Submitted by syntaxfactory on May 11, 2010 - 9:27pm
Kirt Wilson teaches a grad seminar in close reading that begins with the American New Critics. Barry Brummett has a recent textbook on Close Reading. Perhaps Close Reading is a point of useful intersection across the English/Speech divide.
From the ADE Bulletin (TOC to the left):
Gallop:
1. Close reading can be critical or appreciative and thus can include critical reading but also reading that is far from critical.
2. Critical thinking can include close reading but also other sorts of reading that are far from close; rather, it can involve the identification of broad, systemic, big-picture issues.
3. Critical thinking derives from Kant and the discipline of philosophy (which is why it cannot be “specific to” the study of literature).
4. The sort of close reading I am here advocating derives from the study of language (historically, philology) and rhetoric; it is focused on language rather than on ideas.
5. Treating close reading as a synonym for critical thinking makes it harder to make claims for our disciplinary contribution.
Culler
"There are all sorts of ways of achieving closeness in reading. Very different from Johnson’s mode is memorization—unfashionable these days but one way to become intimate with the language of the text. Helen Vendler remarks that musicians learn the pieces they are going to perform and that critics should not shy away from learning by heart the poems they are discussing, since this exercise gives a sense of how elements of the language fit together. A strategy modeled by Roland Barthes in S/Z is to oblige students to comment on every clause in a passage, identifying the codes at work in producing whatever meaning they take to be at play there and in the connections between elements of this passage and those elsewhere in the text. The virtue of such quasi-mechanical systematicity is to compel a different sort of attention. A related procedure is promoting close reading of Shakespeare, as Marjorie Garber has done, using George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy, a Renaissance rhetorical treatise, and requiring students to find examples of the tropes Puttenham describes. The goal is to estrange reading, to give it a different optic. Another artificial way of slowing down reading and producing effects of closeness is translation. This is how literature used to be taught, of course: the class collectively translated Vergil or Horace, line by line, learning along the way about rhetorical structures and figures and things such as mythological allusions. There would be little enthusiasm for bringing back this sort of class, but as a strategy for encouraging attention to the details of a text, it has its merits. Certainly working with translation, which is anathema in many foreign literature classes, is an excellent way to enforce slow and close reading, of texts in languages students are learning as well as texts in their native languages.
Gallop:
The difference between close reading and the way most people read the sort of texts I teach is that, whereas it is generally agreed that it is the big picture that matters, close reading emphasizes small details. The main idea or general shape of a book is likely to correspond to our preconceptions, but we cannot so easily predict the details. I ask my students to notice surprising or insistent details, because it is there that they are most likely to break free of their preconceptions of what should be in the text. The detail is, I would argue, the best safeguard against projection.
When we read, we tend to see what we expect to have been written—what we expect that author to write, what we expect an author like that to write, what we expect from that sort of book. Reading what we expect to find means finding what we already know; learning, on the other hand, means coming to know something we did not know before. Finding what we already know, projecting onto a text, is the opposite of learning. As a technique to interrupt projection, to make us see what we don’t already presume, close reading can equip us to be open to learning—to resist our presumptions, prejudices, and suppositions—to keep on learning.
...In the New Critical framework, the value of studying literature lay in literature’s intrinsic value, which justified the method of close reading. I suggest here the very opposite: it is the value of close reading that justifies the study of literature.
is an excuse for not knowing anything about historical, socioeconomic, and other essential contexts for making sense of rhetoric. It's a dead end, and brings "us" about to where English was circa 1950. Bring it on.
There are so many things that count as or have been referred to as "close reading." So when Jim Aune, nearly always a careful and discerning scholar, lumps them all together and then flails at them, he makes it easy to dismiss his comments. He's not talking about MY close reading, everyone can say. It's like someone attacking "politicians." Well, which politicians and for what politics? Surely it would be more precise and useful to take on whatever particular critical (or uncritical) moves one dislikes instead of an ideologically charged term.
