Jan Maramot
Jan Maramot is an English PhD candidate from the University of California, Irvine. He is a scholar and historian of queer American poetics and reads poetics through the lens of queer theory. He is currently writing a dissertation, titled After Tradition: Tracing the Tease of a Queer Lyric, that traces the complicated history of queer poetics. In that dissertation, he aims to conceptualize a theory of a queer lyric by examining how queer traditions were formed and invented by literary critics of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. He currently has a brief chapter on the conception of a queer confessional published in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry.
Does Slow Reading Have a Form?
Setting the Stage for Slow Reading
Slow reading is hard to define. Is it a literary practice? Does it only exist in literary academe? Or is slow reading something that describes something literary critique does not necessarily account for? As a term, slow reading emerges in parallel to the literary critical practice of close reading. A particularly early and notable instance of the term, slow reading, can be traced back to Reuben Brower’s “Reading in Slow Motion,” published in an edited collection he co-edited with Richard Poirier in 1962. While the two terms are related, these two types of reading do not perform the same function at all. In the preface of that edited collection I mentioned earlier, aptly titled In Defense of Reading, Brower and Poirier point out “that the writers of these essays are constantly going beyond ‘close reading’ and ‘analysis’ in pursuit of their own interests.”[1] In this specific critical instance, close reading functions as a kind of antagonist that performs a perfunctory kind of work. If you are reading this piece as a trained literary critic, you will likely intuit what Brower and Poirier mean without any kind of long explication. The reason why that is the case is because as a literary critic, your training is close reading as a form of analysis.[2] You will know that Brower and Poirier are casting close reading as a specific mode of reading that encourages an analytical lens that privileges isolating the text as an object of skill. You perform a close reading of a text and construct a well thought argument that leads to an appropriate, perhaps even powerfully thought out, conclusion about your reading.[3] Sedimented in this antagonism is how close reading is also measured as work. Close reading is the work of proving that you have satisfactorily read the text in a rigorous manner. By doing this work, a critic would have ideally performed the basic function of their literary endeavor. In simple terms, close reading is how academics show their work akin to a student showing the raw arithmetic of a math problem to prove how they reached a particular answer.
Slow reading does not work like that. While entire books have been written which aim to define the conventions and functions of slow reading, the unifying aspect of slow reading that persists is that slow reading lives up to its temporal function. To put it more simply, slow reading does not demand the kind of analytical component that close reading would demand. Instead, slow reading largely demands readers to physically and literally slow down to read their chosen texts. Speaking holistically, this lends slow reading a more distant relation to literary academe. This is not to say that academics have nothing to say about slow reading: the fact that I am introducing this piece to you by means of critics like Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier show that literary critics have been thinking about slow reading as a methodology for understanding literature for a long time. To define slow reading as a form with tropes and generic expectations, I will show you a brief history of how the term came to be understood as well as how critics and writers often use the term. While people have a lot to say about slow reading, its relation to literary critique is often a distant and even tenuous one.[4] In fact, slow reading often has more at stake with respect to teaching people how to read. That is also inextricably linked to the value of teaching literature to readers that aren’t necessarily going to be interested in literary studies as a career. As I will insist throughout this piece, slow reading is the form of reading that is taught before close reading. In fact, I argue that slow reading has a form familiar to us, but close reading’s pre-supposed dominance as the de facto mode of literary critique means that both terms risk being confused for one another. By getting right to the heart of slow reading as the fundamental unit of how we understand literature, I think we attain a better sense of the function of literary critique without getting lost in the hermeneutic loops that are often the inherent risks of thinking about reading.[5]
Defining Slow Reading
In “Reading in Slow Motion,” Brower spends an entire chapter defining slow reading through constructing a fictional course on slow reading that he would title ‘Literature X.’[6] Brower spends most of the early pages of the chapter outlining the general principles that would guide such a course. His primary concern is teaching this course for the general undergraduate student. Thus, Brower talks about his pedagogical aims by keeping in mind that he is teaching this course for the general reader and not necessarily the literary academic. This distinction is an important one. One of the first principles that Brower articulates is that for slow reading to work, reading itself must be tied to a sense of “amusement.”[7] What Brower means by amusement is through an engagement with reading that stresses “the play of mind, the play of the whole being, that reading of this sort calls for.”[8] I think Brower is a few steps away from calling for a gamification of reading here. His stress on amusement prioritizes an imaginative relationship to reading that moves away from the paradigm of having the “right” and “correct” interpretation of a text. By framing reading as an act of play, Brower is reducing the fraught stakes that are often attached to analytical modes and methods. The imaginative mode for Brower would prime a student for thinking about reading as an exploratory measure rather than interpretive extraction. The reader, in this context, plays with reading as a tool to explore meaning-making rather than forcing the process of meaning to emerge.[9] Therefore, one of the basic fundamentals of slow reading is that reading itself must be a fun process.
