Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced. Some beneficiaries were identifiable: upper administrators were paid much better than those at comparable institutions when just about everyone else was paid worse. It was easy to compare the university to its state’s mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.
It was easy to compare the university to the state’s mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.
All of this is true, but it’s not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation—democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together.
This task was very simple as well as very hard. In every course, at every level, every semester—in every single class, multiple times every week—I taught close reading.
Let’s start by looking at the text in front of us and pointing to something very small: a single word, or punctuation mark, or even something that’s not there, a gap. Tell me, I would ask as we sat down and opened our books, what is one detail that you noticed? What snagged you? Where were you surprised? At the beginning of every semester, my students would be confused by these questions. They were smart, hardworking young people, and they very much wanted to get the answer right. They pointed to themes, identified genres and symbols, and gestured toward historical contexts.
Okay, I would respond, but now point to a detail, one that’s really on the page and small enough to fit under your finger. I sat, and smiled a little, and waited with the conviction that I wouldn’t be disappointed. And then, reliably, every time, a transformation that seemed like magic. It took a few weeks, sometimes, and it always took courage—from them more than me, but from me too—and then, one student and then another and then everyone, would point to the page in front of them. But really they would point to something in themselves: I noticed this. . . . I noticed it. And then they would suddenly lift off into an idea, climbing, striding, soaring, as in Gerald Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.”
Sometimes I would still say an even smaller detail, please, but increasingly as the weeks went on, I would say yes, and now tell me, how should we understand that? How would the poem be different if it were different? What work is that detail doing? Then they offered arguments—as if with a gasp like they were surfacing after holding their breath underwater, astonished at having done it.
We read Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me,” a Renaissance courtier’s poem about an unforgettable love affair. A student I’ll call Karenna pointed to the word “special,” noting that it doesn’t rhyme neatly with “all” and “small.” Laura pointed out that someone besides the speaker, presumably the lover, speaks in quotation marks within the poem. But we weren’t done. Yes, I would say, but how could someone else understand that same detail just a little differently, and what does that counterargument get right and what does it get wrong? How do these arguments affect your understanding of the whole poem? How do they give you a lens to see the world around you? Clarify the stakes. “Special,” Karenna argued, is special in the poem, and it shows us that the poem understands specialness as jarring and challenging. Laura argued that the speaker nearly loses control of the poem by the end. They changed how I read Wyatt’s poem, and teaching them changed how I think about close reading, the central practice of literary studies.
WVU is the flagship university of one of the poorest states in the country. Some of my students came from comfortable or even affluent families, but many did not. It was not unusual to have students who had grown up without running water. For many, Morgantown, a town of 30,000, was the densest, loudest, most cosmopolitan place they had ever visited. Karenna loves literature and would tirelessly follow and untangle the threads of an argument; even as a freshman, she worried about how to support herself financially after graduation. I had the sense that there was no family assistance at all. Laura plans to become a lawyer; she carried herself with what struck me as hard-won poise. Many of my students planned to become teachers themselves.
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A flurry of books about close reading have been published in the past couple of years: John Guillory’s On Close Reading (which includes a remarkable bibliography by Scott Newstok); Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth; Yael Segalovitz’s How Close Reading Made Us. As one of these people writing on the subject—with Dan Sinykin, I recently co-edited Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century—I’m often asked why close reading is having a moment. The renewed focus on our fundamental methodology must be connected to the austerity that has been inflicted on the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis led universities to freeze hiring, with conditions only continuing to erode since then with still more retrenchment and some institutions’ destructive embrace of AI. But that’s a very general answer, and responses have taken different forms: Guillory offers a history of close reading as a cultural practice passed down more by imitation than strict definition, like riding a bike; Kramnick examines close reading as a skill akin to expert weaving; Segalowitz traces the influence of New Criticism—the movement establishing the academic discipline of literary studies—to argue that close reading is a technique of attention. Written more or less simultaneously, these books are not in extended conversation with each other, but all three have the same implied audience: academics.
I try to think about things the other way around, rooted in my experiences with undergraduates at WVU. I learned about close reading when I asked them to take their own thinking seriously—to take themselves seriously. Doing so, I found, forced me to take my job more seriously. Trying to describe how teaching can feel magical always deflates into cliché. But for a long time, I reached for that word, magic, to describe what my students and I conjured together during the pandemic, on Zoom and then in masks, and while they worked delivering food and cleaning nursing homes and caring for family members and crashing on friends’ couches because they were functionally homeless. My classroom felt like it was base-isolated, unshakable. The light always felt bright coming through its windows.
Then, in 2023, WVU’s financial crisis grew so acute that the classroom could no longer buffer everything outside it. Around 150 permanent faculty members were fired. Departments were closed; programs ended. Soon there were more classes for me to teach every semester, each of them with more students than before. There was no longer any time to plan for class, or even, sometimes, for me to do the reading I had assigned.
My own attention became attenuated, and I was less and less able to help students bring their ideas into focus. Failing at one of the things I cared most about made me feel I was being hollowed out. I started crying on the drive home. I contemplated going to law school. I read about “moral injury.” I looked up the university’s bylaws. I felt feverish with fury. I talked to reporters at national newspapers and helped them find other people to talk to. I helped an alum publish an essay, then another alum, then another. I talked with colleagues and we wrote an open letter to WVU’s governing board, published in these pages. Students organized to protect their university. At an open comment period, at the request of the students, my colleagues and I read from our letter. And then student after student, professor after professor, alum after alum, community member after community member spoke—the comments ran for hours—asking, begging, and demanding that the Board of Governors not approve the cuts. The next day they were voted through: we lost; we knew we would.
