A Matter of Scale: Is Close Reading to American Studies What Place Is to Space?

Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch (LMU München)

In my talk I try to answer a seemingly simple question: after decades of contextual criticism, dominated by issues of race, gender, and class, why and to what end should American Studies – or the humanities at large, for that matter – turn to close reading as an important critical tool?

To answer this politically loaded question I propose an analogy with one of the field’s core areas of study: close reading is to American Studies what place is to space. Like the study of concrete places close reading enables us to understand a text by registering its specificity and uniqueness rather than its universality. To look at geographically and historically specific places merely through the prism of a preconceived notion of their relationship with larger, often opaque entities such as the ‘New World,’ the American ‘West,’ the ‘transnational,’ or, more recently, the ‘planetary’ is to miss out on much of their locally accreted cultural density and idiosyncrasies.

The similarities are obvious and noteworthy: recent efforts to resuscitate close reading as a viable technique for the production of non-ideological knowledge seem to mirror similar attempts to inscribe American places with new, non-exceptionalist meaning. At the end of the day it’s all a matter of scale, of how to engage with the small and near-by, how to resist the urge to constantly paint with a very broad brush, how to take the single particular on its own terms rather than making it – as in much of modernist close readings – stand in for an abstract theory of life and art.

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