Then, there is one of the fundamental tropes of slow reading: the temporal element. When Brower evokes the title of his chapter, he describes the method of slow reading as “slowing down the process of reading to observe what is happening, in order to attend very close to the words, their uses, and their meanings.”[10] Brower very carefully constructs this definition to accentuate the importance of the slowness in slow reading. He emphasizes the slowness to communicate to readers that slow reading does not function to extract specific interpretations from texts or to isolate a particular section of a text for particular reasons. To put it more simply, slow reading does not fish for conclusions. What Brower describes here is what the process of slow reading entails. Brower privileges the notion of letting the text breathe and for the reader to engage in a way that rewards imaginative play with the text. Attending to the words on the page already slows down the process of reading by taking away the temptation to skim a text. What Brower shows us is a mode of reading that actionizes reading for reading’s sake. By emphasizing the importance of understanding each word of a passage, Brower provides the foundation of critical reading practices without the undue pressure of the academy. As I will show you later in this essay, Brower is not the first to emphasize the slowness of slow reading, even though such a notion is an obvious one.
A common strand that exists in definitions of slow reading is reading’s complicated relationship to the larger novel media forces at any given time and historical context. Broadly speaking, reading is hardly the sole activity that human beings engage in during Brower’s time. Brower himself comments on how then new media forms were beginning to supplant reading to the point where colleges and universities needed to introduce courses dedicated to teaching reading. In this case, Brower would specifically note the increasing influence of radio and television as signposts for cultural distractions.[11] Brower appeals to an effective teaching of reading “to perform our tasks as citizens and wage earners.”[12] Unsurprisingly, the act of reading is intimately tied to one’s material conditions. The calculus for reading, in Brower’s view, is one in which reading’s values are intrinsically tied to participation in civic society. Pragmatically, of course, reading is an important skill to teach precisely because reading, and not necessarily professional literary training, is how a social subject becomes a more engaged citizen. The focus on the citizen and/or layperson is a critical distinction here. The emphasis on reading as a social good acts as Brower’s rhetorical heft to step away from navel-gazing about academic method. Instead, reading has palpably political stakes. Since the general populace should be concerned about reading as a skill, the stakes for slow reading as having a fungible and familiar form take on a different and perhaps even larger tenor. Brower, in 1962, lays out the central concerns and formulations of slow reading that writers like David Mikics, John Miedema, and Peter Middleton would pick up on in the twenty-first century.
Slow Reading in the Twenty-First Century
John Miedema and David Mikics go a step further than Brouwer by publishing entire books that expand the definition of slow reading while also reinforcing the necessity to extoll slow reading as a method of reading. Miedema’s book, published in 2009 and simply titled Slow Reading, begins with a set of cultural and pedagogical concerns that mirror Brower’s own. The first sentences of his book begin by acknowledging the end product of how reading is tied to productivity and work.[13] Miedema’s book has over forty years of technological progress and new media development over the cultural and historical period in which Brower was writing. While it may seem intuitive to us now, I think it is important to acknowledge that reading in the twenty-first century has a much different set of dynamics, concerns, and practices because of the technological and cultural shifts that we have witnessed in the apotheosis of the information technology age. By the time Miedema published his book, digital reading would already have been normalized as a practice in a way that Brower and his contemporaries would not have been able to viscerally visualize. Thus, it is no surprise that Miedema begins his book by acknowledging that slow reading might be a strange creature in an age where reading digitally and reading quickly are normalized. As a result, Miedema has a different set of cultural and temporal articulations to work through that are deeply rooted in the complex set of relations that reading has with technology.
