exemplaria: medieval, early modern, theory, Vol. 26 Nos.

2–3, Summer/Fall 2014, 215–33

Scales of Reading
Julie Orlemanski
University of Chicago, USA

We read according to different scales: fast or slow, selective or thorough,

deeply or skimming along. What is at stake in scalar variations like these?
Quite a lot, this essay argues. The contrast between close reading and distant
reading, as formulated by Franco Moretti, raises provocative challenges for
the discipline of literary study. Moretti’s claim that “knowing is not reading”
exemplifies the current devaluation — and undertheorization — of the kind
of knowledge that close reading produces. “Distant reading” converges with
recent critiques of historicism, experiments in machinic reading, and narra-
tives of the “turn away from the linguistic turn” to foreground the epistemo-
logical limits of interpreting individual texts. In light of these challenges,
I advocate the reexamination of precisely what we learn through close
reading. This project, of articulating anew the terms of literary-historical
understanding, may be aided by resources of the hermeneutic tradition —
although the possibility seems out of step with current “antihermeneutic”
ideas. I argue that scale remains a literary event and that units of analysis
derive from processes of interpretation. We need disciplinary accounts that
incorporate both intrinsic and extrinsic sources of meaning and that explain
why experiences of reading have validity as sources of knowledge.

keywords close reading, distant reading, hermeneutics, historicism, House of

Fame, Franco Moretti, scale

Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame is a poem gripped with the task of thinking the
magnitude of discourse. As it unfolds, its verses imagine and reimagine how to bring
a universe of speech acts to the point of experience. How might archival totality be
scaled to the phenomenology of reading? Strategies like spatial allegory and personi-
fication lend consistency to what would otherwise be countless, unbounded, abstract,
or imperceptible in the poem. Yet just as quickly discourse’s enormity and self-
strangeness overturn the organizing forms of rhetoric. Noise threatens to overwhelm
listening; Fame’s palace defies any “kunnynge to descrive” (1168);1 bodies are heaped
upon bodies in the whirligig of Rumor; and the goddess herself bumps against the

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1041257314Z.00000000051

216 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

heights of heaven and swarms with eyes, nearly dissolving the persona that holds her
multiplicity in check. Reading emerges spectacularly as a problem of scale.
Within this framework of scalar instability and figural dissolution, I turn my
attention to a moment of quite ordinary and nonfigurative scaling in the poem, when
literary magnitude is shown to be, in part, the reader’s own task. The moment takes
place in Book I, shortly after Dido interrupts the narrator’s recapitulation of the first
four books of the Aeneid. Dido speaks at length, in an Ovidian outpouring of elegiac
passion, and the narrator expresses his sympathy, lamenting the ubiquity of women’s
betrayal, “As men may ofte in bokes rede, / And al day sen hyt yet in dede” (385–86).
The narrator offers further examples: first, Demophon’s betrayal of Phyllis, and then,
continuing,
Eke lo how fals and reccheles
Was to Breseyda Achilles,
And Paris to Oenone,
And Jason to Isiphile,
And eft Jason to Medea,
And Ercules to Dyanira,
For he left hir for Yole,
That made hym cache his deth, parde. (397–404)

The list, derived from Ovid’s Heroides, continues with an account of Theseus
betraying Ariadne, and then the Virgilian narrative resumes. These lines and similar
Chaucerian catalogues (like those in the Merchant’s Tale, the Tale of Melibee, and
the Franklin’s Tale) have most often been studied for their evidence of intertextual-
ity — but they also compel in terms of their phenomenology, or how they unfold
within experiences of reading. The time it takes to read the lines, their density of
meaning, and their literary force depend upon how readers animate the stories coiled
in ovo in the enumerated names. Briseis, Oenone, Hypsipyle, and Medea each claim
only a single line of poetic “extension,” yet each name has the power to conjure an
entire narrative in its own right. It is easy enough to glance passingly over the list,
collapsing all alike into the genus of wronged women, and indeed the bouncy octos-
yllabic couplets, with their uniform syntax, encourage skimming. However, it is just
as possible to tarry, to dwell over particular names and fall down the rabbit hole of
one or another story — as, in the Book of the Duchess, when the narrator descends
dreamily into the sorrows of Ovid’s Alcyone; as in the Physician’s Tale, when
Virginia assumes an unprecedented voice; as in the entire Legend of Good Women;
and as here, in the House of Fame, when Dido’s interruption of the Virgilian plotline
recalibrates the Carthaginian episode against the epic “whole,” to make the poem’s
most pointed intervention in literary tradition. Indeed, the House of Fame takes such
variation in “knowen name” as its topic (1736).
Chaucer’s poem anxiously, enthrallingly revolves the material and cognitive econo-
mies that determine who survives in the archives of discourse. How is attention
distributed? To whom are words allocated? Who has the greater share of fame? The
 SCALES OF READING 217

poem’s first book might be thought of as a laboratory of experiments in discursive

scale. Which is “larger,” the dreamer or his dream? Whose authorship is greater,
Chaucer’s or Virgil’s? Is Dido’s story contained within Aeneas’s? To what degree are
the “ymages” in the temple securely ensconced in their “sondry stages” and “taber-
nacles” (121–23)? And by what operation does one image break loose, to become an
encompassing framework in its own right — as the “portreyture” of Venus does
(131)? Similar questions circulate at a subthematic level in the catalogue of wronged
women, in the apparently otiose modulations in space given over to each woman’s
story. Does Oenone’s betrayal by the Trojan prince play a “smaller” role than
Deianira’s by Hercules — since it is allotted one line rather than three? Does Phyllis’s
betrayal by Demophon outsize them both, at eight lines, or Ariadne’s by Theseus,
clocking in at twenty? Are all four swallowed up in Dido’s enfolding tragedy? Such
calculations seem ridiculous on the one hand, but on the other, memorialization is
shown time and again in the poem to depend upon such material vagaries as the
endurance of letters engraved in ice.
I open what is ultimately a metacritical essay with a consideration of Chaucer’s
scalar provocations in the House of Fame because scales of reading, and their episte-
mological and ethical consequences, are very much at issue today. As I contend
below, the most compelling methodological challenges recently brought to bear
on literary history concern matters of scale (rather than, say, surfaces, suspicion,
networks, ontology, or description). Literary scholars are engaged in asking how dis-
cursive systems, rather than particular texts, become objects of knowledge. In light
of this, what alternative modes and forms might literary history assume? It is impor-
tant to my own arguments that the objects we study themselves contest and construct
discursive scale — as the House of Fame so virtuosically demonstrates. How are
units of analysis and scales of reading implicated in hermeneutic processes? Just as
Chaucer’s poem does, contemporary debates foreground the consequences of how
readers distribute attention and allot their labors of memory, study, and interpretation.
While current reflections on the scale of literary study most obviously stem from
digitized archives and the increasingly sophisticated means of querying them, I sug-
gest that they take on additional urgency in light of frustrations with historicism.
Both “big data” and “posthistoricism” worry a sore spot in literary study, which is
itself a matter of scale: close reading. Close reading and its attendant calibrations of
attention, interpretation, and historical explanation are sometimes valorized and
sometimes disavowed, but they are widely practiced. Close reading doesn’t exhaust
what we do, but it does give literary study consistency and specificity as a discipline.
In what follows, I take Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees as the mouthpiece
for the demand to better explain what kind of knowledge close reading produces.
Alternative scales of reading, like those in Moretti’s experiments, expose the fragile
logic of exemplarity by which reading and history have been sutured together. My
own response is not a rejection of either close reading or historicism, but a call to
articulate more boldly and clearly the specific knowledge claims of literary study.
How do our shared scales of reading — especially close reading — produce under-
standing? One pathway for arriving at such an explanation is to turn to hermeneutics,
218 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

despite its apparent unpopularity in the contemporary “turn away from the linguistic
turn.” Since our discipline has not left behind hermeneutics at the level of practice,
I advocate a return to it at the level of theory, as a means of defining and defending
the labor of literary study.
It is perhaps useful to describe what I mean by the word “scale” insofar as it
features in my title and arguments. First of all, scale is profoundly aesthetic — of or
pertaining to aisthesis, sense perception. It is irreducibly a concept of relation and
refers us to our specific capacities for attention, cognition, perception, and feeling.
“What counts is that the body is . . . immediately available through choices of scale,”
remarks art historian James Elkins, about abstract paintings (16). Even if a painting
is completely nonfigurative, it in some sense “figures” the bodies of viewers, deter-
mining how we’ll position ourselves, whether myopically scrutinizing, or conversa-
tionally attentive, or gazing from far off. As perceptual interfaces, paintings have
power to move and shape viewers’ sensing, apprehending physicalities. The same can
be said for scales of reading: they render palpable the phenomenological determinants
of experiencing texts. We are all accustomed to modulating our scales of reading
according to the text and task at hand. Designing a syllabus demands the calculation
of discursive magnitude against readerly effort. A twenty-page essay on Sonnet 55
assumes a different calibration of “reading” to “read” than does a twenty-page essay
on Bleak House. Yet the fact that a novel is made out of more words than a lyric
poem does not make it an absolutely larger literary object. As Roland Barthes
famously dramatizes in S/Z, scales of reading are not something pregiven, something
objectively present in the textual artifact. As that book’s first sentence says, “There
are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole
landscape in a bean” (3).
This, then, is why the ontology of literary objects is important, or what I would
call the evental character of texts. Texts “happen” when they are read (or otherwise
used — translated or archived, for instance). Texts’ scale thus depends upon, and
takes shape in, the interactions of readers and words, which unfold within regular-
izing frameworks of textuality and literacy. It is to similarly interactive processes of
scaling that the sociologist and theorist Bruno Latour directs analytical attention.
“Scale is the actor’s own achievement,” Latour writes — or more precisely, it is
the achievement of multiple actors (human and nonhuman), which are amplifying,
counterbalancing, modifying, and deflecting one another’s scalar effects (185). The
“scale of reading” proper to Chaucer’s catalogue of wronged women, for instance, is
negotiated between the rhetorical properties of the poem, norms of interpretation,
paratextual apparatus, and readers’ behaviors, learned and spontaneous. The poem’s
scalar effects (its calibration of relations of size, speed, density, clarity, familiarity,
distance, hierarchy, contemporaneity, and totalization) are part of its aesthetic reper-
toire. When an analyst is faced with “such sudden shifts in scale,” Latour writes, “the
only possible solution for the analyst is to take the shifting itself as her data . . . it is
this very framing activity, this very activity of contextualizing, that should be brought
into the foreground” (185–86). Scale, in summary, is an aesthetic phenomenon, a
 SCALES OF READING 219