If I may segue into a shameless plug for a recent textbook I published, of course there are no-nothing versions of "close reading." What I tried to do was to appropriate that term but suggest ways of reading texts that were historically, contextually, and politically sensitive. If I succeeded then perhaps the book undermines somewhat those more regrettable brands of close reading.
Chapter One of "Techniques of Close Reading" is here:
http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/33682_Chapter1.pdf
Ok, Jim, I'll bite.
Close reading, for me, is taking a text on its own terms (and there are a huge variety of ways to do that; I'm partial to de Man's more machinic approach, or Derrida's more playful approach). Anyhoo, there's nothing wrong with that. The problem, as Gadamer (and Leff) taught us, is that this is really hard to do. How does Leff put it? One must "merge" the horizons of self and text (I recall Eliot described CTC as a "tango"). One is in danger of getting lost, or of mistaking one's personal history and affective economy with that of the text.
So, one might counter your beautiful provocation by saying recourse to context---or theoretical talking points---is just the easy way out.
Of course, there is something wrong with taking a text on its own terms and doing nothing else. I can only think of a handful of close readers who actually set out to do this. And, you know, I've already published my own critique of CTC as participating in the occult tradition elsewhere . . . .
I think the operative word in your provocation is "excuse," which implicates the type of person who claims close textual criticism, not the act itself. In which case, we're talking about a certain cultish quality, right? Tribes of close textual fetishists, you might say. I took Kirt's textualism class, and he does indeed begin with the New Critics and draws out how CTC was about creating an interpretive movement more than some narrow method; it was as much about carving out a space in the literary world (and therefore, in English politics) as it was the texts examined.
Approaches to textual interpretation can take on a connotation that better reflects the people who advocate it rather than the approach itself. This is the case with psychoanalysis and the "hermeneutics of suspicion," and it's the case with symbolic convergence theory folks, and certainly with "those Burkeans." Don't get me started with them Deleuzians ;-P
So, Dave: don't get too flustered here. I think Jim's fun comment is rather addressed at his "out group" than what it means to read a text closely.
I personally don't find close textual readers avoidant of contextual consideration; most of the very few folks who read texts closely in criticism (as opposed to, say, philosophy or theory, which is where I think some of the folks above are coming from) are always careful to get their Catholic birth control on. I do worry, however, about the model of reading it encourages---a lesson I learned from Ron Greene: it sets up the virtuoso and a certain regime of power, perched on a logic of mastery as it is. "Do you read like I read?" can become the model for teaching CTC in the classroom. That's kinda icky.
Josh: The critique of the virtuoso close reading was first revealed to me in Bazerman's arguments about the rhetoric of literary criticism, in which he pulls apart the rhetorical stylings of Geoffrey Hartman (deconstructionist):
"In the chain of consciousness from poet to critic to reader, the enterprise rests on the quality of the mediating critic’s sensibility.... the reader must believe that the critic perceives
things that would not be apparent to the reader. A critic’s persuasiveness, therefore, depends in part on establishing a persona of perceptivity, if not brilliance...
"A persona of sensitivity and brilliance can also be fostered by stylistic habits, Hartman uses several techniques to increase the appearance of density of thought. First, like many critics, he prefers the elliptical argument to the fully delineated... In the literary essay reverberative density is also achieved through allusive language, invoking concepts and experiences of other poets and implying connections between words... A plethora of connections attests to the fertile sensibility of the critic, and sensibility is essentially what the critic has to offer."
More soon.
By request and scolding, the source text for Bazerman:
Shaping Written Knowledge Ch. 2
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter2.pdf
WHAT WRITTEN KNOWLEDGE DOES: THREE EXAMPLES OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
The entire book is online courtesy of WAC Clearinghouse
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/
Bazerman, Charles. 2000. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. WAC Clearinghouse Landmark Publications in Writing Studies: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/
Originally Published in Print, 1988, by University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin.
...but I gotta collect myself. I'm shimmering and shaking with rage.