Miedema’s book is divided into four short essays about slow reading, though my piece will concern itself with only one of those essays. The first essay in the book details the varying ways one can slow reading as well as how our vantage point to slow reading can change our relationship to it. Additionally, this essay is also the only one to acknowledge the academic side and practice of reading: close reading.[14] I raise this point as Miedema himself is not writing from the perspective of a literary academic. Instead, he writes as someone who is trained in library studies and has a Master of Library and Information Science degree. This distinction is a critical one, especially since literary academe doesn’t play much of a role in Miedema’s long explication of slow reading. Thus, Miedema is closer to the perspective of the general reader that Brower would pitch Literature X towards instead of someone who is professionally trained. Miedema himself points out that professional training is one of the stereotypes that leads to close reading being seen as something reserved for the literary elite.[15] Doing reading professionally changes the relation that one has to reading, and one’s relationship to reading is one of Miedema’s central concerns in navigating the distinction between the kinds of reading that literary critics are wont to do and the reading that is often practiced by students and laypersons. Miedema, like Brower, turns towards a more pedagogical approach to communicate his definition of slow reading to his readers. This pedagogical approach is not a surprising one. To build an effective populace of readers, there must exist a rigorous understanding of how to teach slow reading as a method of enjoying reading in the first place.
Miedema’s first essay lays out three imperatives that I interpret to be as signposts for how I recognize the form of slow reading: Slow reading must be the space where we acknowledge our personal relationship to reading; slow reading must hold space for rereading; and slow reading must also be voluntary.[16] I admit that Miedema isn’t quite as forceful as I am being, but I bear upon these points to stress the crystallization of slow reading as a fungible form that merits more critical attention in the academy than simply being subsumed under and confused with slow reading. Before a reader can become professionally trained and molded by literary academe, slow reading must be taught and modeled as a form of reading. Slow reading is critical for teaching a model of reading that is not predicated upon speed, productivity, and interpretive extraction. Additionally, Miedema’s three major points all share a common strand: slowing down ourselves and slowing down with the text. The process of slow reading cannot work if the reader is engaging with the text as an object to ‘get through’ like a class reading. For example, Miedema’s point about how rereading itself is also engaging in the slowness of slow reading.[17] By reading the text multiple times, whether in separate sittings years apart or in succession, one necessarily reads slower on average because to reread is to spend more time with the text. The slowness of rereading emerges as an attenuated relationship to the text even down to stratifying one’s engagement out of an average spent time on a particular text or poem. The reader is not quite ‘done’ with the text.
Though I am a literary critic in training, I want to use this moment to briefly show you how I would engage in slow reading before bringing an analytical set of tools to bear on a text. For someone who specializes in poetry and poetics, my most common primary texts are short poems. In my undergraduate classes, I was encouraged to read the poems at least twice. Once to skim the content for the poem. Then, I read the poem again to absorb the fuller meaning from the poem by slowing down to read each line and word. In fact, reading the poem twice was considered the bare minimum to have considered the poem ‘read’ in the context of a class. I was not necessarily taught this method as slow reading, but reading multiple times was often the pre-process for understanding a poem. In fact, undergraduate classes on poetry often discourage students from only reading the poem once and moving on swiftly. Even though that seems in opposition to the fast-paced nature of our current information age, reading a poem quickly risks not even fully absorbing the content of a poem at all. Reading with the intention of skimming a text is to only see, but not necessarily absorb and witness, the words on the page. I raise my experience to flag how one enters slow reading: poetry. Brower, Miedema, and other critics I will cite later in this piece often turn towards poetry as a suitable starting point to practice slow reading. Talking personally, I also derive pleasure from reading poetry. Reading poetry is something I voluntarily do even outside of the context of doing so for professional purposes. Slow reading is the fundamental building block of my work, even though I aim to separate my slow reading to not render the process as a productive instrumentalization. Slow reading is humanistic inquiry in its most distilled and fundamental form, a process that seems so obvious as to be presupposed. However, the work of articulating the form of slow reading, I argue, is just as critical as pondering the limits and bounds of literary method.
