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Close Reading, Writing and Culture

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DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2010.527349

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Close Reading, Writing and Culture
Neil McCaw
University of Winchester, English, Creative Writing and American Studies,
Sparkford Road, Winchester, SO22 4NR United Kingdom
This paper examines the status and impact of close reading practice within the
discipline of Creative Writing and argues that the overly narrow, practice-based form
of textual interpretation that dominates in the writing workshop is limiting and
unhelpful within the context of a broader sense of student writing and learning
development. What is required is for reading to be broadened to take into account a
much wider sense of culture and knowledge, and for other subject domains to be
brought into the Creative Writing classroom in order to bring to life the words on the
page far beyond the implications of the process of learning the writing ‘craft’. The
history of close reading theories in the twentieth century is referenced as a means of
identifying a potentially more symbiotic relationship between ‘close’ and ‘cultural’
reading methods. It is only when such cultural knowledges are taken into account
that the texts students are expected to read and learn from can truly become useful,
encouraging writing students with a much sharper awareness of the cultural and
ideological implications of language and text, within a discipline that much more
readily acknowledges its wider role as communication in praxis.

doi: 10.1080/14790726.2010.527349

Keywords: Writing, workshops, reading, pedagogy, culture, creativity

When I first read Paul Dawson’s ‘Towards a New Poetics in Creative

Writing Pedagogy’ (2004) his vision of a reconfigured discipline explicitly
engaging with the ‘New Humanities’ felt intriguing and exciting. It was
liberating to imagine a re- aligning of Creative Writing not just with literary
studies (the old chestnut) but also with various humanities and even (exten-
ding his frame of reference) social sciences: socio-linguistics, history, sociology,
cultural studies, politics, philosophy, theology, education studies, and crimin-
ology. And why stop there? What about the hard sciences, information
technology, medicine, and many more besides? This sense of freedom
reminded me of the interdisciplinary debates between English and History
in the earlier 1990s,1 wherein boundaries between subjects were viewed as
fluid and interchangeable rather than fixed and immutable. Dawson’s road
map to cross-disciplinarity, to the immersion of Creative Writing within wider
discourses of knowledge and communication, also addressed a nagging
feeling I had been having that my undergraduate and postgraduate work-
shops were not adequately addressing questions as to the way writing
‘participates in cultural, social, political, philosophical, religious debates’
(Boulter, 2004: 137). As such, his article felt emancipatory, a spur to ‘shifting
the pedagogical focus of the workshop from narrowly formalist conceptions of
craft to the social context of literature’ (Dawson, 2004).

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26 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

The key challenge of Dawson’s article was how to implement such ideas
in practice; how to move from innovative intentions to classroom realities.
A number of years on the challenge has yet to be taken up consistently within
the discipline. Despite the lively debates of journals such as TEXT, New
Writing, and Electronic Book Review, and the raft of monographs on creative
writing theory and practice, the broader landscape of the subject within
universities is still, as it has been from the outset, rather too often dominated
by formalist concerns, and an accompanying, overly narrow form of close
textual reading. The influence of Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (1934)
still overshadows the practical pedagogy of the discipline, the ‘idealized space
of the [writing] workshop’ (Edmonds, 2005), within which students’ own work
and the work of others is examined under the guise of ‘reading as a writer’:
‘when someone is learning creative writing they are not only learning the
modes and methods of writerly inscription, they are . . . also learning key
elements of the critical understanding that informs and assists our creative
writing’ (Harper, 2010b: xvi).
The 2010 UCAS prospectus reveals an array of Creative Writing pro-
grammes wherein close reading workshops are identified as fundamental and
where developed, sustained interdisciplinary connections between writing and
other subject domains and areas of culture and communication are rare,
beyond the more familiar links between writing, literary studies,2 and the
creative arts. In the numerous modular schemes across the UK, for instance,
wherein students can take Creative Writing alongside a vast array of other
subjects, there is often no cross-disciplinary dialogue at all between what
effectively become two discrete parts of a degree, separately studied. And
even within the 18 self-standing programmes named ‘Creative Writing’3 and
the further 11 that are Creative Writing programmes in everything but name
(disguised by titles such as ‘Professional’ or ‘Media’ Writing4), the degree to
which students are freed from the disciplinary shackles and encouraged to
explore the various interrelations between writing and the (political, social,
cultural) world around them falls a long way short of the sort of sea change
Dawson initially urged.
Moreover, rather than close reading merely maintaining its position of
pedagogical importance in Creative Writing programmes, in many respects its
position has been extended in recent years. Brande’s seminal sense of craft-
based textual enquiry underpins much of the thriving market of secondary
literature of the discipline, in which the logic of closely reading as a
developing writer reigns supreme. Reading is seen as ‘focusing on the craft,
the choices, and techniques of the author’ (Burroway, 2007: xxiii). It is a
functional sense of the workshop reading process wherein form, rather than
content, is the central concern: ‘students of writing must learn to appreciate
the work of other authors and to appreciate their techniques; we must learn
how to read for how a piece of writing works rather than for what it means’
(Webb, 2005: 180, original emphasis).
Thus, it has become almost doxic that, as Routledge’s Creative Writing:
A Workbook with Readings puts it, ‘reading is one of the chief ways to train
yourself as a writer’ (Anderson, 2006: 12), with utility the key: ‘when we read
other fictional works, as writers, we read them as de facto instruction manuals
Close Reading, Writing and Culture 27

