading. But this book really formalized what close reading was for me, even in my brain. I've been teaching that for a long time, but this helped my brain even figure out what I'm doing when I'm doing close reading. So I thought it' would be useful to talk to you both.
Dan's Initial Struggle and Appreciation
00:00:52
Speaker
But the first question I ask everyone on this show, just like a really simple one is like, how do you feel about close reading as a practice? I'm assuming, you know, you've written this book, so you must care about it. But like, what does it mean to you emotionally, intellectually, wherever you want to start, basically?
00:01:06
Speaker
Oh, this is like our origin stories. I love close reading. i will say that I am an unabashed devotee of close reading. I mostly work on modern poetry and um in both my own writing and in my teaching, I'm often telling my students and telling myself to say something that I really believe about something very small.
00:01:33
Speaker
And that that is where a lot of my ideas and inquiries and commitments begin. That said, like one of the things that I've um thought about through the years of you know graduate school and becoming a professor is both how to make close readings
Johanna on Collaboration in Close Reading
00:01:50
Speaker
work. more useful to other people, which means framing them analytically and theoretically and conceptually, as well as how to make the practice more transparent to students.
00:02:03
Speaker
For my part, my feelings about close reading have long been, i think, very complicated. i have a tendency to think analytically and abstractly. I was a math major as an undergraduate.
00:02:23
Speaker
I, the way my mind works, it was sort of like the purest, the, the pure, the math, the more my brain leaned toward it. So abstract algebra, like an alternative path of my life could have been as an abstract algebraist.
00:02:37
Speaker
And i I like when there's a nice, tidy, clean answer to things. And when I started grad school, I was ah known in my cohort for that stereotypically annoying position of theory guy who has, you know, kind of brought philosophy and was always talking about Kierkegaard or whatever. And I got a reputation someone told me at one point for being bad at close reading. um And in my oral exams halfway through grad school, my committee, their their main thing they said to me at the end of the exams was like, look, you've got to slow down. You've
00:03:13
Speaker
you've got to slow down with the text and linger with specific language and let it be more complicated than you're letting the text
Broader Impact of Close Reading Skills
00:03:26
Speaker
be. You want to clean everything up.
00:03:28
Speaker
You want to make everything nice and neat and tidy. And so, you know, this writing this book with Johanna for me was part of a process of wrestling with something I've struggled with my entire life as a literary critic, something that I've like needed to work at getting comfortable with, which is sitting in the mess and then trying to reckon with and do justice to the complexity of a literary object. in words without oversimplifying in it. And that is, you know, one way to think about what close reading does at its best.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Like one thing I'm constantly telling my students is that there's nothing wrong to notice in a literary text. Even if I say something as specific as notice something weird or surprising. Literary texts are so weird and surprising all the time. Like everything about them is weird and surprising.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, otherwise, why would you go back to them? Right? Like, that that's why we like the text, we hope. You say in the introduction, like understanding close reading will make you a better reader, thinker and writer about anything that you examine in detail and explain to someone
American Vandal Symposium
00:04:32
Speaker
else. And I wonder if you could like, explicate that a tiny bit more. Like, are you suggesting that, you know, learning how to close read text allows you to close read the world? Is that your like, is that your big jump?
00:04:42
Speaker
This is something that Dan and I like keep talking about, actually, that we like have talked about. mean, first of all, I think you can see even from our answers about close reading why it's been such a delightful collaboration between us that I think we both bring really um like shared commitments and even intuitions, but also like really different kinds of backgrounds as well. um and it's been very you know mutually beneficial. At least that's how I feel. It's been very beneficial for me. And so in terms of thinking about this question, this is something that like we continue to talk about because like one thing I think you see in the book is our commitment to conversation and collaboration.
Structured Approach to Close Reading
00:05:21
Speaker
So you know much of the book is co-written between the two of us. A lot of it is co-edited, that you know the parts that we didn't write together, we edited together, bringing in other collaborators. and so um And we also really believe that even every close reading involves an invitation to conversation. So you're asking this question that's actually like one of our ongoing conversations about close reading, which is what does it mean to close read something? and And we do believe that you don't just close read high art, for example, right? Like we're not just close reading Shakespeare sonnets, although there's a really wonderful...
00:06:01
Speaker
analysis of a close reading of a Shakespeare sonnet in the book by Noreen Masood. But also that when you close read something, one of the things you are doing is treating it as if it were art that you are treating it, you are making it into a text.
