Thinking Small

This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation. Sensitive to variations and valances of difference, elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. The chapter examines two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative possibilities: marine biologist Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral.