Close Reading Beyond the Anglophone Orbit

In his acclaimed Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), Joseph
North identifies a pivotal moment in the evolution of literary studies—a
detrimental transition from criticism to scholarship, rooted in the geocultural journey of “close reading” from the hands of scholars in Cambridge,
England, to those of the New Critics in the Southern United States. This
shift, claims North, has led to an enduring decline in the capacity of literary scholars and teachers to engage in materialist aesthetic education.
My aim in this essay is not to contest or extend North’s argument but to
challenge his underlying assumption, paradigmatic to the overall conversation surrounding the New Critical practice of close reading. By scrutinizing the minutest ideological and practical differences between the
British and American versions of this method, North, joining various others, implies that close reading is a primarily anglophone phenomenon.
However, in reality, the New Critical practice of close reading experienced
extensive transnational circulation, as recognized in works by Peter Button (2009), David M. Stewart (2017), and Paul Nadal (2021), who follow
the New Criticism in China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, respectively.
Building upon these pioneering studies and adopting a decentralizing,
transnational perspective, I would like to provide a broad overview of
close reading within the contexts of Brazil and Israel. This comparative
study, informed by my decade-long exploration and recently published
book (Segalovitz 2024), underscores how close reading readily serves as a
tool for self-formation