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That's Close Enough: The Unfinished History of Emotivism in Close Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tristram Wolff
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Abstract

By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 1: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , January 2019 , pp. 51 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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