Scorning the Gaze

It’s a common observation in the discipline of English that for some time now we have lacked a shared object of study. We no longer all read the same core set of texts, and thus, some of us feel, we can no longer talk to each other. The slow creep of specialization and the expansion of the canon have diversified and factionalized English departments to the point that colleagues may not even recognize each other as practitioners of the same discipline. Some lament the lost centrality of “literature,” squeezed out by theory, politics, and other media; others argue that an attachment to an outdated idea of the literary is hurting course enrollments or, perhaps relatedly, that it betrays an attachment to white supremacy. But a recent phenomenon seems to be bringing us together again, a new set of texts that we can collectively pore over, interpret, and debate incessantly: books, articles, blog posts, and tweets about the history, current crises, and imminent demise of English as an academic discipline.

Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth enters this crowded field relatively quietly. Its tone is neither strident nor melancholic but calmly celebratory. Rather than taking the polemical tone of other metadisciplinary manifestos, it aims at the straightforward description of academic literary criticism as it is practiced (at least by those who work primarily on literary texts in English). The best defense may not need to cause offense. Kramnick’s aim is simply to illustrate what we actually do as academics in English literary studies, which is what he calls the “everyday” practice of close reading: we write about other people’s writing, most often by folding the language of strangers into our own, whether by quotation or by mimetic summary, where our style becomes inflected by that of the summarized text, a mode Kramnick compares to free indirect discourse in novels. The practice of close reading, he argues, is how literary analysis generates “truth.”

The focus on practice makes this book a refreshing alternative to historical or sociological views from an Olympian vantage. It also seeks to sidestep the so-called method wars, which Kramnick points out, following David Kurnick (2020), are more about the mood or disposition we bring to a text (“paranoid” or “reparative,” hostile or charitable) than about our method. (Agitators on both sides of these wars primarily use the same method, Kramnick argues: close reading.) Perhaps the most polemical Kramnick gets is his insistence that close reading is writing: not the contemplative reception of words on the page but the creative act of making something new. He describes this act in figuratively physical ways that remind us that writing is literally manual labor; close reading involves “not so much intensive reflection and rumination as intensive finesse and dexterity” (86). This calls for the careful commingling of the critic’s words with those of the text, a process Kramnick describes with vocabulary that wouldn’t be out of place in an artisan’s atelier: words are woven, wrapped, fastened, attached by “grammatical epoxy” (36); sentences are sculpted and polished; the discipline itself evolves through “torque and spin” (29); successful critical performances are “apt,” whose etymology, Kramnick notes, takes us back to a sense of physical fit, as in carpentry (91). Close reading is “the craft of joining one’s words to words that already have order and form” (22).

This definition of close reading as a writerly craft strikes me as polemical not because anyone seriously believes that close reading means holding up a text inches from your face and staring at it but because of the widespread habit among literature instructors of locating close reading—real close reading, the best close reading—not on the written page but in the classroom, in the collective oral activity of seminar discussion. As Kramnick quotes (20) from Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s (2021: 3) widely praised Teaching Archive, “In classrooms, teachers and students have invented and perfected the core methods of literary study.” Buurma and Heffernan argue that a more grounded approach to the question of method would redirect critical energy away from warring manifestos motored by obfuscating abstractions and toward the insights generated by what most of us do most of the time: teaching. Kramnick aligns his focus on practice with theirs, but from his point of view, written scholarship performs a function different from and no less necessary to the reproduction of the field than that of classroom teaching, and it is a distinctly valuable “baseline activity” of everyday professional life (21). Unlike seminar discussion, which can proceed (often pleasurably and productively) in what Kramnick calls a “coruscating zigzag” formed in part by “halting and interrupted expressions of excitement,” close reading takes “the sculpted form of the argumentative sentence” (21).

This might be read as mild contempt from the chaired male Yale professor for the increasingly feminized—affectively and economically—work of teaching, which Kramnick acknowledges, in a placating aside, to be “magical and essential” (20). It might be difficult for someone in his position to say anything about teaching, no matter how well intentioned, that wouldn’t smack of self-satisfied condescension to the thousands of academics whose “everyday” practice of teaching is more literally everyday than his. Elaine Auyoung (2023: 162), building on Buurma and Heffernan, argues that “masculinist professional norms” and “exclusionary attitudes that have long subordinated practice to theory” have prevented us from taking pedagogy seriously or have emboldened scholars to make baseless claims about, for example, how students read. But Kramnick is right that writing literary criticism, too, belongs in the realm of practice. Stressing the importance of the published writing of academic literary critics to the health of the field doesn’t disparage pedagogy. Disciplines are made up of communal knowledge, Kramnick emphasizes, and this knowledge must be stored up in books, journals, and online servers to be accessed in the future for use in new scholarship as well as in the classroom (20–21). Because “academic practices are living phenonema,” “they require care to avoid deterioration and death,” a care that means “not simply being taken up and passed on” but also “being transformed” (19). Kramnick’s dynamic sense of the preservation of knowledge as intrinsically involving transformation, as the words and practices of one critic are modified in the guts or carpal tunnels of another, is hardly a sterile image of a scholar in his study. Writing is just as vital and collaborative as teaching, but it is different: it is manually forged for at least provisional permanence, a product of the hands rather than the eyes or mouth. Kramnick’s account of “in-sentence” quotation, in particular, usefully articulates an understanding of our practice that I intuitively shared but hadn’t even thought to put into words (much less into words like articulate that remind us that to put into words is to join some words with others).