It seems to me that one of the functions of blogging is to stir up comment. So, I'm not going to apologize for my testy short post earlier. And, it obviously provoked thoughtful responses. Although here are amplified remarks:
1. Close reading is a fundamental skill. it's of a higher order than, say, basic public speaking/lecturing or writing an essay. But it is a Skill. And it is not clear to me how it contibutes to Scholarship. . writ large in however a Foucauldian way you want to read that. . I'm hardly the Master. . I know people respect me, but few people ever agree with me, which is fine.
2. Yes, DB/syntax factory, you have taught me to pay more attention to language, not to mention IA Richards, the pioneer of close reading (if you leave out the French tradition). And Barry, it's a very good thing you wrote a textbook on this, which was much needed--and being generous enough to excerpt it here is a Good Thing. The Gift Economy of the Internet at its best.
3. But I resist the idea that we rhetoricians are "critiics" who look at single "texts." For one thing, it leaves out orality, the embodied spirit of the object as performed.
4. Only a very few documents we look at are worth looking at closely. . Edmund Burke, yes. TJ, maybe. But they are interesting mostly as a mosaic of audience responses, living (and scarcely remembered) political languages in Pocock and Skinner's sense, or as part of an ideology (in Marx's sense), and I cannot think of any exemplars of "close readings" (I don't wish to name names here. . because it would involve some old very bitter personal disputes, but think of Jefferson) that seriously engage the larger British/American negotiations of terms like liberty and order and republicanism.
5. I do not like the field of English. I wish it would go away entirely. I do not want to be associated with Them as a rhetorician. .and would far rather find elective affinities with History or Political Science or Sociology. Go read the volumes upon volumes of wasted time in the English section of your library--close readings that fail to engage context or do the sort of hard-slogging archival work historians do.
So, that's why.
1. The function, at least, of the Blogora should surely be to encourage these moments of friction and frisson.
2. You can't mean you don't see "how it contributes to scholarship" -- it must be an essential first step, no? I fully expect we will disagree on this, and it probably centers on my experience of the public address conference. In my neglected blog, I wrote:
"I am not a public address critic, and so the genre of the paper may be alien to me. It seemed a bit theory-heavy -- front loading discussions of liberalism before conducting textual analysis... [M]y desire is to see a paper start with the language, in action, rather than the political philosophy."
Which is to say: when I want to understand liberalism, I would go to the political theorist. When I want to understand the tensions between liberalism as an ideal and any historical moment as a context, I can turn to the rhetorician who will see that tension manifest in language. Language is the space where the tension between the ideas and the material conditions of human experience is worked through, consciously and unconsciously. What kind of ideas (philosophical, religious, political, aesthetic, literary, popular) matters little to me; what kind of language (oratory, literature, scientific articles, songs) matters little to me.
You can't detect those tensions without close reading. Close reading alone is not scholarship, but the analogy might be: breathing is not speaking, but speaking requires breathing.
2.1 It's important to note that I. A. Richards is NOT the pioneer of close reading, really. Richards was repeatedly chastised, in his lifetime, for being a theorist not a critic. Richards was more interested in defining an aesthetic experience than in studying it in a specific text. In that way, he is more like you than you know. And once he matured, Richards was far more interested in the way that ideology (without using that term in any sophisticated way -- meaning more or less a "system of ideas") shapes interpretation. (This would only come to Richards when he visited China and had to decide whether the Chinese were "wrong" or whether they proved that there was not, as he believed, an objectively "right" way to see things.
Where Richards got tangled up in Close Reading was in writing Practical Criticism. Therein, Richards gave students poems stripped of any context and attempted to understand their misinterpretations of the texts. [He would do the same for misinterpretation of prose in Interpretation in Teaching, a book rarely read in large part because it is terribly written -- dictated!] Most importantly, from this perspective, was what Richards called the "stock response" -- lacking historical and authorial context, students culled from "stock responses" to linguistic forms to drive their interpretation.
