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originally entitled “My Credo,” he insists that “literature is not a surrogate for religion” and “the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.”7 Formalists, he says, assume an ideal reader because, in taking into account “a lowest common denominator” of possible readings, “we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology.”8 And while Brooks acknowledges that different critics may have different goals, from editing texts to writing book reviews to presenting papers to the Modern Language Association, he is genially dismissive of both “applied” readings and the supposedly less “drab,” “brighter, more amateur, and more ‘human’ criticism” that flourishes “in the classroom presided over by the college lecturer of infectious enthusiasm, in the gossipy Book-of-the-Month-Club bulletins, and in the columns of the Saturday Review of Literature.”9 Brooks doesn’t think these versions do much harm, but nor do they do much good. “The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism; nor does an estimate of its effects. Good literature is more than effective rhetoric applied to true ideas.”10 “Literature is not inimical to ideas. It thrives upon ideas but it does not present ideas patly and neatly.”11 Insofar as literature has “uses,” it is the task of the critic to analyze the ways that ideas perform in literary works, not how works “exemplify” or “produce” them.

Everything Old Is New Again

After many years of being old-fashioned, close reading is again fashionable, although, like all revived fashions, it wears its retrospection with a difference. Suddenly—or not so suddenly—students, graduate and undergraduate, are alight with excitement about this category of analysis, for so long relegated to the supposedly naive past, the heyday of I. A. Richards and practical criticism, and of “new” critics like Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and William Empson, to name only a few of the literary luminaries of that era. While they continue to resist some of the basic tenets of New Criticism, like the Intentional Fallacy described by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and the Affective Fallacy proposed by Wimsatt, young scholars and critics, for so long immersed in historicism and context, are again intrigued by the idea of close reading a work of literature. Reading, that is to say, not for what the work says about the time when it was produced, or about the author or the reading public, but about how its language functions.

Here it may be useful to say a word about those famous fallacies, and about the genealogy and lineage of close reading, to try to see how the practice (which I would prefer to call simply reading) has become both so controversial and so out of fashion that it is once again new.

The intentional fallacy says that the intention of the author has no ultimate control over the meaning of the work. If we were to discover, for example, a letter from William Shakespeare to one of his fellow actors, saying that in Hamlet he intended to express his dismay about the corrupt state of contemporary politics, or the parlous economic situation of actors, or his Christian faith, or his loss of faith in marriage, or his belief in providence, or his worry about political succession—this would have no definitive effect on our readings of Hamlet. It would be another piece of evidence, but it would not trump or sideline other readings of the play, even readings that run counter to whatever the author’s letter asserted. The author, in other words, is entitled to his opinion. But what he intends, even assuming that we could know what that is, is just one point of view among many. (Imagine another letter, written at the same time, to his wife, contradicting the assertions he made in the letter to his fellow actor: the play is about his idealization of love, his loss of Christian faith, his doubts about providence, his confidence in the political system.) The work of literature has a life of its own; it takes on meanings, in the plural, as it is read and performed