Read on Twitter
By deriding and jettisoning close reading as an old-school, formalist hangover - post-colonial and post-modern literary studies have led to a kind of blindness to *text*. People don't read texts closely even in professional environments where such rigour is required in reading...
"Analysing" a book or a poem at university now amounts, simply, to discussing its themes and characters - summarising it, basically. "Reading and comprehension" - what we did at school. And pronouncing on the text's moral highs and lows. Little engagement with the intricate...
mechanics of a particular text. Little *close analysis*. Upshot is that the flattest texts - those most easily read and comprehended, and with the right moral valences - get lionised. And this goes for critical writing as well where, even under the guise of radical politics...
people exhibit no understanding of the most glaring political contradictions in their own texts. It's as if by paragraph 5 they had forgotten what they themselves had said in paragraph 1. They can't even read their own texts closely and critically. But who's got time for close...
reading, right? This carelessness trickles down into general professional communications: people don't read carefully enough, so you have to make explicit every single thing in an email to make sure someone doesn't misunderstand an email. And the flip side: correspondence...
that is genuinely inchoate, where the writer is unaware of the reader, sees connections in their own head but does not make those connections clear to the recipient, and where the recipient is then paralysed because they do not know how to ask for clarity without appearing...
I dunno, appearing like an old fart? A know-it-all? Yet stupid, because why can't you see and understand what I'm saying? Smfh... how's your morning?