Still, as I read, I kept wondering if Kramnick’s approach to the method of literary studies was a stealth (or perhaps unconscious) strategy of defeminization, a shot of testosterone to counteract one potential reason for the “death of the English major”: the feminization of not only university teaching but academic literary studies as a whole, in the sense that, as more women (as well as people of color) have entered the discipline, it has lost the economic and cultural value it enjoyed in the good old days of the good old boys. With his carefully cultivated simple-country-critic approach, Kramnick steers clear of the heightened emotions of what Kurnick (2020: 358–59) casts as a melodramatically scripted battle of the sexes—loving, caring, feminine teachers on one side; angry, rapacious, masculine critics on the other. But such an implicit stance of neutrality is its own kind of one-upmanship. Can’t we take a break from our domestic disputes, Kramnick seems to say, and focus on what really matters, that corollary to “criticism” in his book’s title: “truth”? He’s a bit like a hard-boiled private eye who’s had enough of paranoid husbands and tricky dames: on the one hand, he’s opting out of this silly “two genders” schema, but on the other, he’s presenting himself as the only real man in the picture, the only one with the wits to calm everyone down.

Kramnick’s insistent yoking of criticism with truth suggests that some of us can’t handle it. It’s not clear to me that criticism is primarily a machine for generating “truth”—rather than, say, useful fictions, or experiments, or wagers, or interesting interpretations of texts, which may be plausible but still contestable, risking dismissal as fanciful, about the dare as much as the truth. Compare Kramnick’s multifactor-verification approach to Christopher Ricks’s (2021: 139) likening literary criticism to the art of polite conversation: “It asks tact, of itself and of its readers, for it must neither state nor neglect the obvious. Whether something is obvious may not be obvious.” Or compare it to D. A. Miller, a self-professed “too-close” reader, proclaiming his relief that close reading has become unfashionable in an age of theory. No longer imaginable as the “chief tool” of the literary critic, so much a part of his identity that it “would as good as light the pipe in his mouth and sew elbow patches on his jacket,” close reading has been freed from propping up such fantasies of academic masculinity: “For only when close reading has lost its respectability, has ceased to be the slave of mere convenience, can it come out as a thing that, even under the high-minded (but now kitschy-sounding) rationales of its former mission, it had always been: an almost infantile desire to be close, period, as close as one can get, without literal plagiarism, to merging with the mother-text” (Miller 2005: 57–58). Kramnick’s close reading is about tactile manipulation more than tact, the close fit of inanimate parts rather than the embarrassingly intimate closeness of human relationships. That closeness has been carefully de-eroticized and denuded of the feminine touches that threaten to soften literary criticism’s sharp edges or (worse) to degrade the hard work that deserves respect and material support into a labor of love that hardly justifies public funding or student tuition. To be clear, I am not saying that Kramnick has a problem with women joining the profession, or with its racial diversification; most of his positive examples of close reading in the book are by women and only one, by my count, by a white man. And maybe he’s right to be suspicious of rhetoric that locates literary criticism in the realm of parlors and nurseries: it’s urgent to insist on the value of what we do, and feminization and devaluation, unfortunately, often go hand in hand.

Still, Kramnick’s measured distance from the social, affective, or frankly feminine terms that other critics have used to define close reading made me think more critically about his verbal workshop and his master metaphors for craft. When he introduces the first of these, weaving, he draws on the scholarship of the anthropologist Tim Ingold to invoke the example of “weaving bags among the Telefol people of Papua New Guinea” (5). As Kelly Wisecup points out in this forum, these Telefol, having been recruited to establish the distance between Indigenous textile work and academic textual analysis so that Kramnick can collapse it rhetorically, vanish from the book almost as soon as they appear—perhaps even sooner. Kramnick purports (6) to quote Ingold (2000: 353) on how a bag-weaving novice, through “repeated practical trials, and guided by his observations,” “learns to fine-tune his own movements so as to achieve the rhythmic fluency of the accomplished practitioner.” But the quotations Kramnick has woven into his own prose here don’t directly refer to the Telefol at all, as you can tell immediately from Ingold’s use of masculine pronouns: Telefol bag weaving, Ingold explains when he introduces it on the next page, is the work of women (354).¹ We’re left with a handy image of rhythmically fluent fingers, real enough to give us something to hold on to, something we can associate with a real activity in a real place, but not so real as to be attached to the Telefol people who actually do the weaving. As I read, I started to wonder if Kramnick’s unconscious suppression of specifically feminine labor, in passages like this, came from the same place as my paranoia about that suppression: an anxiety about the gendered identity of literary criticism, about the critic’s status as, on the one hand, a manual worker heroically subduing volatile material and manfully banging out artifacts and, on the other, a midwife coaxing out meaning or a young lady fussing with fine thread, doing a kind of needlework that, historically, was called simply “work,” both affirming its status as work and eliding the devaluation of that work as feminine and therefore frivolous.