(See Gallop, above, where she claims that "The detail is, I would argue, the best safeguard against projection. When we read, we tend to see what we expect to have been written—what we expect that author to write, what we expect an author like that to write, what we expect from that sort of book. Finding what we already know, projecting onto a text, is the opposite of learning." This kind of projection is one way to think through the "stock response.")
Flashforward: Ransom and others pick up Practical Criticism and miss the whole fucking point. Instead of a mechanism for diagnosing misinterpretation [remember: rhetoric, for Richards, was the study of "misunderstanding and its remedies"], they see a pedagogy. American literary critics, seeking status obtainable through professionalization of their field, and facing enrollment pressures catalyzed by the GI Bill, found in Close Reading / New Criticism a double-solution. The claims to objectivity enhanced disciplinary prestige. The dehistoricization of the text meant that GIs without the education necessary to contextualize Keats could still make sense of it in a gradeable way.
And yes, as a pedagogy, New Criticism is bankrupt. And it spawned enough useless monographs to feed my furnace for many a cold Duluth winter.
2.2 That's why it's important that Dr. Brummett's book includes significant sections on ideological criticism. His book is designed to teach close reading without the defects of 1950s English.
Incidentally, when I posted the chapter, I posted it from the publisher's website. It's not generosity -- it's a marketing tool. And damn if I don't find publishers' websites posting more and more useful excerpts for free.
But, yes, the entire book is an act of generosity, in a way. It stands, in relationship to a rhetorical criticism class, the way that a handbook stands in relationship to a composition class. Damn useful, and I recommend it.
3. At no point does close reading necessarily imply a material, alphabetical text. Richards, who again is the accidental father of close reading, was firmly committed to questions of media and orality.
It is fair to say that I have thrown my hat in with the International Listening Association (http://www.listen.org/, an affiliate of the ILA that was started on the St. Paul Campus of the U of MN) in part because I want to parse the auditory text in the way and depth that others have parsed the printed and the visual text. That we don't have a term for "close listening" like we have "close reading" is a gap we must fill. But in the meantime, we can read, closely, a performance.
4. Not Richard Weaver? Bracket, for a second, the disagreeable parts of Weaver's politics; doesn't at least some of Weaver do exactly what we are talking about: an investigation of the tension between ideas and manifestions in language in context? I'm thinking, in dim memory, of the essay in which he declares Burke someone advancing conservative ideals in largely liberal-style arguments from circumstances (instead of more conservative argument from principles)?
And Pffft to most of the work I like in the rhetoric of science? Here, I mean both the virtuoso stuff that analyzes the discourse of Darwin, etc. (Campbell, Gross, Bazerman) and the massive corpus studies of Gross, Atkinson, etc. One of the amazing things about the RoS project is the way that virtuoso criticism of major authors and corpus studies of a stratified sample of hundreds of years of texts mutually enlighten not only the rhetorical strategies of scientists but also the shifting ideology of scientfic practice. Pffft?
Corpus studies and virtuoso studies are, in their own way, grounded in close reading. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the resistance to social scientizing of rhetoric in Communication has meant that quantifiable work like corpus studies is underutilized and perhaps undervalued on that half of the rhetoric divide.
Finally... No one is more suspicious of English than I am. There is a circularity to the arguments for the value of literary study that makes me dizzy. Departments which buy into that circularity underwrite the production of those monographs about which you complain.
I would buy, wholeheartedly, Steve Mailloux's claims that English Studies should be reconfigured as Cultural Rhetorical Studies, an umbrella that would pull rhetoric, creative writing, literary studies, film studies (as found in English), folklore studies, socio/linguistics and cultural studies into a nice, neat package. But wishing for that reconfiguration is like wishing that my dead grandparents were not racist. In 2010, it's too late to wish, and in their lifetime, wishing would have done no good.
I would buy, also wholeheartedly, Mailloux's arguments for Rhetoric Centers. But that feels like wishing that my great-grandchildren might be rich. It is possible, but very highly unlikely in my lifetime and extremely unlikely to be a result of my actions.