00:06:16
Speaker
And that's, you know, certainly easier to do with some things than other things. But um that close reading is a way not of like evaluating in some ways as much as simply valuing. We held a symposium
Challenges in Textual Interpretation
00:06:28
Speaker
to launch this book at Emory University, and we brought a number of the contributors to talk, extend their thinking from the book at that symposium. And one of the most brilliant performances, each of these was a short five to seven minute talk. And one of the most brilliant performances was by Christopher Spade, ah professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. And he did a close reading of the word okay as a text message. um And all of the ways these he talks about this with his undergraduate students, because they understand how big of a difference it can be if that okay has an exclamation point at the end or not, if it has a period there or not. And he just kind of riffed on all the variations of the word okay in a text message and what the implications might be. So, you know, it was a great demonstration of close reading something that's not a Shakespeare sonnet, but ah everyday use of a single word I would also say something I've learned a lot from Johanna, something that I think really is at the core of the book that she brought to it is the importance of argument and the idea that close reading has a transportable structure of inductive logic at the core of its epistemological work. And that form of inductive argumentation really does allow you to think well across objects.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah,
The Art of Noticing in Texts
00:07:56
Speaker
that's fascinating. the The text thing is really funny because we do this in the first class. I do a first year class on close reading and just reading text generally, right? And I say, like, you do this every day when your friends send you a WhatsApp message and you say, wait, why doesn't that have a capital letter?
00:08:12
Speaker
Why are they not using punctuation? Why is this emoji here? Why are they breaking up into different individual messages? Right. I'm like, this is an an example this. That's a really fun way to talk about that, about like the OK. I really wish I heard that now. That's so up my screen. The symposium was um recorded as a podcast, fellow podcast, American Vandal, and it'll be out in the new year. So people can listen in on the symposium.
00:08:39
Speaker
Amazing. I will link to that in the show notes, as they say in this genre. The other thing i was gonna say, a shout out to Noreen Massoud, who has been on this show before we talked about a passage from her glorious, glorious book. So go back to that episode if you haven't listened to already. um She's wonderful and joyous.
00:08:55
Speaker
in every possible way. And her chapter in this book is funny too. I'm like, she's doing close reading. She's arguing that actually, I don't really understand the sonnet and I don't really understand the close reading of the sonnet, but it's great. And it's funny. So yeah. And she talks about loaves of bread, like cat loaves. You have to read the book basically. Noreen was one of the first people we solicited to contribute to the book. I don't blame you.
00:09:19
Speaker
So in the book, in the introduction, you kind of set
Relevance of Close Reading in Modern Times
00:09:22
Speaker
up this framework for thinking about what close reading is, right? I think I've been doing it very loosely on this podcast, but you give a real kind of structure to what that looks like. And I wonder whether you could talk through those steps for people, not like at length, but just like give them a kind of sense of beginning with scene setting and ending with what you call global theorizing. And I wonder if you could just talk us through those steps briefly just to give us a sense of it.
00:09:43
Speaker
Sure. And just to um be clear for your listeners, Chris, ah what Dan and I are talking about here is what we've called a close reading, noun goes to the verb close reading. we're not talking about like what you're doing when you are looking at a text text.
00:10:00
Speaker
for the first time or even necessarily for the third or fifth time, but what you're doing when you are producing a close reading for your own reader yeah um or interlocutor. And um we came up with these steps by reading a lot of close readings. like we did not This is not in some ways um prescriptive, like this is a descriptive project. where we were looking at a lot of close readings. And like, it felt a little bit like, I don't know, maybe how Darwin felt when he went to the Galapagos to look at the Finch's beaks or something. But like, what is it that holds this category together? Like, what is its internal logic? So that's just to say that like, it's not that we are saying that all close readings have to be exactly this way. And we also think that close readings are more than the sum of their parts. Hmm. But also there are parts.
00:10:53
Speaker
And this was an attempt to name and identify those parts. So with that lead in, I'll say we we identified five parts or we call them five steps.
00:11:05
Speaker
When you begin ah to write a close reading, you want to invite your reader into the conversation. And to do that, you need to set the scene. We call this scene setting. where you're giving enough context, intellectual context, context of where we are going to be in the poem or story so that your reader can follow you, join you, and notice the detail you're about to point out to them. That's the second step, noticing. And that's when you identify one tiny detail in the poem or play,
Close Reading vs. AI
00:11:36
Speaker
text message,
00:11:38
Speaker
novel that you're going to base your argument on. going to say, this was surprising or angering or frustrating or whatever, but I noticed it. And now we're going to build an argument from it. Your third step is local claiming. You build a claim, you make a claim about what that detail is doing or how it works right there in that moment in the poem or the novel, just in that line or that sentence or that paragraph.
00:12:04
Speaker
And then you begin to notice patterns that are in sympathy with that claim across the poem or across the novel. You make a regional argument. You say something about the entirety of that novel, the entirety of that poem. That's the fourth step.
00:12:19
Speaker
And finally, you can scale up to global theorizing. That's where you speculate or posit something on the basis of your argument for that text across an oeuvre or across a literary period or across a genre. And so what you've done by that point is you've moved from a tiny little detail to a vast terrain of literary history or literary form. um And that's the power of close reading.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, those five steps, I think it was just very useful to like, just chart them or map them onto the way I've been approaching text or the way my students would. And I think it's such like a helpful kind of scaffolding, if you like, of the kind of the various parts. But I wanted to ask you, the are there parts that you find in your readings or that you notice in your students, like the most difficult?
