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Close Reading as Performance

Rather than see close reading as just a means to protect the hypostasized text from its social mediation, this chapter proposes that we see it as one of the many ways in which, over the course of the twentieth century, art has moved from an affair of objects towards one of events, whose modus operandi is performance. In fostering this change, unintentionally or deliberately, close reading is actually moving in the same direction as the contemporary historicists, blurring the borders between art and its contextual medium. Returning close reading to its beginnings as the companion to a theory of modernist poetry may not help it sound less elite. But it will, as the chapter argues, make clearer how modernist poetry was partly aware from the start of the material conditions and social mediations of its reception.