This leads me to the most important sentence in Miedema’s book, located at the very beginning of the last chapter of his slow reading:
Slow reading can be defined as a set of practices that reduce the rate of reading to increase comprehension and pleasure.[18] (emphasis mine)
Another common axiom of slow reading emerges: pleasure. The pleasure principle of slow reading, I argue, is also directly related to envisioning slow reading as a voluntary act. At an affective level, feeling good about slow reading also engenders a desire to continue slowly reading a text. What Miedema subtly poses is a pleasurable hermeneutic circle of slow reading as a process. Slowing down our reading feels good. By slowing down our reading, readers spend more time with a text, which then also engenders a deeper understanding of the text they are reading. If that continues to elicit positive affects, those same readers will want to continue reading voluntarily. This buy-in is a critical one for slow reading to function. If reading were to become an unpleasant or laborious act for a reader, the principles and process of slow reading begin to crumble. More simply, if a reader were to not enjoy the process of reading a text, then it is very likely that slow reading is something they would not voluntarily do. However, I acknowledge that there is a danger in relying so strongly on pleasure as an index for slow reading. Reading itself is also work. In the twenty-first-century context that Miedema writes in, forms of reading that prioritize speed and efficiency are baked into how we read non-literary texts. The thesis of slow reading as predicated upon pleasure also largely depends upon the content and context of the text being engaged. It should come as no surprise that the root of slow reading’s pleasure principle comes from another common and perhaps even obvious axiom that unites any writing on slow reading: literature.
The Principle(s) and Practice(s) of Slow Reading
It should come as no surprise that literary texts have most at stake in their relationship to slow reading. Unlike, say, an email or a technical manual, the rhetorical considerations behind a piece of literature demand a different kind of engagement that is vastly different from quickly reading a work email. Now, I do not mind binarizing the kind of reading nominatively done for work versus reading literary text. I raise emails as an example of texts that are usually designed to be read and understood as efficiently as possible. For literary texts, the process of slow reading must necessarily move beyond a willingness to slowly engage with the text. The temporal element of slow reading is a process all on its own. For this, I turn towards David Mikics’s Slow Reading in a Hurried Age.
David Mikics’s book is an interesting creature in the context of studies on slow reading. His vantage more resembles Brower than Miedema, especially since Mikics’s book was published by an imprint of Harvard University Press: Belknap. Mikics also writes from the same set of cultural anxieties about reading that Miedema’s book also begins with.[19] The title of Mikics’s book gives it away. He is an English professor who is trying to unpack and extol the virtues of slow reading in a context where digital media and interfaces tend to prioritize more rapid reading.[20] Mikics’s suspicions are not unfounded ones, given he is also speaking to the very same cultural forces that Miedema himself must respond to and similar forces that even Brower himself was facing with the advent of television and radio. Mikics also has some skin in the literary game. As an English professor, he is a literary academic who himself is trained in the practice of close reading. His professional livelihood depends upon a not insignificant number of readers voluntarily being taught the kind of reading that he would teach in the university classroom. Unsurprisingly, his book also has a pedagogical bent to how he explains slow reading.[21] Yet another axiom emerges: slow reading should ideally be an important practice for the lay reader. To be able to read as an engaged citizen is to understand the process of slow reading as something inherently valuable. Mikics, like his forebears before him, invests a lot of writing into the pedagogical value of reading.[22]
It is fitting that Mikics lays out a fourteen-step ruleset for slow reading in his book.