00:13:05
Speaker
Because I was reading the introduction, I was thinking, often it's the claiming stage, I think, for my students, like make like, I see a thing, what But now, you know, what are the stakes of that thing? I think is what you describe it, right? Like, what are the stakes
Format and Diversity in the Book
00:13:18
Speaker
of the argument? And I and i find that always quite hard to tease out or describe to students to be like, you know, it it like I've always want to say, well, it depends on the thing you're looking at and the kind of thing you're saying. But that's not very helpful by in the moment. and But I wonder whether you have your own kind of sticking points or things you've noticed about those steps.
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. I find that moment of moving from a detail to making a claim really difficult. And I think for me, part of what I've found difficult about that is that when we do it as professionals, often we're relying on a lot of knowledge about the genre of literary criticism, about the genres of theory that we might already have embedded within our minds, you're going to make a certain kind of claim about what a detail means differently if you're a Jamesonian than if you're Derridian. And there's different kinds of rules or assumptions of inference.
00:14:13
Speaker
that you're going to make with those. so So the rules are varied and we don't articulate them clearly that often as pedagogues or in our field and trying to articulate exactly for students what those rules of inference, what those rules are for making a claim from a detail, that move from a detail to a claim.
00:14:32
Speaker
are are really hard. I think Johanna has some really great ways for thinking about how students are like can do that without needing all this the infrastructure that you get trained into as a professional over the years. But I also suspect, I've heard Johanna speak very um brilliantly many times about the challenge of noticing itself and how that is a really, really hard thing to get students to learn how to do. Yeah, I think my sense is often that noticing is really hard because it's a moment of vulnerability. So it's hard, not necessarily intellectually in a sort of pure intellectual way, but it's a real moment of like courage often that it requires. um This is what I was writing about in that Boston Review essay in particular, that pointing to something on the page for a student that is not a right answer. They're not identifying a genre or using a word like dichotomy or um talking about how they know the historical context or tracing a theme. There's no right answer to this. And instead what they're doing is confessing puzzlement.
00:15:42
Speaker
Right. on some level, um that that's a really, really vulnerable moment. And and it takes students, I think, ah ah often a while to trust me as their teacher when I ask them to do that. So I've i've found it to be useful to, first of all, be like very straightforward and honest about that this is a that there is no right answer, that this is something that they just have to trust themselves about as well as trust me. And that it really helps if it's something very small, because that will restrict um restrict the sort of range of anxiety as well as a range of kinds of claims they can make.
00:16:23
Speaker
that's it right So they're not making they're not noticing a whole paragraph. I asked them to notice a single word. Or sometimes something that's missing or punctuation and really sort of think about like, what does it mean that it's this word rather than another? Or that the sentence ends here instead of continuing. Like what are the, um Helen Bendler calls this the roads not taken that a poem in a poem. that um like how else could this have been different and what would it have meant if it were? So then why does it matter that it's the way that it is?
00:16:52
Speaker
And so like just just in terms of what Dan's saying, in terms of like picking up on how what kinds of expertise students might already bring to this, like I think often even um even like very new undergraduates bring a lot to the literary studies classroom that they don't necessarily even are not aware that they bring. So the book starts, our book starts with a close reading of The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, a poem known as a Red Wheelbarrow. And we point to the word glazed in that poem and make a claim about it.
00:17:23
Speaker
That's a poem I teach all the time. Like I teach modern poetry all
Favorite Chapters and Passages
00:17:26
Speaker
the time. And if I put that poem on the board and tell students, One of these words is not like the others. Which one would you point to? With that sort of preface, nine out of 10 times they will say glazed, like immediately.
00:17:39
Speaker
It's like not a hard thing on some level to notice that it sticks out. If you ask them why they noticed it, they will have all kinds of different claims about it, including like, and they won't necessarily be able to say it this way, but it's one of the two ah Latinate words in a poem that's full of Anglo-Saxon ah Germanic derived words. Right. So like that's something that they kind of know, but like don't know that they know. And a lot of what I feel like I do as a teacher, i was talking about this with a colleague yesterday, I describe myself as a professional closet organizer.
00:18:11
Speaker
Like they have a lot of stuff in there. Students come to the class like a lot of stuff. And part of what I'm trying to do is be like, what if we put some shelves here and labeled them? Like, what if we hung these things there?
00:18:24
Speaker
um And so I think it's both very useful to, you know, read Jameson and Derrida and be able to bring those kinds of lenses to help students notice, to be aware of your own noticing. And then also like they are, but that that doesn't inhibit even first year students from doing this work. They are already coming to literature with a lot of lenses just from like being alive in the world.
00:18:49
Speaker
And the force, I think, of asking them to notice something very specific and to make a claim at that local level is that it slows them down from doing the thing that I always wanted to do and which I find most of our students always want to do, which is first say they're noticing something that's kind of vague, like a feeling
Personal Influences in Close Reading
00:19:08
Speaker
or an aura or a a vibe, and then immediately move to stakes at the regional or even global level. Like you just want to kind of immediately be like, this poem is about life and this is why it's about life. without actually slowly and carefully lingering with the weirdness and moving from like claims at a step-by-step level. So there's a kind of tendency that we're trying by naming these steps to to to resist and slow down.
