In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, via close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures.
Close reading is thinking about both what is said in a passage (the content) and how it is said (the form, i.e., the manner in which the content is presented), leading to possibilities for observation and insight.
History
Literary close reading and commentaries have extensive precedent in the exegesis of religious texts, and more broadly, hermeneutics of ancient works. For example, Pazand, a genre of middle Persian literature, refers to the Zend (literally: 'commentary'/'translation') texts that offer explanation and close reading of the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism. The scriptural commentaries of the Talmud offer a commonly cited early predecessor to close reading. In Islamic studies, the close reading of the Quran has flourished and produced an immense corpus. But the closest religious analogy to contemporary literary close reading, and the principal historical connection with its birth, is the rise of the higher criticism, and the evolution of textual criticism of the Bible in Germany in the late eighteenth century.
In the practice of literary studies, the technique of close reading emerged in 1920s Britain in the work of I. A. Richards, his student William Empson, and the poet T.S. Eliot, all of whom sought to replace an "impressionistic" view of literature then dominant with what Richards called a "practical criticism" focused on language and form. American New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s anchored their views in similar fashion, and promoted close reading as a means of understanding that the autonomy of the work (often a poem) mattered more than anything else, including authorial intention, the cultural contexts of reception, and most broadly, ideology. For these critics, including Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, only close reading, because of its attentiveness to the nuances and interrelation of language and form, could address the work in its complex unity. Their influence on American literary criticism and English departments held sway for several decades, and even after New Criticism faded from prominence in American universities in the waning years of the Cold War, close reading remained a fundamental, almost naturalized, skill amongst literary critics. By the turn of the 21st century, efforts to historicize New Critical aesthetics and its apolitical pretense prompted scholars, especially in departments of English, to debate the fate of close reading, asking about its status as a critical practice.
In two of its 2010 bulletins, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) featured a cluster of articles that attempted to take stock of what the 21st century held for close reading. The articles were motivated, as all of the scholars remarked, by the changes they had observed in the work of their colleagues and students—as well as in contemporary culture—that made them think again about why close reading mattered to the study of literature. Jonathan Culler noted that because the discipline had taken close reading for granted, it had disappeared from discussions of the goals of literary criticism. For Culler, as for Jane Gallop, that absence needed remedying, and therefore signaled an opportunity for departments of English to renew—in order to capitalize on—one of the more distinctive traits of studying literature. If New Criticism and its isolationist stance had given way to the politicization of literary studies, and if technological developments were changing the very ways in which people read, Culler and Gallop emphasized that the signature of close reading, meticulous attention to the workings of language and form, still had value. N. Katherine Hayles and John Guillory, meanwhile, each interested in the impact of digital media on the ways people read, argued that close reading skills were not only translatable to the digital context, but could also exist productively alongside the hyper-reading that web interfaces and links had generated.