Preliminary Class Business
1. "Close Reading"
What is close reading?
- History of close reading ("New Criticism," "formalism")
- What was close reading not?
- What is close reading?
- Operationally, how do you do close reading?
Some resources for studying "close reading"
- Exemplary Poems
- Close Reading Theory (the "New Criticism")
- John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (1941),
- Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and "Keats's Sylvan Historian," from his Well Wrought Urn (1947) [course reader]
2. Distant Reading
Franco Moretti
Background: Annales History
- Moretti on Braudel (Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 13)
- Lynn Hunt, "French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm," Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986)
- Fernand Braudel,
- Extract from the Preface of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1976)
- Table of Contents from The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1976)
- Extract from "History and the Social Sciences"
- Moretti
- Graphs, Maps, Trees, pp. 3-4
- "Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850)," pp. 134, 143 ff.
[What seems to you most interesting or productive in Moretti's approach?]
[What is most problematic?]
[What disappears from sight in our reading of literature?]
[What appears?]
[(Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 35) ("Style, Inc.," pp. 139, 152-53): Not "what is distant reading?" but "what does distant reading do"?]
3. Toward Future Classes
- "model" (Moretti, 1)
- visualization in Moretti