00:19:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's interesting. And I think that depending on what kind of class... I'm teaching, right? Like that often shapes that moment too, right? Like if it's an American lit class and I give them the red wheelbarrow and I say, what do you notice? They notice red and white, right? Like as though America is the context of that poem, not just like the language of the poem. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like even when I put a text on a reading list, like I'm already shaping some of the close reading before it's even started. And I'm really like interested in that moment of just being like, here's the text on its own. Like, what do you do with it?
00:20:04
Speaker
What happens if you ask them what they're confused by or puzzled by? That's good. And again, I think it may be is your point about risking, right? It's about risking saying, i don't know, or like, I don't get it, or I don't like it or something. and I'm like, that's fine. That's good. Even because I'm just sort of thinking about like, if they're noticing red and white and sort of making the context America, they might notice that there's no blue. Yeah, quite. Right. And then what does that mean about the fact that this poem is shaping kinds of expectations, perhaps even around, you know, symbols of patriotism?
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, yeah, we, I think I did a class ones and we spent probably like an hour and a half on that one poem. They were like, when they came out at the end, they were like, I didn't know we could spend so long on like ah six lines or whatever it is. And and i I was like, that's the happiest thing for me, right? That we could just linger. and This is really helpful to think this through. i wanted to ask a kind of bigger question about like the bit at the end of your title is for the 21st century, right? Close reading for the 21st century. And part of the contemporaneity you address in the intro is about the kind of the move of theory in the kind of 21st century in particular. But I wonder whether there are other meanings for the 21st century in your minds when you put this book together. Are there other kind of contemporary contexts or kind of vibes, to use that word, that that are kind of lingering as like, why bring this book out now? Yeah, I would say one was already there for us when we started, and one actually has emerged in the process.
Writing Practices and Collaboration
00:21:31
Speaker
So there was already there this sense that we are embedded to use the largest conceptual term for our moment, neoliberalism. in a moment that is attempting to make school always instrumental.
00:21:45
Speaker
And that this constant attempt that is really intensified since 2008 and isn't stopping makes students want to think about return on investment in the classroom and makes them want to think about like, you know, everything I'm doing here ought to lead to some financial career in the future. Rather than thinking about the fact that education can address other than economic pursuits, right? Can address aesthetic pursuits, can address pursuits that are about making oneself an agent of knowledge for the sake of knowledge being worth pursuing.
00:22:23
Speaker
And so wanting to be able to defend that, wanting to be able to make a case that we're doing that in the field of literary studies, that this is at the core of what we're about. And not just that, but making that exciting and desirable for a 19-year-old in 2026, that is really important to us. And that actually, unbeknownst to us, that that made this book, I think, really well-suited for the emerging hejani hegemony of AI.
00:22:53
Speaker
um Because so much of what, and this is the second thing I was referring to that we weren't anticipating, AI attempts to make us passive with regards to knowledge. And it makes our students passive with regards to knowledge. um And it accelerates and intensifies the neoliberal urge to instrumentalize everything, to dumb down literary texts, to summarize, to rewrite them, to make them easier, rather than acknowledging the difficulty as valuable for the aesthetics of it in
Current Reading Recommendations
00:23:26
Speaker
and of itself. And so when we've got AI just sort of sitting here, tempting our students to, tempting all of us, trying to make the case for our students, not punitively, not like you can't use ai not because we're cops, but because we're offering you something better.
00:23:45
Speaker
Because we're ah we we're trying to make the case for you that that the work we're asking you to do is worth doing for its own sake. And so the way we we we wrote this book, Close Reading, for the 21st century is trying to say, this is a practice that is worth it for you to do. And we want to convince you of that in the 21st century.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'll just add that when we started this book, Close Reading did not feel fashionable. ah ah It's now kind of having a moment with other books on close reading coming out, but that obviously was not something we knew about four years ago when we first came up with this idea, which like still in academic terms is like light speed for a book to come out in the world.
00:24:26
Speaker
But even so, so much changed during that time. and then the other thing I guess I'll just say is that, and I think you can tell this from the way that Dan just answered this question, like he and I are both believers, you know, like we believe in literary studies. We believe in this work.
00:24:42
Speaker
And um I think, you know, the book has been a joy to work on with Dan and with our with our contributors because it has really been a space for this like affirmative belief and community too. Yeah, that comes from it.
00:24:55
Speaker
I have so many things I want to ask you and talk about, but the generative AI point, right, which I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe in my university. I don't know how your universities are, but, um you know, I'm like a probabilistic language generator, right? Like a machine is guessing the next possible word in a sequence that is deriving from all of the garbage of the Internet.
00:25:17
Speaker
Right. Like, how is that ever useful for anyone? Right. Let alone what we do in this kind of cultural world. And i kind of gave my students one is the one and only time I've used ChatGPT listeners.
00:25:27
Speaker
I asked them to do a close reading of Lydia Davis's short story In a House Besieged. i don't know if you know it. And it did the it did the thing. And then I gave them one that I did like in 10 minutes, right? Just a quick rough one that wasn't very good.