I was in this metaparanoid mood, reflecting on my own attachments to gendered metadisciplinary melodrama, when I reached Kramnick’s final example of close reading, which in the original focuses precisely on the issue of feminization but which Kramnick, in his abstracting act of quotation, degenders. All of his positive examples of close reading in the book—again, mostly by women—are “virtuosic” in a sense drawn from virtue ethics: they demonstrate skills honed by years of habit and constitutive of “the ordinary science and everyday brilliance of the discipline itself” (87). The sole negative example of close reading, in the final chapter, is reserved for an older white man everyone loves to hate: Stanley Fish. Unlike the modestly virtuosic readings Kramnick has praised—readings that, in their “everyday brilliance,” are not “spectacles of unusual performance that hold us in awe” (87)—Fish’s close reading is virtuosic in a showy sense, emphasis on vir.

Fish’s virtuosity, for Kramnick, is aggressive in its disregard for truth. “For method to be method, it ought to make some part of the world intelligible, not twist it to its will,” Kramnick explains, and such twisting is precisely what he finds in Fish, who seeks not to get it right but to produce “a certain magnetism of critical mastery” (86):

Kramnick wants to use this example to show that Fish is a bully who will—as proof of his own theory of how “interpretive communities” work—misrepresent the text under discussion to trick readers into agreeing with him. But Kramnick is misrepresenting Fish. He says that Fish “makes the short-form agreement between parts of speech inside and outside of quotation marks sit in deliberate abrasion with the larger pile from which the quoted material is taken” but does not provide any of that “larger pile,” so his reader is ill equipped to assess any abrasion. Here are the two passages of Samson Agonistes (Milton 1957) that Fish draws his quotations from:

Fish, I think, gets it right. Before the action of the play, Samson has “divulg’d” his secret to Dalila; because of this, he now fears that he is being “sung and proverb’d” and made a “scorn and gaze.” The parts of speech are the same in Milton and in Fish; scorn and gaze, which can function as verbs, are nouns inside Fish’s quotation marks and in Milton’s “larger pile.” Fish assembles this evidence to establish a connection between Samson’s betrayal by Dalila and his degradation from active hero into passive object, something to be looked at and gossiped about: something feminized. There’s nothing particularly Fish-y about trying to convince an audience to go along with your reading by showing evidence of a pattern. It’s less than truthful, though, not to provide any evidence at all and to cast vague aspersions of grammatical impropriety instead.

Intent on bringing Fish down like the pillars of the Philistine temple, unable to resist battling a giant of a previous generation, Kramnick twists an unextraordinary example of close reading into a diabolical scheme and in the process buries himself. He also elides the crux of Fish’s argument, which is that Samson’s abject objectification is related to his misogyny: both stem from his abhorrence of the feminine power of words to weaken and feminize him. This might be clearer if Kramnick better described what comes directly before the part he quotes. For Fish, Samson’s “most grievous affliction” is not only “turning into a version of Delilah,” as Kramnick puts it somewhat neutrally (86), but, in much more pointedly gendered terms, “the sense that the integrity of a closed and masculine interiority has been breached and profaned by the scattering and defacing touch of woman” (Fish 2001: 467). This is what causes the interpretative crisis in Samson, which allegorizes that in Samson: feminine contamination—Samson’s conversion from an autonomous man into “a pliable feminized medium” (470)—has led to a loss of identity and a dilution of truth.

A more paranoid reader than I might interpret Kramnick’s competitive virtuosity, and his rendering of Fish’s local argument about Samson’s fear of internalized femininity in a way that excises all explicit mention of gender, as of a piece with his subtle campaign to rid literary studies of its foul feminization and restore its identity as a manly truth-seeking enterprise. I don’t think that it would be fair to proverb Kramnick so, to make him, like Milton’s Samson in Kramnick’s own reading of Fish, into a billboard that passively receives the imprint of my meaning. But I also don’t think that literary criticism needs to be a billboard, plywood perfectly aligned, for “truth.”

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