schematism dynamically negotiated. Scales of reading happen in performances of

reading.
No one has done more to unsettle the notion of scale in contemporary literary
study than Franco Moretti. “The very small, and the very large; these are the forces
that shape literary history,” writes Moretti in his slender 2005 book Graphs,
Maps, Trees: “Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real objects of
literature . . . but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history” (76).
With this statement, Moretti challenges the scale at which literary history takes place.
“Distant reading” and “sociological formalism” throw doubt on whether the “real
objects of literature,” the texts we read closely, are our proper “objects of knowl-
edge.” In distant reading, “distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it
allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text:
devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems” (“Conjectures” 57). Moretti’s pro-
grammatic claims conjure echoes of structuralism, of phonemes and morphemes,
memories of Fernand Braudel’s “breaking down time past, choosing among its chron-
ological realities” (27), and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim that “properly scientific work
consists in decomposing [one’s object] and then recomposing [it] on a different plane”
(250). Indeed, one might wonder if our current post-poststructuralist moment is the
setting for a kind of transformed structuralism.
Moretti describes “distant reading” as emerging directly out of considerations of
scale. The traditional canon, as he describes it, is calibrated for human perceptual
labor: two hundred novels correspond nicely to one career’s worth of thoughtful
perusal. By contrast, the more than 40,000 novels published in nineteenth-century
Britain dwarf the individual reader. These thousands of volumes make up a qualita-
tively different entity, which demands other modes of apprehension and comprehen-
sion. “One thing for sure,” Moretti writes, “it cannot mean the very close reading of
very few texts. . . . A larger literary history requires other skills: sampling; statistics;
work with series, titles, concordances, incipits” (“Slaughterhouse” 208–9). Moretti
pushes his audience to recognize what is at stake in the habitual scalar decisions we
make — including, as he suggests in one essay, the very possibility of world literature
(“Conjectures”). “Graphs, maps, and trees” might be thought of as Moretti’s
aesthetic solutions to the problem of how 40,000 novels can be brought into relation
with an individual’s thought and experience. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for instance,
is strategically redescribed through the coordinates of genre and publication date.
Hundreds of pages of chivalric adventures become a point of data determining a line
on a graph, which in turn makes new understandings of genre possible. In this way,
Moretti’s efforts converge with recent projects in data visualization and digital
curation — experiments in how vast archives can be brought into different forms of
perceptibility. Chaucer’s allegorical figures in the House of Fame might be thought
of as answering similar desiderata, long before the advent of statistics and with
different epistemological claims.
Moretti is not alone in rendering scale among the most urgent questions of
contemporary literary-historical methodology. In her 2004 The World Republic of
220 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

Letters, the French sociologist Pascale Casanova holds up for social-scientific analysis
the global system of literary production. She explicitly rejects the “radical monadol-
ogy” of close reading (2) and “the persistent tendency of critics to isolate texts from
one another” (3). Margaret Cohen, who minted the much-cited phrase “the great
unread” to refer to the vast archive of novels left out of the literary canon (Sentimental
23), argues for new ways of navigating “the archive of literature,” to correct for the
“aesthetic blindspot[s]” of criticism and theory (“Narratology” 51, 57). Matthew
Jockers’ 2013 monograph Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History
explores how “studying large collections of digital material can help us to better
understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections” (32). In
discussing the significance of the digital humanities, N. Katherine Hayles remarks,
“Perhaps the single most important issue in effecting transformation is scale” (27).
Bruce Holsinger has recently curated a series of online posts to address “medieval
studies in the age of big data” and the “specifically quantitative transformation in the
character of our archive and its accessibility.”
Certainly there exist collegial and conciliatory tones for talking about Moretti’s
“other skills” of data mining and corpus analysis, sampling and statistics, graphing
and mapping — tones that suggest that their difference from close reading is one of
degree, not kind. For instance, Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, as they intro-
duce their computational analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, observe that “writing itself
is a prosthetic: it allows us to overcome the physical limitations of the medium
of speech and psychological constraints of linguistic processing” (358). Martin Foys
remarks,
Humanists have always swum against an incessant and inexorably accumulative informa-
tional tide, trying to come up with intellectual and material methods for mining and
managing data. . . . The twenty-first century digital repositories and algorithmic resources
to explore them are simply the next station stop.

Indeed, seventeenth-century book wheels and revolving bookstands were technologies

for the rapid collocation of many texts. John Guillory calls such “extensive” reading
for research purposes, “scanning.” He predicts that “machine reading, which already
successfully functions as a prosthesis for the cognitive skill of scanning (as in keyword
searches), will not anytime soon relieve scholars of having to learn when and how to
decelerate reading or to commence the slow labor of interpretation” (“How Scholars
Read” 13). Such remarks reassure: don’t worry, you close readers, you decelerators;
you’ll be fine.
While this ethos is levelheaded and makes good on media studies’ long view of
information technologies, it is not always the most useful attitude to think with. New
scales of reading do have the potential to constitute alternative objects of knowledge
and provoke new methods of inquiry — and the interesting question is what we’re
going to do about it. A recent talk by Ted Underwood illustrates digital humanists’
apparent ambivalence about how to pitch the significance of quantitative findings for
the discipline of literary studies. Underwood, an English professor and researcher
with the Mellon-funded “Uses of Scale in Literary Study,” opens his remarks by
 SCALES OF READING 221

opposing “discovery,” which he associates with digital research, to “intervention,”

which he associates with unreconstructed literary studies. “As grad students,” Under-
wood remarks, “we learned that the discipline moves forward dialectically. You take
something that people already believe and ‘push against’ it, or ‘critique’ it, or ‘com-
plicate’ it.” In other words, he summarizes, in traditional literary studies, “Instead of
making discoveries, you make interventions.” Although Underwood quarantines the
imperatives to “critique” and “complicate” in scare quotes and locates them in his
grad-school past, he also protects them by proposing “discovery” as a simple addition
to literary studies. As a mere add-on, “digital methods don’t have to displace tradi-
tional scholarship.” Yet Underwood’s comments are compelling because they do not
actually stick to such modest aims. His ambitious “larger thesis” does in fact “push
against” traditional scholarship. “We don’t understand literary history,” he says; “we
don’t fully understand the terms we’re working with.” Underwood’s digital scholar-
ship, he claims, shows how statistical analysis of large archives of digitized texts can
alter the “broad contours of literary history.” His arguments, then, imply not simply
that there are more facts to know, more “discoveries” to be added to the content of
literary history. Rather, the category of “literary history” itself enters into a state of
dissolution, and this dissolution, if not caused by digital research, is at least more
recognizable in light of it. Underwood illustrates some of the real pique and potential
of scalar experiments: quantitative “discovery” becomes dialectical “intervention.”
As a great polemicist, Moretti always places the accent on intervention. In an
online forum following the publication of Graphs, Maps, Trees, he remarks,
I still think that the strategies I outlined are antithetical to the mainstream of literary
criticism. . . . [I]t’s a matter of logic. Between interpretation (that tends to make a close
reading of a single text) and explanation (that works with abstract models on a large
group of texts) I see an antithesis. Not just difference, but an either/or choice. (“Moretti
Responds (II)”)