00:25:41
Speaker
And they were like, we love the chat GPT one. and i was like, why? And I asked them to like, give me the reasons. I didn't tell them it was that at that point. And I was like, do you not see any problems with the reading? They're like, what do you mean? i was like, look at the quotes.
00:25:51
Speaker
And it had made up all of the quotes. The short story is only like four sentences long, but none of the quotes were accurate, right? Like nothing from the story was in it. And I was like, this is the looking closely thing, right? This is the noticing. This is the paying attention to like the words in front of you, not the idea of the story, right? with the idea of like this machine. So I'm not i'm really interested in what you're talking about, making the case for like a better way of approaching. Like I kind of like this more positive spin. I need i need to think about this and take that forward because you're right. We can't always just say no. we have to give a reason for why the alternative, which is sitting, thinking,
00:26:23
Speaker
And that's part of the other question I want to ask about the format of the book, right? For those who haven't read it yet, you've basically got a range of like writers, scholars who are unpacking and analyzing a close reading of someone else, right? So we're we're almost doing a close reading of a close reading of them, this third thing. And I wonder at what point did that format come to you or how did you decide on that? And what do what do you think it offers?
00:26:46
Speaker
I'll just start by saying, because um I'm assuming that listeners won't see the book. It's a very unusual ah structure to the book. It is not really, um like Dan and I kind of invented it invented this, we feel like, as as a potential genre, although it's the only one like it so far. But Dan and I co-wrote a 40-page introduction, which is great.
00:27:05
Speaker
Quite long, like almost one of those, you know, very short introductions to X. Almost that long. yeah And then there are 21 essays, each of which is under 3,000 words. This one is under 3,000 words. And then there's another 40 pages of practical pedagogical materials that Dan and I co-wrote. So most edited collections have like a very brief preface and then long scholarly articles from like eight to 12 people. This one is um not that. It's really, we tried to do a sort of course in a book. So the close readings of close readings, But Chris, you mentioned those are the contributors' essays. The introduction is where we lay out the five steps and talk about what close reading is, what it does, and where it comes from um in the history of literary criticism.
00:27:52
Speaker
ah The contributors' essays, we ask people to choose a close reading that mattered to them and explain how it works to an undergraduate audience. And the hope is that these will be really useful ah for students and teachers
Conclusion and Engagement
00:28:08
Speaker
alike. So, for example, um in a class I taught a year ago, I had students read Keats and then Helen Vendler on Keats and then Jeff Dolvin and Joshua Coton on Helen Vendler on Keats. And I had them read Sense and Sensibility and then I had them read D.A. Miller on Sense and Sensibility.
00:28:26
Speaker
then i had them read Stephanie Inslee-Hirsch-Chanel on D.A. Miller on Sense and Sensibility, so showing how the magic was done. When did this idea come to us, Dan? It was pretty early on in the process. Yeah, it was. i you know i remember having in my mind one of the more exciting magazine issues about criticism that I remember, which was from 2014, 2015. It was an issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books called No Crisis. Hmm. And it did this thing where a scholar, I think it was mostly scholars who were more junior, picked some scholar. I think in that that case, it was they picked mostly living scholars, but who are more senior and wrote about why they admire them. And it was so wonderful. i just devoured it. It was so wonderful to see the kind of intimacy of that choice and to see people writing about scholarship in this world.
00:29:25
Speaker
personal way personal way that was also deeply rigorous. And so that was in my mind when we had this thought to have people do something somewhat similar here, but here really tailored to the pedagogical situation. The 21 essays are divided into five sections on each of the five steps so that when Josh Cotin and Jeff Dolvin write about Helen Vendler, they're trying to show, they're showing for a 20-year-old here's one thing that Helen Wendler does about how Helen Wendler notices that you can use to learn how to notice.
00:29:59
Speaker
Or when Omari Weeks writes about Hortense Spillers on Gwendolyn Brooks, Omari Weeks says, here's how Hortense Spillers is making a local claim. And here's how you as a 19-year-old can learn something from how Hortense Spillers does and do something like Hortense Spillers, right?
00:30:15
Speaker
So there's that pedagogical element, but there's also this sort of like excitement about reading a critic on a critic that has been important to them and do it in a really writerly way. I mean, these essays stand on their own as really joyful to read. And the other thing I'd say about this is that it...
00:30:35
Speaker
One enacts, here's the other thing, and I'm going to say two. it enacts a conversation, which is like ah one of the key words for this entire volume is conversation. The idea that any close reading emerges from and enters back into conversation.
00:30:51
Speaker
um And so we're kind of modeling conversation between critics in these essays. And then we're also, I just taught this book as part of a graduate student course on methods, on the method of close reading. And it serves as something of a overview of literary criticism, which doesn't tend to be taught at the graduate level. We get a lot of theory courses. We don't get a lot of criticism courses. And so the students got this overview of a number of critics. It's a sort of little canon of criticism from a range of fields that gave them a kind of history of literary criticism by actually seeing it done. that makes it a lot more robust as a course, as a history of criticism in a course, than say being like, here's new historicism, here's deconstruction.