The following week, I tried to tell friends what I had seen—how astonishing it was to see people speak, to argue, to put themselves at risk by arguing, by saying what they thought and why it mattered, but also (though they shook while they spoke) that they refused to be afraid. Each speaker seemed, in those moments, both so vulnerable and so utterly powerful. And these were not contradictory: they transformed powerlessness into power, they claimed power.
In the years I taught close reading at WVU, I was always learning. I learned more about the novels, plays, and poems my students analyzed because they always showed me new things to notice and new ways of understanding. Almost always I was overwhelmed, but I was never tired of listening to them and reading their work if I could see them trying to do it.
I also learned more about close reading itself. My students showed me how simple and how hard it can be to notice, to point to a detail that’s really on the page and small enough to fit under your finger. I never asked them to respond to a prompt. They had to build arguments from the ground up; there was no right answer, only stronger and weaker ones. And my students showed me how thrilling it is to take the step Dan and I call local claiming, a step onto a high wire extending from safe ground: Now tell me, how should we understand that? How would the poem be different if it were different? And then regional argumentation, catching a trapeze, seeing the text and your own idea from above: How does this affect your understanding of the whole poem? What do you see? What else can you tell me?
I also know what close reading can do because of my students at WVU, and why it matters to be able to close read. Close reading grounds and extends an argument, reasoning from what we all know to be the case to what the close reader claims is the case. You are the world expert in your idea, I would say. My students offered arguments, but they also showed me what making an argument offered them. One, who went onto be a nurse, told me that she writes notes for doctors the way we made arguments in class—interpreting and connecting symptoms, then making a claim with stakes—and they always do what she says. Another student told me that she filed a police report about an assault by writing her account as an argument, moving from noticing to claiming, so she would be understood and believed.
In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way.
On the first day of each new class, I tell my students about the philosopher Donald Davidson’s idea of radical interpretation. To make sense of a foreign language, or indeed any language, Davidson argues, a listener must begin with a stance of good faith by assuming that the person they’re listening to has rational beliefs and is making meaning. This must happen before the listener can begin to interpret what that meaning is and whether she agrees with it. I tell my students this because I want them to read difficult and strange poetry this way too: with the foundational and constant assumption of good faith.
Dan and I have written about how students have to care about a literary text in order to notice a detail in it, that the text needs to feel meaningful as a whole for the part to become significant. But teaching at WVU taught me that writing an argument requires good faith as well, though in a different way. My students needed to have good faith when they approach a text’s language, as Davidson describes. But they also needed to assume that they themselves had rational beliefs and could make meaning—that they are capable, that they can do it. I said that I was never tired of reading my students’ close readings if I could see them trying, and of course, some of them didn’t, for any number of reasons. But I could see that for many of them, the anxious desire to say something correct loosened, and they instead took the chance try to say something strong and even useful. In other words, they also have to care about themselves, enough to believe in their own significance.
All arguments work, at a basic level, in the same way. There is the evidence we all agree on (even if just for the sake of argument), and there is a claim about that evidence; that claim must be able to sustain reasonable counterarguments—it’s not obviously the case, or it wouldn’t be a claim. And a claim has stakes: implications that follow from the claim, the difference the argument makes. The arguments my students wrote on Renaissance poetry might seem like they worked differently than the arguments made by students who faced down the Board of Governors.
But the difference is only superficial. The evidence was different, the claims were different, the stakes were different, but the moves my students made as they argued were not. In both cases, the arguments that students made first required believing that they had the authority to make them. When offered a poem, and time, and attention, and good faith, my students offered their own arguments back as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the chance; they reciprocated my trust many times over. I don’t recognize college as written about in the New York Times, where higher education outside of a handful of Ivies scarcely seems to exist, and the misery of ChatGPT–written essays is primarily a story of austerity: the looting of the treasure house of public higher education and the resulting impossible teaching and learning conditions for real humans.
The years I taught at West Virginia were scarred by despair, but I never despaired about my students, who, when our conditions allowed it, showed me again and again how close reading requires and multiplies both trust and strength. In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way. This is truly and always radical, in a way not too distant from what Davidson meant. This decision had to come before any evidence to support it, because that crucial step of noticing requires the close reader to point to evidence and identify it as evidence, to make it into evidence, to grant themselves the authority to do so. And this is work to do together, and only together.
Everything everywhere is worse now than it was when my students made their arguments to the faces of WVU’s Board of Governors in fall of 2023, or when Dan and I turned in our book manuscript in fall of 2024. I’m writing this now from a private college on a different coast; I don’t teach at West Virginia anymore. But I’m still thinking about close reading and what it offers.
So let me state my argument: I noticed that my students—all students, everyone—could write close readings if they came to see that they could. I’ll make the claim, based on this observation, that close reading should be understood as teachable, precisely because it has the logical structure of argument, which includes the prerequisite of good faith. Teaching argument is portable and scalable, but the care it both fosters and depends on requires material support in increasingly short supply—a faculty member’s time, a small enough class, the resources that increasingly distinguish private education from public, elite from nonelite.
My classrooms indeed felt magical because of the close readings being done there, but I no longer like describing it that way. These days, I stress that close reading is not magic. Its power lies in argument: always vulnerable, nothing simpler and yet nothing harder. And to clarify my stakes: the way that close reading is powerful is that it lays claim to power.
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