At every turn, Moretti urges decision, pushes quantitative change to become qualita-
tive, and change in degree to become change in kind: “World literature cannot be
literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different.
The categories have to be different” (“Conjectures” 55). Questions we set out to
pursue within our field of knowledge come to demand the transformation of that very
field. This polemical incisiveness, rather than any particular information or method
turned up at the Stanford Humanities Lab, seems to me of greatest interest in
Moretti’s writings:
They provoke resistance, which is another kind of engagement: they inspire a thirst for
specification, amplification, modification, modulation. Hyperbole is the signature of the
dialectic; it expresses the brinksmanship of an approach that reduces every position to its
most impossible extremity. It brings every situation to its breaking point. Its strategy is
not to instigate change but to precipitate crisis. (Comay 95)

This description of polemical virtue is actually drawn from Rebecca Comay’s account
of Hegelian dialectic, but it is an elegant statement of how polarization and
222 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

unappeasability produce new thought. Moretti, I am claiming, acts as a kind of

dialectical catalyst, insofar as he pushes constitutive tensions within literary study
toward a point where opposed forces — say, “discovery” and “intervention,” or
literary history and literary criticism, or explanation and interpretation — have
the potential to transform one another as well as transform the situation of their
relation.
Moretti brings us to the sticking point: close reading. He accuses close reading of
a kind of irrationalism, or at least the irrationality of the knowledge claims made
on its behalf. “Take the concept of genre,” he writes. “We choose a ‘representative
individual,’ and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and
detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman” (Graphs 76). Moretti calls
this “typological thinking,” which amounts to an unexamined trust in the sufficiency
of examples. “You analyse Goethe’s novel,” Moretti continues, “and it counts as an
analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking there is really no gap
between the real object and the object of knowledge” (76). Most scholars are a little
cannier than Moretti’s “typological” caricature suggests. Nonetheless, one can recog-
nize the contours of the field in Moretti’s broad strokes. Something like the standard
recipe for a literary-historical monograph is to argue a general condition swiftly into
existence and then start reading closely — both to substantiate the broad claim and
to set the limits of its reach. Moretti’s point about scale concerns this very logic, or
illogic, of exemplarity. Reading a handful of the “real objects of literature,” he claims,
does not actually tell us very much about literary history.
On this point, Moretti’s arguments dovetail with the critiques of historicism
recently advanced by medievalists and early modernists (even as historicism arguably
continues to be those fields’ default mode of scholarship). Similarly to what Moretti
calls “typological thinking,” historicism tends to rely on the “representative individ-
ual” to crystallize something much larger and more heterogeneous. Paul Strohm
offers a clear-eyed summary:
Although nobody believes in the “spirit of an age” anymore, new historicism was no less
reliant than old upon an unacknowledged belief in some kind of spirit-medium or ether
in which unexpected cultural affinities might emerge and repetitions and replications
occur, by an unexplained process of effortless transmission. (381)

Historicism’s “under-theorization of the relation between text and context,” as

Strohm puts it (381), is logically parallel to the undertheorization of the relation
between Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman in Moretti’s critique. Without an
account of precisely how an artifact participates in its milieu, a work in its genre, or
a given instance in its class, historicism has tended to translate its own procedures of
juxtaposition and synecdoche into ideologies of historical causation and temporality.
“These operations reveal an unexamined assumption that an age represents an
expressive totality, within which artful and imaginative associations can be made and
sustained without ponderous demonstration,” Strohm writes (381). This transmissive
immediacy of “context” is what Strohm calls an “‘enabling fiction’: an unspoken
assumption that is demonstrably untrue, but that has, from time to time, permitted
 SCALES OF READING 223

dazzling apparent truths” (381). The “enabling fictions” that give close reading sali-
ence beyond the “work itself” are those unarticulated operations by which singular
texts assume exemplary or “typological” significance.
As an antidote to this, Strohm recommends more history. Assuming New Histori-
cism “was not being nearly historical enough,” Strohm concludes that “what is
needed now is not an escape from history, but a refined appreciation of the unruly
multiplicity of ways in which history can manifest itself within a text” (381–82). This
would be “historicism after historicism,” as Maura Nolan terms it: resisting “general-
izing habits of mind and maintain[ing] a sense of the differences between present and
past — and indeed, between past and past, and present and present” (84). Such a
solution, however, leaves other historicist conundrums in place, like the difficulty of
accounting for why one particular work is studied rather than others. Any practice
based on close reading will be unable to elucidate fully the attention lavished on
a small fraction of available texts.2 Dissatisfaction with close reading’s synedochic
logic is part of what motivates Moretti to adopt “quantitative formalism.” His social-
scientific experiments are abstract, but they do not generalize on the basis of particu-
lars. Instead, they constitute what he calls “invisible objects” — “Objects that have
no equivalent within lived experience: this is what Graphs, Maps, Trees is made of”
(“End” 85). Moretti assembles texts without recourse to close reading’s interface,
without the recursive oscillation between text and context, form and history. In
other words, he steps out of the hermeneutic circle. His peeling apart of the categories
of the “text” and of the “proper object of knowledge” is the crux of the scalar
challenge to literary study.
For scholars of medieval literature, Moretti’s experiments in scale may appear
either irrelevant or old hat. Their seeming irrelevance stems from the fact that the
“great unread” of the Middle Ages is for the most part in manuscripts. Even when
manuscripts are digitized and thus potentially more accessible, their texts are rarely
machine-readable. More seriously, Moretti’s aggregation of scholarship on various
national literatures to form his sweeping data sets relies on certain shared character-
istics of those literatures, like the capitalistic market for printed books. Given the
relatively small and eclectic discourse communities characteristic of manuscript
culture, it is not clear that more “distant” analysis is needed. On the other hand,
distant reading loses its novelty for medieval literature insofar as the “other skills”
Moretti recommends for a “larger literary history” — “statistics; work with series,
titles, concordances, incipits” — are not dissimilar from the skills of medieval studies
itself, with its subdisciplines of paleography, codicology, bibliography, dialect study,
and philology (“Slaughterhouse” 209). Scholars of medieval literature have long
operated at scales of reading other than close — a tendency that has sometimes
isolated them within the field of literary study.
My purpose in rehearsing Moretti’s claims is not to recommend his methods,
nor to swear them off, but rather to show the force and broad applicability of his
critiques. It is also to call for responses to them. Indeed, I address this essay not to
medievalists per se — that is, not to the category of scholars who share a historical
224 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