In the Blogosphere, I can pick my colleagues. In research, I can pick my community. But, as I wake every day, I have to step into a context in which my interest in rhetoric is pinned, tightly, between two sets of colleagues:
A) the colleagues who believe that rhetoric is unnecessary for the teaching of writing (the way some universities and colleges -- not mine -- seem to believe that rhetoric is unnecessary for the teaching of speaking).
B) the colleagues who believe that rhetoric is either some diminished form of literary criticism (covered in a week, yoked to catharsis in the lit crit anthology), or some precepts for the organization of first-year expository essays
I would not object if you could snap your fingers and make English (defined as that circular enterprise, not in Mailloux's dreamy possibility) go away. But when it goes, will the teaching of writing remain a rhetorical enterprise, or will it become the domain of social scientists and teacher-scholars trained in education? If that [and my attendant unemployment] is my option, I'd rather try to find common cause with Gallup.
Stick with me in this effort. I'll make it worth your while.
No apologies are necessary Jim---you capture the spirit of blogging that I enjoy. Of course, I also know you---as do most of the folks responding---and we're hip to your playfulness. And we're also hip to the seriousness of your playfulness, which is why I'll respond here a bit more.
Let me say I was trained in "close reading" by my mentors, a number of them noted and respected close textual critics. None of them would fall prey to the kind of literary studies close reading that you take aim at---which is why, of course, we're in rhetorical studies and not literary studies. I think in this respect Burke's critique of "art for art's sake" in Counterstatement has taken root in many a rhetorical studies scholar (and for some of us, Freddy Jameson---not a bad close reader himself, mind you).
(A brief aside: your amplifications here remind me of my dissertation defense; I took a very similar position and a good deal of my defense was spent defending this position.)
You make five points, which I address seriatim: your claim in italics, and my response in non-italics.
1. close reading is a skill, but it is unclear how this skill contributes to Scholarship.
I disagree. I agree reading closely is a skill, but "close reading" connotes a certain approach to texts, and an even more specific approach in rhetorical studies. It seems to me in rhetorical studies on the speech side, close reading is an approach to texts rooted in phenomenology, and more specifically, the epoce (lil' v over the e). The idea is to try to "bracket" one's assumptions about a text and read it on its own terms, as if it were some Edenic object. It is not unlike the first steps of ethnography: read, try not to judge. Parse metaphor. Discern allegory. Isolate meaning. Outline structure. Judgment comes later in the critical act.
Before I can respond to the claim about CR to Scholarship, however, I would need to know what you mean by Scholarship, in a Foucauldian frame or otherwise.
2. Thanks DB and Barry.
Ditto that!
3. Close reading reduces the vision of rhetorical criticism to textualism, which excludes orality, for example.
While I am down with the idea we should resist the romantic notion of "critics" looking at single "texts," I would disagree with the equation of close reading = textualism, but it's a very common one in our fields. "Close reading" implies "text," but of course, "text" is a metaphor. We do tend to forget this.
I would say the hegemony of close reading is of "texts"---feeling delivered to the signifier that is written. But Jim, how is this avoidable in scholarship? Even to examine oral performance closely in scholarship, we must deliver affect to the signifier; knowledge is the domain of signification. This is why, as rhetorical studies has evolved, it has become more and more writerly (even numberly)---the drift is away from affect.
I realize the battle for "the text" was hard won (and announced at the first Public Address conference in Wisconsin). Any "Escape from Text Mountain" in close reading requires us to think text metaphorically, to retreat to the adjective, to start thinking performatively (to push toward newer vocabs, like that of Deleuze or psychoanalysis, a kind of poetics if you will). We may be able to escape the text-as-written, but we cannot escape the signifier as rhetoricians (although Diane Davis may help us do just that in her forthcoming book [plug plug!]).