for technique, style, structure and thematic possibility’ (Harris, 2009). By

learning the rules, Amy Sage Webb claims, we ‘may produce a lifetime of
stories’ (2005: 180), directly relating a tight readerly focus on language and
form to the development of the trainee writer learning ‘how to do it.’ What we
end up with, perhaps most explicitly delineated in Francine Prose’s Reading as
a Writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, is
the triumph of practice-based close reading over all other forms of textual
interpretation, the most ‘basic techniques of looking at a text and noticing
what was [is] there’ (Brummett, 2010: ix) raised to the status of the ‘go to’
method of Creative Writing as ‘a formal institutionalised apprenticeship for
literary aspirants’ (Dawson, 2004: 2). This sense of ‘apprenticeship,’ of learning
the craft, has been a defining characteristic of the proliferation of university
writing programmes.
The sadness is that such a functionalist caricature of reading as a process
fundamentally lacks imagination and creativity, ironic bearing in mind it is
supposed to be Creative Writing after all. For the tight focus on learning ‘how
to do it’ inhibits the freedom of interpretation, instead lending itself to the
examination and learning of the apparently fixed properties of texts that (it has
been judged) should be read. Within this environment, the sort of creative joy of
reading and interpretation that resists the sausage factory ‘modern academic
commodification of human experience,’ and which instead acknowledges the
‘human values associated with our fundamentally action-based creative
exploration’ (Harper, 2010b: xvi), is drastically restricted, if not entirely absent.
There is little sense that creativity can be part of the interpretation of texts,
negating the imaginative interaction between language and what Hans Robert
Jauss has called the ‘context of experience of aesthetic perception . . . the
subjectivity of the interpretation and of the taste of different readers or levels
of readers’ (Jauss, 1982: 23).
The limitations of this utilitarian form of close reading are magnified by the
frequent workshop focus on ‘the privileged category of literature . . . the raison
d’étre of Creative Writing’ (Dawson, 2004: 4). For, within the context of a
disciplinary logic that posits ‘reading as a writer’ as a precursor to ‘learning
how to do it better,’ literary ‘classics’ that are a commonplace of literature
syllabuses, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872/1985), present a
particular dilemma. Just what do we usefully do with such texts in a (close
reading) Creative Writing classroom full of students who are striving to
become relevant, contemporary writers?:
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not
greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly
have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a
new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a
brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is
forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts
are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a
far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
(Eliot, 1872/1985: 878)
28 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