focus on the Middle Ages without necessarily sharing a set of methods. Instead I am
writing primarily to those who participate in the discipline of literary study. By
“discipline,” I mean a set of institutionally embedded knowledge practices linked by
common forms of work, objects of inquiry, and claims to knowledge. Literary study’s
characteristic form of work, one might hazard, is close reading. Its object of inquiry
is a text treated as an experiential script — that is, as an interface that supports
and provokes aesthetic, affective, and interpretive experiences in historically situated
subjects. The specificity of literary study’s claim to knowledge, I claim, is uncertain
at present. In the ongoing “turn away from the linguistic turn” — that is, the widely
acknowledged disintegration of the analogy between linguistic science, literary read-
ing, and social analysis — methodological eclecticism has become pervasive. While
I am ultimately in sympathy with something like Strohm’s and Nolan’s “historicism
after historicism,” I cannot but think that a detour through the programmatic and
polemical imperatives of “distant reading” offers a certain promise — namely, the
possibility of crystallizing literary study, in all of its current eclecticism, as a self-
conscious discipline by means of collectively articulating what we mean by literary-
critical understanding.
“Distant reading,” thanks not least to its clever and opportunistic turn of phrase,
seems to implicate everyone who is engaged in close reading — which is, well, just
about everyone. “Close reading, like motherhood and apple pie, is something we are
all in favor of, even if what we do when we think we are doing close reading is very
different,” Jonathan Culler has recently quipped (20). Margaret Cohen observes that
the practice “continues to dominate the teaching of literature today” (“Narratology”
58). Jane Gallop calls close reading “the very thing that made us a discipline” (15).
Close reading is our business in classrooms, in job talks, on blogs, at conferences, in
monographs. But what do we mean by “close reading”? Despite its bagginess, I’ll
hazard a definition. Close reading is the performance, as it were, of a piece of writing
that is treated as a script, or notation, for sensory impressions, affects, and meanings.
By extension, it is the detailed description of the experience thus cognized. Close
reading is typified by attentiveness to detail and by reflexivity, or self-conscious
awareness of how experience continually modulates in interaction with the text at
hand. Texts “happen” when they are read.
How did I arrive at this definition? More or less by thinking about the contempo-
rary academic practices called “close reading” and by evaluating what these seem
most significantly to share. There is thus a disciplinary dimension to my definition
that is not explicit in the iteration offered in the paragraph above. John Guillory
insists that this disciplinary embeddedness is essential, and he accordingly distinguishes
“close reading” from “reading closely.” “By close reading,” he writes,
I do not mean the same thing as reading closely, which arguably describes many different
practices of reading from antiquity to the modern era. I assume rather that close reading
is a modern academic practice with an inaugural moment, a period of development, and
now perhaps a phase of decline. (“Close Reading” 8)
 SCALES OF READING 225

“Close reading” versus “reading closely”: while I don’t share Guillory’s inclination
to distinguish sharply between them, I agree that understanding close reading’s
disciplinary centrality requires accounting for its institutional history.
I rehearse the familiar narrative here.3 In the 1940s, the New Critics adapted their
techniques of close reading from the “practical criticism” of Cambridge scholar I. A.
Richards and his student William Empson. This development was part of the New
Critics’ claim to method, that is, to the analytical consistency and philosophical
groundedness of their scholarship and pedagogy. Making this claim to method was
crucial to the institutionalization of literary criticism in American research universi-
ties after World War II. In effect, close reading became a solution to disagreements
about the purpose of English departments, debated since the nineteenth century. Did
studying English demand the rigorism associated with Anglo-Saxon philology or the
sensibility and taste commanded by belletrists? Later, the battle lines were slightly
redrawn, between the scienticity of literary history and the eclecticism of interpretive
criticism. New Critics’ elaboration of close reading came to look like a decisive
victory for sensibility. Their protocols for reading helped make plausible the “profes-
sionalization” of literary criticism.4 The battle between aesthetic interpretation and
philology appeared settled when, in 1951, the Modern Language Association added
the word “criticism” to its constitution and when, in 1954, Harvard University
discontinued its requirement that doctoral candidates in English study Anglo-Saxon.
New Criticism’s ensuing fall from favor can be narrated in numerous ways, but
each decline appears, in retrospect, to be mitigated by the rise of the “linguistic turn.”
The “linguistic turn” refers to the widespread influence of structural linguistics in
various American academic disciplines in the period after World War II. In the course
of the “turn,” structures of language, first and foremost described by Ferdinand de
Saussure, were adopted as ur-logics for culture and meaning. Analogies between the
organization of language, texts, cognition, and society permitted sweeping claims and
undergirded interdisciplinary scholarship. The analogization of language, thinking,
and sociality also maintained the prestige of literary study within the interdisciplinary
matrix: if it was “language all the way down” (in some sense), then the dazzling
analytical acumen bequeathed by the New Critics had currency across the humanities
and social sciences. In hindsight, the ascendance of deconstruction looks less like
usurpation and more like regnal succession, with close reading guaranteeing the
bloodline. Likewise, New Historicism oversaw the “return” of history, politics,
and noncanonical texts, but it did so by extending the domain laid open to close
reading.
The one aspect of New Criticism that was genuinely discarded in its aftermath was
its analytical isolation of “the work itself.” Instead, “theory,” New Historicism, and
cultural studies traced interpretive circuits not only between a work’s parts and its
totality, but between a text and its many contexts. In this way, old debates within
literature departments — debates between philology and belles-lettres, literary
history and literary criticism, extrinsic and intrinsic evidence — were redistributed as
the internal fissure of a broadly shared disciplinary practice. This model of practice
226 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

is divided between the imperatives of aesthetic judgment and of historical argument.