00:31:38
Speaker
The individual criticism is actually a lot more interesting and weirder than the kind of chatty PT version of the overview of these fields. So a lot of work that's happening in these in these essays. No, yeah, they're doing they're fun. they They're so fun. I mean, I need listeners to hear this, right? Like, it is an enjoyable book. Like I've been dipping in and out, like just following my interest from like chapter to chapter. I didn't go like I read your intro. And then I've been jumping around like based on Yeah, the kind of books they're reading or so many scholars in here that I'm like, oh it's Natalia I know Natalia oh it's Omari like all of these wonderful people that like I know and love and respect their brains so it's really been lovely to kind of follow those paths and before I'm going to turn to talk about your writing practice in a minute but um I wondered whether there were any little highlights that you wanted to flag up like I love Brian Glavy's chapter on Lauren Ballant reading John Ashbery
00:32:29
Speaker
Not only for the like way Beland was maybe like misquoting this poem or not realising the poem went on, but then Glavy uses that to kind of show how their reading of the poem was like spot on anyway. And like this just it's just like a brilliant conclusion.
00:32:44
Speaker
There's a quote, I have to read it out because I love it so much. Even when we have a strong global theory about our lives... understanding on some level how our lives are shaped by capitalism or racism or history say we still have to do the regional work of figuring out what is going on and how to feel about it i was like wait wait i was not expecting an essay on close reading to like speak to my core but you know that thing we were saying earlier dan about like you know we're all we're we're quite used to making global theories right like this is x Right. Like this is the thing that's defining. But like the local, the regional work, sorry, of how does this thing connect to that thing in this small little moment? And what how do I feel about it? what How do I make sense of it? It's such like a beautiful reading and of itself. Like that's its own global theorizing as it's talking about staying away from global theorizing. I don't know. it was just a moment that really stuck out to me. I wonder whether you had favorite bits or bits that you turn back to.
00:33:36
Speaker
I have so many. i mean one thing I'll say is that um Dan and I invited scholars and writers that we really admire. We did not, we focused on more junior scholars so that this book would really represent the people who were, you know, in the first or maybe middles of their careers, but um relatively, relatively early Yeah.
00:34:02
Speaker
academics. And then also we edited them. Like really, like Dan and I have both written for the public. And these essays are not a sort of like revised resubmit situation. These essays are themselves the products of many conversations with these writers. So I feel sort of like very connected to all of them, actually. i don't know that I can choose. Yeah, I'll i'll just offer, i could offer something from any of these, but I'll offer a moment from Summer Kim Lee.
00:34:31
Speaker
She writes about Barbara Johnson, um the great deconstructive critic who i've I've now taught this book twice. And both times my students have utterly fallen in love with Barbara Johnson.
00:34:46
Speaker
at the end of the semester, I think Barbara Johnson is the critic they've kind of left most desiring to go um read more of. And Summer does a brilliant job of helping students navigate Johnson's brilliant and challenging essay about Jane Campion's film, The Piano, and about John Keats and about the history of poetry. It's it's really ambitious.
00:35:12
Speaker
And Summer's helping our readers see how Barbara Johnson notices. It's in the noticing section. And one thing Summer points out is that the way Barbara Johnson notices begins to show us that there's a kind of noticing in close reading that has certain affinities with the noticing that happens for those who are feminized in our contemporary society, the way that you have to be, if you're if you're um disciplined into being a girl or a woman, you're on notice. You're kind of always paying a certain kind of
00:35:51
Speaker
extra attention, maybe at times a paranoid attention to what's going on around you that can sometimes be like the kind of attention certain subjects bring to close readings. And my students have found that observation to be really powerful. Like you said, Chris, you didn't expect a ah book about close reading to also kind of teach you about life or like the center of how we live. um But I think that that moment where Summer points that out, that being a ah feminized subject in the world is like the practice of noticing close reading, something where they were like, holy shit, wow, this is more powerful, more than what I thought I was bargaining for when I came here. Yeah. Yeah. Chris, I have a question for you, actually. yeah yeah So one of the things that um has been really fun in the wake of this book, Finding Its Way to More People, is that people have asked us, like, you know, how did you assign these topics? And we said we didn't. You know, we invited... We invited the contributors and tried to have a range of theoretical lenses and historical fields of expertise and teaching experience at different kinds of colleges and universities and like genres and methodology, all these different kinds of things, because our gambit is that close reading is foundational for us all. But then we let the contributors choose who they wanted.
00:37:13
Speaker
And what has emerged is a sort of like cocktail party question of who would you have chosen that people are now coming up to us and saying, like, why didn't anyone choose X or whoever? Because actually everyone does have their pantheon or the and and one of the things that was really thrilling about in inviting people to contribute. was we got emails back like 10 minutes after we sent them saying like, yes, and I assume that someone already has said this particular close reading, but like, that's the one I want. And it's like, almost never had anyone said, I mean, like, everyone said really different things in terms of who they wanted. No one did the one I would have chosen, for example, so...