4. Very few texts are worth looking at closely.
Well, I just disagree with this sentiment. Let me provide what I think is a great example: J. Nimi's book-length close reading of R.E.M.'s debut album, Murmur. It's rather a close reading/hearing, combining musicological insight with lyrical analysis. It's a "close reading" of a record album (there's even a chapter on the album art featuring kudzu). When I teach "close reading" I assign this book, because I think it addresses many of your objections. I use this book, in fact, to teach Leff's scholarship. After reading Nimi's reading, one never hears this album the same way again. I make the analogy to learning how to taste wine: after a class in wine tasting, your experience of the wine is very different, transformed. I think a decent close reading does this to whatever object is under investigation. It can teach one to appreciate the object in new ways. Yes, this has been done primarily with literature, but there is so much more to our philosophies than literature.
Close reading gets us to thinking about and experiencing objects in new ways. I would agree that is not enough for the critical act, that the reading must be pressed into something else---politics, perhaps. After I teach Nimi's book, the next question is: ok, so, this is a great album responding to its time. So, what? There are many answers to that (what it means to be young and queer in the 80s, for example, the AIDS epidemic, southern politics, and on and on). But, my point is that close reading is valuable and transformative. How you channel that value and transformation---well, I think that's where cultural studies shines brightly.
(And let me just plug Barry's book, cause of the affinity: he comes at close reading from this perspective, not the vision of the virtuoso critic looking at the singular text.)
5. Jim does not like English
What literary scholars do with close reading is very different from what rhetorical scholars do with close reading. I would think that is why our forebears broke off of English. It's a class thing, yo.
6. Um, I'm aware of the fact I'm promoting my Texas colleagues' work here, but I cannot help it---I dine with these folks on a regular basis! Bias is who you eat with.
...I complained that there is no "close reading" analogue in listening. Then, Josh posts about this "Murmur" book.
Woot!
I agree and embrace all you say here, Josh, except:
"What literary scholars do with close reading is very different from what rhetorical scholars do with close reading. I would think that is why our forebears broke off of English. It's a class thing, yo. "
When Speech broke from English, close reading was an apple in the literary scholars' eye (as they were primarily engaged in philological research and loose author biography). And rhetoric was a sloppy mess, as yet undiscovered, as I understand it.
In both rhet/comp and rhet/comm, pedagogy for acts of production is the source of the break (where the break has occurred). But performance (writing or speaking) is poor grounds for a discipline. Rhetoric allows us to recover the critical thinking part of the field without the ideology of literary studies; close reading is a tool, I think, that literary, rhet/comp and rhet/comm can use.
Where is the break that Josh describes (the "class thing")? Thirty years later than the break in Comm/English, when John Crowe Ransom is systematizing the New Criticism (1941; literature decontextualized) and when Wrage is defining public address work (1945, as the history of ideas contextualized and manifest in discourse). That, to me. seems the crisis moment when Speech says No! to New Criticism the way that Jim is saying No! to close reading.
Maybe? Guessing? Help!
I am referring, actually, to two class related issues. The first is the Morrill Land Grant Colleges act, which was deliberately signed into law to teach "the industrial classes." It is the fact that the "new student" coming to the new universities were NOT literate that created the need for the teaching of speaking and writing. We teach "rhetoric" today because of the need to adjust to the new class of student coming to the land grant institution (and we have much more in common with, say, the community college than we do Harvard). Owing to this, I think one finds a heavily pragmatic strain in the "mess" that originally organized itself into rhetorical studies. Attempts to "class up" the reading of texts (e.g., "oratory as literature") ultimately failed until relatively recently.
Second, I'm referring to the replication of class internal to the English departments that sprang up in the late nineteenth century; it didn't take long for the professoriate to break into those who taught the lofty aims of literary interpretation, and the rest of us who taught speaking and writing. This is what I mean by referencing Burke's critique of close reading for its own sake; only a handful of folks who do close reading actually fell into the spider-web of close reading as sublimity, etc. For exemplary close readers of rhetoric texts---like, say, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell---it's not just about the text in itself, but about how that text articulates a variety of contexts (e.g., the experience of womanhood or race, the organization of social movements, etc.).