It “earns its sense of force by continually dramatizing its skepticism about the
tendency toward generalization that its own movements create,” as Frances Ferguson
incisively describes (662). That is, the interplay of text and context seeks at once to
ground generalizations and to show up their inadequacy. Literary method after New
Criticism might usefully be understood as hermeneutic, especially in its likeness to the
hermeneutic circle, ceaselessly returning one’s evolving contextual knowledge to the
experience of a text.
What happened next? What is happening now? Since the late 1990s, a consensus
has grown that the linguistic turn is over. The post-Saussurean analogy between
linguistic science, literary reading, and social analysis has broken down. In 2007
cultural historian Michael S. Roth penned what might be the most quotable account
of this state of affairs:
The massive tide of language that connected analytic philosophy with pragmatism, an-
thropology with social history, philosophy of science with deconstruction, has receded;
we are now able to look across the sand to see what might be worth salvaging before the
next waves of theory and research begin to pound the shore. As language recedes there
is much talk of ethics, but also intensity; of postcolonialism, but also empire; of the
sacred, but also cosmopolitanism; of trauma, but also animals. (66)

Medieval historian Nancy Partner has subsequently identified many of these new
“candidates vying for critical attention” as exhibiting “a common desire to escape
language, restore a pure and immediate connection with the past or at least some
central aspect of experience, and generally deny the power of language to contami-
nate ‘history’ with its own uncontrollable meanings” (82). Though Partner is address-
ing herself to historians, it is possible to recognize similar developments in literary
study.
Over the last decade a diverse set of attitudes toward literary study, which I call
“antihermeneutic,” have gained momentum. These various orientations toward
reading have ranged themselves explicitly against the hallmarks of the hermeneutic
tradition: against depth, consciousness, the primacy of language, humanism, interpre-
tation, mediation, epistemology, and historicism. From “surface reading” (Best and
Marcus) to the “descriptive turn” (Love 376), from quantitative formalism (Allison
et al.) to speculative realism (Bennett; Harman; Morton), from “reparative reading”
(Sedgwick) to “not reading” (Price), they have variously valorized surfaces, descrip-
tion, cognition, affect, materiality, nonhuman entities, the natural and social sciences,
and speculative thought. Their “family resemblance”5 might also plausibly be
identified as “anticritical” (in either the Kantian or Marxist senses of “critical”), or
“anticorrelationalist” — to take up the banner term of Quentin Meillassoux’s philo-
sophical essay After Finitude (published in France in 2006). I choose here to categorize
them in relation to hermeneutics because of hermeneutics’ obvious disciplinary
significance, as the historically articulated theory and practice of textual interpreta-
tion — or as Wilhelm Dilthey defined it, “the methodology of the interpretation of
 SCALES OF READING 227

written records,” arising from the practical context of “struggle between different
schools about the interpretation of vital works” (249).
“Antihermeneuts” have frequently issued one of two calls: for a different attitudi-
nal comportment of readers to texts (less paranoid, more reparative; less suspicious,
more “just”) or for the redistribution of attention, perhaps in favor of “surfaces,” or
nonhuman actors. Despite the brio of these polemics, the (often excellent) scholarship
generated by those who advance them maintains close reading at the center of their
ostensibly antihermeneutic work. In an astute analysis, Heather Love identifies this
as a field-wide contradiction between theory and practice:
In critiques of the canon, the text, organicism, the nation, culture, and tradition — as
well as the very concept of the human — the anchors of humanistic criticism have come
under sustained and powerful attack in the past several decades. Still, despite widespread
rumors of the death of humanism, key humanist values remain alive and well in literary
studies. What to make of this persistence of humanist values in the context of a discipli-
nary milieu that often sees them as outmoded? . . . I want to focus on the significance of
hermeneutic activity — the practice of close reading — in this genealogy. Close reading
is at the heart of literary studies, a key credential in hiring and promotion, and the foun-
dation of literary pedagogy; it is primarily through this practice that humanist values
survive in the field. (372–73)

I agree with Love that the disjunction between antihermeneutic cris de coeur, on the
one hand, and ubiquitous hermeneutic practice, on the other, signals a kind of
impasse in the field. However, my response to this incongruity differs from hers. Love
offers up several models of analysis inspired by “observation-based social sciences,”
which would ostensibly break with the “humanism” of close reading (375). By con-
trast, I am inclined to give more credence to what we do in our discipline than to
what we say about what we do. My wager is that close reading generates knowledge,
this knowledge has specific value, and our disciplinary practices implicitly attest to
this value. However, in the aftermath of the linguistic turn, there have been few intel-
lectually ambitious efforts to describe the nature and worth of the understanding that
close reading produces. My hope is that even as experiments in alternative methods
continue, we come to give robust accounts of criticism’s own knowledge-claims.
Hermeneutics, I think, is one of the readiest discourses for beginning this work.
Hermeneutics, understood as the art of textual interpretation, has a long history of
negotiating the countermanding tendencies of what we might call, on the one hand,
the scientific management of linguistic and historical alterity, and, on the other, the
phenomenological experience of textualized meaning. The Hungarian philologist and
literary theorist Peter Szondi describes these two countermanding tendencies as
“grammatical interpretation” (or the pursuit of the sensus litteralis) and “allegorical
interpretation” (or the pursuit of sensus spiritualis). The two tendencies share a
common impulse, namely the “desire to draw the canonical text . . . out of its his-
torical remoteness into the present, to make it not only comprehensible but also, as
it were, present” (6). Szondi’s account of early hermeneutics focuses on classical and
228 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