- Be Patient
- Ask the Right Questions
- Identify the Voice
- Get a Sense of Style
- Notice Beginnings and Endings
- Identify Signposts
- Use the Dictionary
- Track Key Words
- Find the Author’s Basic Thought
- Be Suspicious
- Find the Parts
- Write It Down
- Explore Different Parts
- Find Another Book[23]
Mikics spends a considerable bulk of the book outlining each step. The fact that he goes in as closely as he does with steps that might seem self-evident to us is his way of showing us the pedagogical primacy of slow reading. It justifiably takes much longer to explain the process than Mikics does in explaining the complex relationship between slow reading and close reading. While yes, describing how slow reading inflects literary method is important, more so is describing the intricate process of slow reading itself. With these fourteen steps, Mikics shows how he would teach the principles of slow reading that Brower and Miedema before him would extol. While Mikics does not make a larger argument about slow reading in his book, I think the way he talks about slow reading underscores the importance of conceptualizing it as a set of engagements that move beyond casting reading as a professionalized skill. Mikics boils down the steps to slow reading as fundamental steps that anyone, especially the lay reader, can do by merely picking up a book and reading the words on the page. Brower, Miedema, and Mikics are all united by yet another common and fundamental axiom of slow reading: the democratization of reading as a skill that can be taught beyond the ivory tower.
Nowhere in Mikics’s fourteen steps does he say that you need to assert a larger argument about any given text. Many of these fourteen steps place more emphasis on comprehension. Not coincidentally, these steps are also exclusive to the process of slow reading. Close reading a text involves using many of these same steps to unpack the deeper meaning of the text, but Mikics instead emphasizes the act of doing more reading after finishing a text. Whereas a literary critic might have to contend with paratextual material and secondary sources to augment their reading, the lay reader that Mikics appeals to won’t have those concerns. Instead, when that same reader finishes a book, they are free to choose another and begin the same process. As with any set of rules, these are going to be an inherently imperfect set of principles that do have holes in them. The fourteenth step might not be so helpful if you are reading a shorter text, such as a novella or a collection of poems. In fact, Mikics’s rules for slow reading are a helpful primer that assumes you are reading a longer novel. If you were reading a poem or a short story, rule 14 would have to be transposed or modified based on the category that your given text belongs to. In the case of a poem, rule 14 could be replaced by either ‘Reread the Poem’ or ‘Find Another Poem.’ The same principle applies for a short story that could be read in one sitting. Rule 9, ‘Find the Author’s Basic Thought,’ might stymie a reader who is dealing with a particularly avant-garde or difficult-to-read text. However, these rules offer a useful framework in thinking about slow reading as bearing a form and formula to follow. These rules offer a pedagogical way to understand slow reading as carrying a well-defined schema that bears just enough specifics for lay readers to follow through while holding enough space for textual subjectivity.
Rules 1 through 6 are indeed repetitions of the principles of slowness that Brower and Miedema both accentuate in their explanations of slow reading. Mikics takes Brower’s appeal to pleasure and Midema’s call for increased comprehension by transfiguring those ideals into a ruleset. When Mikics asks the reader to ‘Be Patient,’ that is another call for the reader to take their reading of a text slowly. That is as much a call for slowness as it is asking the lay reader to not treat the text like a work document or email. Rules 3 and 4, respectively asking the reader to gather both voice and style, are essentially steps towards increasing reading comprehension that are dressed in slightly more literary style. While voice and style are hotly debated in literary studies, those terms are wide-encompassing enough for a lay reader to understand what Mikics means when he uses those terms. These two terms, taken together, are larger stand-ins for a reader attempting to comprehend how a particular text is written. Mikics is also guiding readers of his book to read for an author’s intentionality without needing to spell such a notion out loud. The lay reader practicing slow reading must now also contemplate the author in their deliberations of a text, which then leads them towards slowly piecing together the context(s) of a text. These steps build upon one another. The only way these steps lead to the practice of slow reading is if they are done in a measured, slow way that gives the reader time to absorb the text.