00:37:52
Speaker
Okay, I'll tell you mine and then you can tell me what you would have chosen. Okay, like immediately I have like one answer and this is the critics. So my like ah early work and my PhD was on literatures of the US South and I found Patricia Yeager's book called Dirt and Desire. i don't know if you know it.
00:38:07
Speaker
and Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing. i can't remember the full title, but she was sadly passed away the most exuberant reader and writer Like her sentences, like she cares about sentences, which makes me happy, right? It was one of the first academic books that I read that I was like, wait, what's happening here? why are you talking in this register? How are you drifting? and what she does, she just pulls together so many readings into one, right? She is jumping from Flannery O'Connor to Faulkner and back again without even like a hesitation, like no breath. And there are some gorgeous readings in there of Flannery O'Connor who, you know, all of the problems with her admitted that she's so good on the textures of, as in the title, Dirt and Desire, like the soil, the way dirt shows up, the way bodies... disappear in Southern fiction into the ground into lakes into bodies of water and she does it in a way that is also rich with her own language right and full of her own imagery and figurations and that book sustained me through my PhD I was like oh this this is how literary criticism can be done right like that that book it was just like a joy to me see yeah that would be my first choice I have like loads of others but like I think I would have gone there
00:39:16
Speaker
Isn't it interesting that you knew right away though? I think like that was, that was our experience talking to contributors too. I kept saying, why is no one choosing Sharon Cameron's 1979 masterpiece lyric time? But like, that was me, you know? Yeah.
00:39:31
Speaker
But I think that's it. It's partly showing kind of our affinities and kind of the ways our, like how we've come to texts and how we've come to other critics on text, right? And the way that shaped us. So I think it's, that that's the idiosyncrasy that i find really exciting. And that we knew we were not going to be able to get everyone. And so that was what was actually important was trying to capture what you're talking about in terms of like this moment of clarity and inspiration.
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah. I want to kind of swerve, which is why I ask all of the writers on this podcast about your writing practice. I want to know how you two, both very prolific writers and writers in different modes, um I think not just within the academy, but outside. Like, how do you write? Do you have writing practices?
00:40:14
Speaker
Are you in the same place? Are you typing? Do you have coffee and chocolate? And, you know, how do you do it? Right. This great question of when people co-write, how exactly are they co-writing? And we're co-writing again right now. I was writing something this morning leading up to but this podcast that is part of a co-written document that that we've got forthcoming. together. um We ourselves, we don't do the thing which I've only heard of one other set of co-authors. One set of co-authors is the only set I've ever heard of actually doing this successfully, which is simultaneously writing in a Google Doc, which does seem kind of like insane.
00:40:58
Speaker
Johanna and I do not have that kind of like mind meld. No, we have a relay race. We have a relay race, I feel like. Yeah, and we talk a lot about, we we have like a series of Zoom meetings where we we kind of brainstorm and talk through and outline and get on the same page. And argue and yeah, and compliment each other. And yes.
00:41:19
Speaker
All of that. And that's kind of like our pre-writing work. And then we work in ah Google Doc typically and we'll kind of like say, okay, you're going to kind of take the lead on this section. I'll take the lead on that section. And we hand those off and so I'll write some things. Johanna will write some things. And then it's kind of free game. And neither of us, I think importantly to our process, are precious. We're both kind of like the other person has 100% freedom to do whatever with the words that they think is best. And so there might there's some instances where I could probably disentangle it. And there's others where I definitely couldn't from like the introduction of the book of like, who did that? thinking about too. Yeah.
00:42:06
Speaker
And like, there are ideas in the book where like, I no longer can like say, like some of them I can probably but some it's just like, completely lost on me like whose words or whose ideas those are. They're shared. being there They're really cognitively like shared.
00:42:22
Speaker
Yes, i ah i totally agree with that. There's like one or two sentences where I'm like, oh, I remember, I think, I think I remember writing that. And then I'm like, that could be a false memory, though, like, because it went back and forth so many times. Maybe I remember revising that.
00:42:36
Speaker
Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. Because Dan and I really did, um each took the job of, you know, drafting something provisionally as provisional, because we knew the other one would improve it. so much, which is really liberating actually, um to be able to write something that you know someone else will help you with and help you and help you figure out.
00:43:01
Speaker
And so that's i mean that's been like really one of the great things for me about writing this book. This book happened simultaneously with my other book, which is coming out in a few months.
00:43:11
Speaker
And um and the you know the processes were very different, but also like very like this book was so helpful. for me because it reminded me how um how much fun this is why we do this in the first place that's so nice yeah we all need another writer to just make our sentences better that would be great i need yeah go writing is great um and do you are you like morning writers nighttime writers anytime you can fit in around your teaching do you have to be in a quiet space So i'm i'm I'm reading this lovely book right now by Martin High Jensen about Thomas Mann and Thomas Mann, how he wrote The Magic Mountain.
00:43:52
Speaker
And Thomas Mann was like this, you know, kind of anti-Bohemian, super buttoned up, kind of really neurotic and organized. And i feel so much identification. Yeah.