Alexandrian readers of Homer, who confronted the archaic Greek of the Iliad and
Odyssey by glossing the historically alien words (grammatical interpretation) and by
offering new meanings drawn from their own conceptual world, for instance treating
the poems’ gods and heroes as personifications (allegorical interpretation). The
Stoics’ Homeric allegoresis, in turn, became a model for biblical exegesis. Because
some degree of grammatical reconstruction necessarily precedes allegoresis, and
because contemporary relevance is required to motivate the pursuit of the sensus lit-
teralis, grammatical and allegorical interpretations are not simply counterpositions.
They rather implicate one another, producing the historicality of hermeneutic
understanding. The history and historicality of hermeneutics remain live resources for
helping us explain what we are engaged in learning as well as the manner in which
contemporary practices depart from the models of the past.
If our discipline has now woken up from the fever dream of universal textualiza-
tion, then the methodological lessons to be derived from this reveille are not straight-
forward. After all, literary study remains uniquely dependent on the writtenness of
experience. Many aspects of existence are nonlinguistic, but the discipline is premised
on that special class of artifacts made out of language. The disciplinary efflorescence
of antihermeneutic rhetoric has been, I think, an effort to acknowledge the “turn
away from the linguistic turn,” to recognize its critique and be accountable to it. Yet
a complete “turn away” would be self-annihilating. Despite earnest wishes to do
justice to the referents of signification, the limits of epistemology and representation
are not just so much poststructuralist coquettishness. Literature’s referential and
rhetorical powers are real, but they do not reflect and affect the material world in a
straightforward manner. The new modesty of literary study has taken the form of a
rhetoric that deauthorizes hermeneutic practice, even as hermeneutic practice, exem-
plified by close reading, continues. One way to bridge this disjunction would be to
give new accounts of literary-critical knowledge production, arguing both its validity
and its limits. Instead of assuming the universality of linguistic structuration, we
might more seriously seek to trace the borders of language and what happens at those
borders. Moreover, if we move away from strict allegiance to a Saussurean paradigm
of language — as a system of arbitrary signs that signify through difference and
combination — alternative modes of inquiry, like semantics and pragmatics, may
help us think rigorously about the interface of language and world. Making substan-
tial but bounded claims for literary study will mean thinking anew the contemporary
architectonics of knowledge.
There is another option: to abandon close reading and hermeneutic interpretation.
“Does work like mine belong in a History department, rather than in English?”
Moretti asks, adding:
I take the idea as a compliment — trying to make literary study a part of historical
research has always been a fixation of mine. Does this abolish the pleasure of reading
literature? No — it just means that between the pleasure and the knowledge of literature
[or at least a large part of knowledge] there is no continuity. Knowing is not reading.
(“Moretti Responds”; brackets in original)
 SCALES OF READING 229

“Knowing is not reading”: Moretti posits a transformed methodology. To move liter-

ary study into another disciplinary domain, and to do it well, would require verve
and imagination — qualities that are admittedly everywhere on display in Moretti’s
writings and in some of the other scholarship advocating investigation of systems of
literary and textual production, without hermeneutic reinvestment in the individual
text, without return to the phenomenological interface of reading. Moretti’s provoca-
tions are worth thinking through and thinking with. At the least, his alternative scales
of reading might provoke strong and intellectually ambitious counterarguments,
accounts of what would be lost if we redrew the dimensions of our discipline to agree
that “knowing is not reading.” Distant reading’s “heresy,” as it has been called, has
the potential to mobilize a certain catholicity in literary study. If we do understand
reading to be knowing, then we require rigorous accounts, argued in the terms of the
present, about the kind of knowing that close reading and interpretation generate.
Above, I quoted Rebecca Comay on Hegel’s dialectical method — “It brings every
situation to its breaking point. Its strategy is not to instigate change but to precipitate
crisis” (95) — and I suggested that Moretti’s arguments might act likewise, by sending
a polarizing current through our disciplinary field. However, the “crisis” that I
associate with Moretti, which is punctual, intellectual, and dialectical, should not be
confused with another contemporary crisis, namely the “crisis in the humanities.” In
the present era of neoliberal austerity, permanent low-intensity crisis is the horizon
of university life. Crisis-as-stasis describes the feel of institutions increasingly aban-
doned to market rationality. Digital and quantitative methods of humanistic research
in no sense have caused the “crisis in the humanities,” and any facile lumping of, say,
digital corpus analysis together with the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs)
obscures more than it reveals. Nonetheless, both the methodological crisis in literary
study and the “crisis in the humanities” raise a serious and sticky matter, the matter
of humanistic work. What is the labor of literary study, what do we want it to be,
what value does it have, and what are the distinct but interrelated levels at which
those questions have answers?
Responding to these is beyond the scope of what remains of my essay. One can
imagine a complex of replies that would address, for instance, the “adjunctification”
of academic labor and the rise of online and for-profit education; the divide between
the pedagogy of writing and literary study; the hegemony of English as language
and as department; institutional gateways that maintain the stratification of reading
practices; and the largely solitary nature of literary study, compared to the collabora-
tive but hierarchical organization of science labs, and our discipline’s relatively
incommunicable results, with little portability even across subfields. The situatedness
of academic labor affects the concrete tasks we perform and the techniques we teach
others to perform. How should we negotiate the institutionally conditioned nature of
our knowledge production, within that very work? As we reflect on what we do and
what we might do, it is worth thinking again about the New Criticism that came to
ascendency in the era of the G.I. Bill. Despite its drift toward libertarian individualism
and aesthetic fetishism, New Criticism did have a democratizing vector, which passed
230 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