Coda: Practicing Slow Reading
As Robin Valenza writes in “How Literature Becomes Knowledge,” slow reading “embeds the method’s logic that the more possibilities for interpretation a work offers the more slowly one is forced to read.”[24] Of course, Mikics does not go as far as to write interpretation as an impulse on his ruleset, but Valenza’s definition of slow reading denotes one of the formative end results of slow reading. Interpretation is not the sole purpose of slow reading, but slow reading certainly benefits a reader’s interpretive ability by virtue of their attenuated engagement of a text. By its nature, slow reading is a circular format. If much of this piece strikes you as saying the same thing but with slightly different variations, that is by design. Slow reading is a method that is, on the surface, seemingly obvious to intuit and yet difficult to trace because its ubiquity risks overdetermining the work of slow reading. The work of defining something so fundamental and primal to literary understanding is to acknowledge that the most basic of our methods merits needing to go in circles. Slow reading also pins its function in the hope that deriving pleasure from the act of reading leads to the possibilities of a deeper interpretation. An axiom of my own emerges: slow reading bears a sturdy yet fragile network that is dependent upon a reader’s commitment to the process. As a form, slow reading can only work on a persistent belief that there is a value in the process of reading itself. The moment that one moves too fast or derives no sense of pleasure from reading, the enterprise of slow reading as a form begins to fall apart.
I’ll end this piece by showing you how I slow read a poem. As a scholar of poetry, I derive a lot of pleasure from the act of reading a poem. I do have my preferences and reservations about specific poems and poets, and those do inform how I read. However, I often tend to enjoy the process of reading enough as an exercise where I incorporate my own relation to the text in my reading. Thus, poetry is where I do most of my slow reading and is also what I feel most comfortable in using when I teach my students how to read in the context of the English literary classroom. I’ll be using the first stanza of Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West as my textual laboratory:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.[25]
If I projected this stanza to a classroom of undergraduates, I would first ask them what stands out. Part of demonstrating slow reading is to figure out what parts of the text are just inherently interesting and lingering on those aspects during discussion. For me, I would be interested in determining how many sentences are in this stanza and how the lines are arranged grammatically. In this case, this stanza begins with one short sentence, while the second sentence is long and comprises the rest of the stanza itself. The stanza itself doesn’t seem to rhyme, but there is something that feels metrical. There would also be certain words and phrases I would also point out that are interesting to me personally, such as ‘genius of the sea,’ ‘water never formed,’ ‘body wholly body,’ ‘empty sleeves,’ and so on and so forth. Before getting into more advanced specifics that a poetry critic would get into, what I’ve noted down as just interesting already follows many of the principles of Mikics’s rules for slow reading. I am patient with the text by just plucking out aspects from the first stanza and nothing more. I’m identifying the sense of voice and style by figuring out why Stevens would string together certain word choices. I’m also trying to coach myself and my students to be suspicious and find the interesting parts of the poem by pondering the sentence structure of this stanza. Similarly, keeping track of the poem’s grammar also involves identifying the signposts of what makes this poem unique. What I have not done so far is to offer an interpretive assertion or argument about the poem. I’ve yet to reach part of the process. In fact, it is unlikely I will even offer you an interpretation of the poem at all, because I won’t have enough word space or figurative time to slowly read the poem in this piece.
Once I’ve identified what I feel are aspects that a student would be interested in, I would then begin to point out aspects of the poem that a trained literary critic would be able to pick up on. Again, what I am doing is the work that leads to interpretive possibilities, but I have not even unearthed the possibilities of simply what is happening in the poem. To answer the question of what is going on and to return to our hypothetical undergraduate classroom, I would then introduce some poetic terms to my class. I would tell my class to pay attention to phrases like ‘body wholly body’ or ‘constant cry, caused constantly a cry.’ I’m signposting both repetition and alliteration here. I want my class to see how Stevens repeats words like ‘body,’ ‘cry,’ and ‘constantly’ and for them to think about what kind of effect that has on the poem. Additionally, I would be reading these parts out loud to them, especially to accentuate how sound also affects our reading of the poem. I’m hoping that by giving them examples of poetic devices like repetition that I am modeling an expanded toolset for them to join in on slow reading. This is the raw product of literary training.
