Touching from a Distance: Close Reading and Looking Now

Touching from a Distance: Close Reading and Looking Now asks what it means to pay genuine critical attention to texts, art objects, and media in the twenty-first century. Close reading and close looking, central to English Literature and History of Art and widely practised across the arts and humanities, are increasingly represented and reframed as a range of things: fading skills, teachable methods, resistant gestures, passé ‘formalist’ techniques, or conservative modes of approaching ‘the text’ now eclipsed by more fashionable critical tools.

Close reading is having a moment: witness John Guillory’s On Close Reading (2025) and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading (2025). This one-day symposium explores the acts of close reading and close looking, asking what they enable, considering their historical roots, and reflecting on their contemporary ‘reinventions’.

What do we mean by ‘close’ today? What kinds of attention, labour, intimacy, and time does it imply? Is close reading still at the heart of humanistic enquiry, or has it become a nostalgic ideal? What does the act of paying attention do to, or say about, the object of enquiry? And what might close reading and close looking offer to, and demand from, different media?

We aim to bring together colleagues from across the arts and humanities at York and beyond for a day of shared attentional practice, foregrounding the contentious questions of value, difficulty, and scale that close reading and close looking inevitably raise. At once timely and deliberately out of step, this symposium treats close reading and close looking as living practices, ones that reach beyond their supposed confines and touch much of what we do.

Schedule of Events

10:00 to 10:30 Registration and welcome
Coffee will be provided

10:30 to 12:00 Panel 1: Perplexity and Pratfalls

• Matt Campbell (University of York): ‘Thomas Kinsella: Potatoes, Proceduralism and Pratfalls’
• Michael Rizq (Peterhouse, University of Cambridge): ‘Perplexed Insight’
• Hugh Haughton (University of York): ‘Close Reading Names in Emily Dickinson’

12:00 to 12:15 Break
Coffee will be provided

12:15 to 13:15 Keynote

• Laura McCormick Kilbride (University of Durham)

13:15 to 14:00 Lunch
Lunch will be provided for attendees

14:00 to 15:30 Panel 2: Forms of Attention

• Jonathan Moreland (University of York): ‘Cobbling Sentences: The Fascist Form of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel’
• William Burns (University College London): ‘“Fresh for reference”: Closeness and Obliquity in R. F. Langley’s “Videlicet”’
• Ivan Knapp (University of York): ‘Relating Objects: Rachel Harrison’s Situation’

15:30 to 15:45 Break
Coffee will be provided

15:45 to 17:15 Panel 3: Textual Intimacy

• Pritika Pradhan (University of York): ‘“Trouble the Brain, Stain the Imagination”: Reading and Being Read by Details, Apropos of The Picture of Dorian Gray’
• Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani and Tilo Reifenstein (York St John University): ‘“But the Rags”: Blackout Poetry as a Creative Method of Close Reading’
• Sam Coe (University of York): ‘“Intimate participation” in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. and the Neoconcretista Art Movement, or How to Read a Work that Eats You’

 Registration is required via Eventbrite

Image: Charles Edward Perugini, Girl Reading, 1878
Art UK Creative Commons