through the validity of each person’s aesthetic and interpretive responses as sources
of knowledge. New Criticism’s particular model of humanistic empiricism meant that
“primary research” was constantly going on in classrooms: close reading was held to
generate literary knowledge. Of course, a utopian dimension can be found in any
social form, and this democratizing vector has its own wavering historical path. New
Criticism may not have done justice to close reading, but perhaps its pedagogical
possibilities are not to be discarded.
I cited above John Guillory’s distinction between “close reading,” which he consid-
ers to be disciplinarily specific, and more general practices of “reading closely.” How-
ever, any firm distinction between them seems to me untenable. Hermeneutic practice
operates on the premise that its own situatedness does not cut off access to the vast
repertoire of textualized meaning-making distributed across time, space, and social
organization. What we read changes how we read it. Elsewhere, Guillory acknowl-
edges the continued presence of what he calls “lay reading,” within professionalized
practice: “scholarly reading can be said to preserve within it an encysted form of lay
reading, a necessary recollection of [its] pleasure” (“How Scholars Read” 12). This
pleasure, “encysted” or not, is itself a source of knowledge. “[T]o admit to pleasure
or enjoyment in our reading of medieval texts, to acknowledge their emotive power
or charm,” Simon Gaunt argues, is to help construct “a rigorous way of talking about
the affects of texts that had enormous power to move, precisely as a means of under-
standing how this power arises” (480–81). Treating literary texts as performative
scripts, for the production of imagery, affect, and meaning, implies that “performing”
texts is necessary for discovering their design and effects. Knowing may not be
entirely a matter of reading, but reading closely plays an irreducible part.
The evental force of reading implicates scale as well. John Frow, a literary scholar
who has made extensive use of sociological methods, bases his critique of Moretti on
the fact that the hermeneutic negotiation of scale is finally indispensable. In response
to Moretti’s claim that in distant reading, distance “is a condition of knowledge: it
allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text,”
Frow writes:
Yet this dichotomy of text to smaller or greater units seems to me to beg the question of
the process by which units of analysis are constituted: devices, themes, tropes, genres,
and systems are neither given in advance nor arbitrarily constructed by an analytic choice,
but are, rather, necessarily implicated in and derived from a process of reading and
interpretation. (239)

The extrinsic and intrinsic determinants of literary scale cannot be reduced to one
another, and neither can they be completely distinguished. This observation places
limits on the kinds of knowledge that literary scholarship produces, but it also helps
us to describe what is specific to, and specifically valuable about, our inquiry. Units
of analysis emerge through hermeneutic processes, and how we establish comparisons
between such units depends upon what we take to be important about them.
 SCALES OF READING 231

Chaucer’s poetic practice itself is a constant enactment of the malleability of

literary scale. Minor and marginal characters step forward, dissolving the episodes
that enclose them, or pausing the plots about to leapfrog past them. In the House of
Fame, even the monumentality of brass dissipates under the force of Dido’s rhetoric,
which is the precise moment when the dreamer-narrator asserts his authorship: “Non
other auctour alegge I” (314). Vertiginous changes of scale are essential not only to
Chaucerian poetics, but also to the ambitions of translatio studii and to the Ovidian
wit that define late medieval poetics more generally. When the narrator of the House
of Fame recalls his catalogue of women wronged — Phyllis, Briseis, Oenone,
Hypsipyle, Medea, Deianira, Ariadne — he does so in a poem that enacts literature’s
power to contest and construct discursive scale and that thematizes scale’s epistemo-
logical and ethical consequences. The referential scope of each woman’s name is not
determined in advance, but happens in processes of reading, whether by growing to
swallow the structures that would subordinate it or by fading away, “ofthowed” from
Fame’s icy crags (1143). Scale, in summary, remains a literary event, taking place in
acts of reading, both distant and close.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors of Exemplaria for the invitation to contribute to this special
issue; to Eileen Joy for posting an early version of these ideas as a blog post on In
the Middle, which yielded lively, thoughtful comments; to Ruth Evans, whose New
Chaucer Society seminar on the “descriptive turn” provoked my thinking and whose
generous responses furthered it; and finally, to Ian Cornelius, Marcella Frydman
Manoharan, Maia McAleavey, Arthur Russell, Daniel Shore, and David Simon for
helpful suggestions.

Notes
1 3
All citations of Chaucer are from The Riverside
Chaucer.
4
2
Although I disagree with the absoluteness of his for-
mulation, Stanley Fish makes this point with clarity:
“[C]an you simultaneously operate within a practice
and be self-consciously in touch with the conditions
that enable it? The answer could be yes only if you
could achieve a reflective distance from those condi-
tions while still engaging in that practice; but once
the conditions enabling a practice become the object
of analytic attention . . . you are engaging in another
practice (the practice of reflecting on the conditions
5
of a practice you are not now practicing) . . . Once
you turn, for example, from actually performing
literary criticism to examining the ‘network of forc-
es and factors’ that underlie the performance, liter-
ary criticism is no longer what you are performing”
(240).
The following epitome is based on the histories
recounted in Menand; Frantzen; and Graff.
Menand usefully anatomizes what was required for
literary criticism to “become a valid professional
pursuit” in the mid-century research universities:
“This meant demonstrating that literature is a field
whose study requires a transmissible but untranslat-
able body of knowledge and skills; that literary
criticism, or a particular form of literary criticism,
constitutes such a body of knowledge and skills;
and that proto-specialists in literary studies can
be vetted and credentialed by standard academic
methods” (109–10).
Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances”
describes what links a group that cannot be delim-
ited by “what is common to all” but rather by “a
complicated network of similarities overlapping and
crisscrossing” (§65–§67). There is no single feature
common to all the antihermeneutic approaches
I invoke here.
232 JULIE ORLEMANSKI

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Notes on contributor
Julie Orlemanski is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the
University of Chicago. Her recent scholarship includes a chapter on genre in A Hand-
book of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and an essay on practices of
medical reading, in Robert Thornton and His Books (York Medieval Press, 2014).
She is completing work on a monograph entitled Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Signs,
and Narratives in Late Medieval England.
Correspondence to: Julie Orlemanski, Department of English Language and
Literature, University of Chicago, Walker Hall, 4th Floor, 1115 E. 58th St., Chicago,
IL 60637, USA. Email: julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu