Touching from a Distance: Close Reading Now

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.

Ostensibly central to the study of English Literature and History of Art and widely deployed in other disciplines, including Music and Film Studies, close reading and close looking now find themselves reframed as fading skills, teachable methods, resistant gestures, or dated ‘formalist’ techniques eclipsed by more fashionable critical theory.

Taking inspiration from John Guillory’s On Close Reading (2025), this project explores the historical roots and contemporary reinventions of attentional criticism.

What do we mean by ‘close’ today? What kinds of attention, labour, and intimacy 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 this ‘traditional’ approach offer to ‘new’ media, including video games and digital art?

At once timely and deliberately out of step, this research strand treats close reading and looking not as settled methods, but as living practices, ones that reach beyond their supposed confines and touch much of what we do as scholars.

Close Reading and Looking Now will bring together colleagues from across the arts and humanities at York, along with external speakers, for a one-day symposium in 2026.

Starting from the premise that close reading and close looking are foundational techniques of enquiry that cross-disciplinary, historical, and methodological lines, the symposium will comprise talks that coalesce around close enquiry into a text, art object, or media entity, paying acute attention to what close reading and looking are ‘in practice’, and what they allow us to do as critics and scholars.

Foregrounding inevitably contentious questions of value, difficulty, and critical scale, this research strand speaks to current debates on the role of criticism, the place of the critic, and the future of interpretation in the humanities.