00:44:06
Speaker
It's like, you know, I have a like a fantasy in my head of myself, like, oh, you know, be lovely if I were such a bohemian. But ah the truth of my personality and disposition is such that I am profoundly routine oriented and a deeply morning person. And i like must get up at 530 in the morning and set my pot cup cup of my pot of coffee on. And I always like sit down in the same little corner of my couch where I'm sitting right now, where I cannot be like displaced from. And i open up my computer and i start writing and I have a few hours of good writing, you know, until the sun comes up and, my toddler wakes up and, and ah like, that's like, it just, you know, and even when it wasn't in this house, in this couch, like since I was 19 and started having a writing routine, it's always been wherever I am
00:45:06
Speaker
You know, I was an undergraduate who was like getting up at 530 in the morning and my friends, you know, were constantly making fun of me for being such a neurotic nerd. Uh,
00:45:18
Speaker
And like, I would like go to bed at, you know, 930 in college and my friends thought I was nuts, but like, it's always been that way for me. Like I have to get up and write first thing at the same spot with the same routine every day. Okay. I, uh, I think i am shaped by the fact that I had young children during the pandemic while I was writing two books and i now fit writing in where I can. but And that um for like, I don't know, close to a year there, that was two hours on a Saturday morning when my husband took our children to the playground or when we would put the kids to sleep at like 730 at night so that we could each have like another blessed 90 minutes.
00:46:04
Speaker
So that has made me, I think, less precious, which is overall good um for me. And then also co-writing with Dan is very helpful because I will, especially now that I'm on the West Coast of the United States, but even when we were in the same time zone, wake up to a bunch of stuff from him. but That has been in my inbox already for hours. um And that's like, you know, like, very useful because that um he sets a good pace. Like, this is how I feel when I when I go running to is that if I'm running someplace where there are other runners, I try to like feel like who is going about the speed that I want to go? how can I just try to keep up with them?
00:46:43
Speaker
And so like, you know, working with Dan has been really great ah for many reasons. But one of them is that like he he ah sets the pace and I try to keep up. ah Keep moving. We keep I keep moving. We keep moving together. we And we continue to work together. so like, you know, it's been great.
00:47:00
Speaker
There's going a good sign. Okay, everyone find your pace setter and use that your opening and find your corner of the room to write in. Okay, final question. What books are you going to recommend to listeners? They could be anything, new, old, stuff you return to. Okay, I mean, yes, I was thinking about this. So my book club is now reading The Leopard Lampedusa. The Leopard, woo!
00:47:23
Speaker
like I am just keeping myself from getting on a plane to Palermo, like minute by minute. um And then I just finished on the third on the calculation of volume, which ah you have to start with the first one.
00:47:35
Speaker
um But on the calculation of volume is a um perspective. I mean, it's not all the way out yet. ah The third one was just published, but um going to be seven volumes, but they are very short. They're not Proustian. Yeah.
00:47:49
Speaker
um And they all take place on November 18th. And um although it's not very Joycean either, in all taking place on one day, but um the third volume just came out on November 18th. And so I ah insisted on buying it that day because it was, you know, calculation of volume day to all who celebrate.
00:48:10
Speaker
all right, i'll I'll give three books. The first is Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal. Oh, yeah. She's a poet who's been working in various genres for a long time, but just had her debut novel a few years ago, and that this is that. um And it's a novel about a writer who imagines or has the experience of having written Baudelaire's complete works.
00:48:33
Speaker
And it's a really poetic, it's a poet's novel. um And it's it's wonderful. The second one is Mark Haber's Lesser Ruins. He's writing, he's he's an American writer ah who's writing in the kind of Thomas Bernhard mode, ah the rant novel. And it's it's darkly, deeply, darkly funny. And it's it's also sort of in the dark comic tradition I think of of Nathaniel West, who's one of my favorite writers of all time. um So this kind of like finding humor in the dark heart of modern life.
00:49:11
Speaker
It's really about a community college professor who's been trying for decades to write his book about Montaigne. and is also deeply in a relationship ah with his son who is obsessed with electronic music. And about a third of the novel is just his son talking about his obsession with electronic music. It's amazing. And the third one, ah my favorite book I've read in the last decade probably, is Mircea Cartorescu's Solenoid, which is, he's a Romanian writer. This is a big, one of these big, complex European late modernist books
00:49:45
Speaker
books ah that is kind of about the surrealism of the Romanian 1980s under dictatorship. And it is again, it's it's deeply funny, absolutely strange. It's dreamlike.
00:50:00
Speaker
It's absolutely brilliant um about another protagonist who is a kind of depressed teacher. So I don't know what it is. about me being really into these books about these sort of abject ah teachers and professors who are also failed, right? Solanoid's protagonist also failed writer. So ah something's going on with me um and these figures I find myself attached to. But those are the three books I would recommend.
00:50:28
Speaker
Amazing. Thank you for all these recommendations. I will link them. They're fantastic. Dan, Johanna, thank you so much for your time. This has been thrilling and enjoyable. ah Thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. Pleasure. Yeah.
00:50:42
Speaker
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00:50:57
Speaker
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00:51:09
Speaker
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