Concise and graceful in its exposition, Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds exemplifies at every turn an unapologetic recommitment to close reading and engaged attention to form, for which it also advocates in spirited arguments about the vital place of literary studies in the twenty-first-century American university. A set of essays written over the past decade and addressed to varied audiences, the book is less a sustained development of a single thesis than a series of readings describing the peculiarly irreducible forms of consciousness rendered in literature and defending close reading as uniquely appropriate to the study of those forms. Part 1, “On Method and the Disciplines,” delineates the “everyday formalism” and “skilled competence” of literary scholarship (13), offering a substantive and hardheaded defense of the intellectual compromises and material pressures that have so strained the profession. Parts 2 and 3, “Poetry and the Perception of the Environment” and “Fictions of the...

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