Communication and Composition are fields that, seem to me, are still classed. Practical application always seems to be built into our research, in one way or another, and I do believe we are viewed by administrations as the "working class" departments of a university. While this was a problem in the early 20th century, it seems to be an asset today---certainly it was in the early 2000s.
Finally, there's this John Dewey guy . . . .
...and I am, perhaps, splitting hairs of little consequence. The state of literary studies when Speech broke off was not "new criticism" against rhetoric [as New Criticism comes, literally, decades later], but it is, nonetheless, "consumption" against "production."
Literary scholars were working through the transformation to the German-style research based university (which encouraged knowledge-making activities like philology) and the desire for the 19th century model of liberal or humanistic education (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Humanism). By the 1930s. some of the New Humanists would become New Critics. Irving Babbitt's death in 1933 meant that New Humanism lost its charismatic leader, and even those who might have claimed his influence (e.g. Richard Weaver, Austin Warren [of Wellek & Warren]).
Where New Humanism fit the vision JG articulates is in its sense, broadly, that the teaching of literature was in part an exercise in self-improvement: "the true mark of excellence in a man, as Pascal puts it, is his power to harmonize in himself opposite virtues and to occupy all the space between them (tout l'entredeux)." The reading of literature is the cultivation of this kind of self, a virtue of humanistic education in opposition to "the encroachments of physical science."
This is what the speech types were walking out on (kind of) when they walked out of English departments: philologists on the left and people who believed that reading literature would make someone a better balanced, "humanistic" person.
The autonomy of art and the New Criticism in the US English department curriculum would flower in the 1930s and after, concretizing in 1941 with Ransom.
...
Josh is right: neither philology nor New Humanism [nor the close reading of New Criticism] were well-suited to the land-grant institution; neither met the needs of the new "industrial" and "agricultural" student population intellectually/professionally. Neither fed into the civic ideals of the land grant institutions.
Land Grant institutions are sometimes misread as a kind of voc-ed project. (Josh: I'm not accusing you of this. I'm reminded of Ann Coulter's criticisms of a graduate of Cornell's Ag School as not being a real Cornell graduate: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/06/keith-olbermann-ann-coult_n_172....) And while there is certainly that edge to some interpretations of the act, several notable accounts call the institutions that come from the act "Democracy's College." The land grant universities created both professional or technician AND citizen. By their very organization (both [a] taking in children as young as 13 and [b] sending out extension educators into the community), the land grant universities created and maintained a relationship between the citizen and the state. I'm not sure that any institution occupied quite that role in the US before the Morrill act; other [K-12] education was too local to serve that function.
Through the land grant university, the state gets to create the citizen it wants to govern -- or it creates the citizen that is capable of participating in democratic governance in the future, if you want to spin it positively. Taken to its extreme, the Wisconsin Idea, in which the university's borders are not its campus, but the very state border itself.
In this context, the fact that some land grant schools (like Minnesota, but also Iowa State, I think) created Departments of Rhetoric in their ag units is significant. Pieces like this one: https://webspace.utexas.edu/jw2893/www/Inst-Hist-Rhet-North-America.htm, translated by your colleague at UT {I can pimp UT people too!) phrase the question badly. They ask: what happened to rhetoric in English in the 19th century? Rhetoric, in English, is twisted, diminished, and sometimes erased in the 19th century.
But not all rhetoric is in English. Some rhetoric freestands in the land grant context -- not many programs, but some. I want to believe that these freestanding programs selected Rhetoric as their god-term because rhetoric's civic imperative mapped onto the land grant mission not just to create professionals and technicians, but also citizens.
But I delude myself more often than not.
...as composition becomes differentiable from rhetoric and public speaking becomes differentiable from rhetoric...
...as PhD students in rhetoric seem to resent the once mandatory "pedagogical implications" chapter of a rhet comp diss...
...as rhet theory in comm comes to resemble hermeneutics over heuristics...
I see us scrambling to ascend the class ladder while losing our roots.
...just a tweaking of chronology to clarify causality -- I think! Maybe! The overall point about differences in temperament stands, of course.
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