Admittedly, there are many different directions you could take this teaching of slow reading. I’ve only given you one dimension of what I would do with this Wallace Stevens poem. I’ve given you my understanding of how the form of slow reading emerges in practice. There is a particular set of conventions and axioms that are attached to the teaching and understanding of slow reading. It is also a capacious term, precisely because there are so many texts that exist that boiling it down to a singular form of reading is unsatisfactory. Yet, that is also the tempting allure of talking about slow reading as having a form. Since the form itself is malleable in distinctly unique ways, one isn’t beholden to a particular type of slow reading. You can read as slowly to the beat of your temporal desires. The few presuppositions that do exist in literary understandings of slow reading are predicated upon slowness and pleasure. Though I find myself struck at how slow reading itself is an index for a cultural anxiety surrounding the institution of reading itself, just as much as slow reading is both overdetermined and understudied. Slow reading is the method that comes before what we know as method. We all do it, but do we really know if we are actually doing it? Or does it take a pause, a moment of patience, in our process to recognize that much of what we do is slow reading?
[1] Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier, “Preface: In Defense of Reading,” in In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, eds. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1962), viii-ix.
[2] More concretely, the kind of training that literary critics often carry is to be trained under a very particular New Critical inflection. The New Criticism is the literary movement that took stock of the practicalities behind literary critique and was also very concerned with how a text itself can be studied in isolation. John Crowe Ransome’s 1941 book The New Criticism is an integral primer in understanding this movement. I.A. Richards’ Practical Criticism is also an essential text in understanding close reading. However, close reading does not play a huge rule in my piece at all. It exists in my meditation on slow reading insofar as it is a contrasting kind of reading that does a different kind of work.
[3] Not all forms of close reading must necessarily reach a conclusion. After all, close reading’s whole intent is that it privileges the text above all else. However, close readings also lend themselves to interpretive gestures which then inevitably lead to the kind of arguments that are pro forma for literary academic articles. Close reading, in our contemporary moment, are often thought of as one of the fundamental toolsets that comprise an academic’s ability to construct a cogent literary argument. When I say in this piece that close reading often hinges upon making an argument, this is what I mean.
[4] This is not to say slow reading has disappeared entirely from literary academe. Far from it. However, slow reading is but one of many forms of reading that are up for debate. My piece focuses more on slow reading’s relationship to the very abstract construction of the general reader, or lay reader as I would refer to them. In a literary context, Virginia Jackson’s Before Modernism brings to bear Brower’s definition of slow reading as a framework on her complex and very long readings on her historicization of nineteenth century black poets.
[5] Basically, this is not a piece that wades into the debate about critique and postcritique.
[6] Reuben A. Brower, “Reading in Slow Motion,” in In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, eds. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1962), 9-10.
[7] Ibid, 4. Brower also cites a line from a D.H. Lawrence poem that acts as his motto on slow reading and amusement: “If it’s never any fun, don’t do it!”
[8] Ibid, 4.
[9] In page 9, Brower would write “that a course in interpretation is a course in “right answering,” not a course in “right answers.””
[10] Ibid, 4. This is also a point Brower will continually reinforce throughout the rest of his chapter.
[11] Ibid, 5.
[12] Ibid, 5.
[13] John Miedema, Slow Reading (Litwin Books, 2009), 1-2.
[14] Ibid, 10-12. Miedema also notes how close reading is itself considered a professional academic practice in this part of the book.
[15] Ibid, 11.
[16] Ibid, 8-10, 15-17.
[17] Ibid, 16.
[18] Ibid, 63.
[19] Mikics outright writes in the first paragraph of his book that “Scanning an e-mail or a text message is fundamentally different from the activity of reading as I will describe it to you.”
[20] David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 1, 4, and 7.
[21] Ibid, 4, especially when he writes “My argument is intended for concerned teachers and parents who recognize that constant use of digital technology has negatively affected our children’s attention spans and their ability to work independently on challenging tasks.”
[22] Mikics also writes this book with the express intent of providing practical advice on how to teach slow reading to young readers.
[23] Ibid, 51-187.
[24] Robin Valenza, “How Literature Becomes Knowledge: A Case Study,” ELH 76, no. 1 (2009): 215-245, 226-227, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0037.
[25] Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43431/the-idea-of-order-at-key-west.