Do such extracts, when read closely, have something to contribute to the

process of developing and fine tuning writing skills in a way that accords with
the twenty-first century publishing environment? What are students to make,
for example, of the profound, but frankly outmoded elegance of the sentence
construction; of the slightly clumsy, old-fashioned omniscience of the narrator;
of the speculative philosophical and moral heavy-handedness? Each of these
aspects contributes to the extraordinary, groundbreaking nature of Middle-
march as a landmark of 19th century realist art; but how are our students to
come to terms with the fact that if the novel was submitted to an agent today it
would almost certainly be dismissed as unpublishable? Close reading in
isolation (even of a literary classic) seems hopelessly ill-suited to the task of
helping students understand how their reading will help them to become
better (let alone published) writers.
What texts such as Middlemarch thus reveal is a fault line between formalist
close readings of published works within Creative Writing workshops and the
organic process of students evolving not just as creative writers but as creative
thinkers as well. For as close reading becomes more functional it also becomes
less and less effective as a means of facilitating writing and learning
development. Those of us involved in the discipline try to paper over the
cracks of this fault line with earnest but too often uncritical assertions of the
truth that ‘reading makes you a better writer,’ but implying that a familiarity
with the words and form of canonical works will necessarily improve a
student’s ability and discriminatory powers is little more than a comforting
myth. It glosses over the fact that the benefits of reading for writers depends
on precisely what sort of reading we are actually talking about. Such benefits
are not inevitable and universal.
One response to the ‘Middlemarch’ question (a.k.a. ‘how does a detailed
familiarity with the literary canon help students to become more effective
writers?’) is to reject the canon and study only contemporary published works
in writing workshops. But this would miss the point. For even then, unless we
are interested more in our students perfecting the art of pastiche or imitation,
the question of ‘how useful is this?’ cannot be resolved by a narrow
application of close reading in isolation. It is the introduction of a much
broader sense of knowledge into the reading process that offers the best
potential for bridging the gap between functional interpretation and the more
expansive forms of textual interpretation that are likely to further students’
understanding and appreciation of how writing works and what being a
writer means within the context of a wider culture. In terms of a work such as
Middlemarch, for instance, writing students can only effectively make use of the
novel in their learning/writing development through understanding both its
nineteenth-century English cultural frame and its relation to (and status
within) their own culture and its various knowledges. Once they have such an
understanding their close reading takes on a greater relevance and poignancy.
The irony is that prominent close reading critics knew the truth of this well
over half a century ago. I.A. Richards’s theory of ‘Practical Criticism’ (first
published 1929), for instance, often seen as a reaction against ‘speculative’
culturally-informed critical approaches, regularly moved beyond a focus on
‘the plain sense of poetry’ (Richards, 1929/1964: 13, emphasis original) as ‘a
Close Reading, Writing and Culture 29

craft, in the sense that mathematics, cooking, and shoemaking are crafts’
(Richards, 1964: 312). Despite an inherent suspicion of contextual, especially
psychological, criticism, ‘poetry has suffered too much already from those
who are merely looking for something to investigate and those who wish to
exercise some cherished theory’ (Richards, 1929/1964: 322), he also attempted
to accommodate such approaches within his own world-view:
[between the] two extreme wings of the psychological forces there is the
comparatively neglected and unheard-of middle body, the cautious,
traditional, academic, semi-philosophical psychologists who have been
profiting from the vigorous manoeuvres of the advanced wings and are
now much more ready than they were twenty years ago to take a hand in
the application of the [close reading critical] science. (Richards, 1964:
322)
Richards’s subsequent How to Read a Page (originally published 1943)
extended this sense of readerly context further in acknowledging the multi-
plicity of differently situated (and educated and informed) readers:
We may reasonably doubt whether there is one right and only right
reading . . . different minds have found such different things in them
that we would be very rash if we assumed that some one way of reading
them which commends itself to us is the right one. (Richards, 1943/1954:
11)
Reading was thus seen as an interaction between individual, culture and text:
‘the varied and possible meanings hang together . . . seeing thereby more
clearly what our world is and what we are who are building it to live in’
(Richards, 1943/1954: 13). It was a process of ongoing, but essentially partial,
interpretation rooted in the reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’ (Jauss, 1982: 23):
Modern historical scholarship especially terrorizes us with the sugges-
tion that somewhere in the jungle of evidence there is something we
happen not to know which would make the point clear, which would
show us just what the author did in fact mean. That suspicion of a
missing clue is paralyzing
unless we remember firmly that from the
very nature of the case essential clues are always missing. However
much evidence we amass, we still have to jump to our conclusions.
Reading is not detection as the perfect detective practices it. We are
never concerned with facts pointing conclusively to a central fact
what
happened in an author’s mind at a given moment. No facts could ever
establish that. If psychoanalysis has done nothing else for the world it
has at least helped us to realize that minds
including the authors’
minds
are private. All we can ever prove by factual evidence is an act

that the author wrote such and such words. But what he meant by them
is another matter. (Richards, 1943/1954: 14, original emphasis)
The New Criticism, which followed on from the early work of Richards and
was predominant in Western textual study for much of the twentieth century,
has similarly been characterised as constitutionally reluctant to consider texts
in relation to authors and cultural contexts. But, as with Practical Criticism, in
30 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

practice the New Critics were more inclusive than this. W.K. Wimsatt and M.C.
Beardsley may have become known for their rejection of the ‘intentional’ and
‘affective’ fallacies, therein sidelining the author’s own intentions and the
effect of the text on the (culturally situated) reader,5 but this was only part of
the story. And whilst John Crowe Ransom’s seminal The New Criticism (1941)
opened by rejecting any reliance on ‘the idea of using the psychological
affective vocabulary in the hope of making literary judgements in terms of the
feelings, emotions, and attitudes of poems instead of in terms of their objects’
(Ransom, 1941: xi), in truth his prescribed reading method was far less narrow
and restrictive in its focus than this. Ransom explicitly delineated what he saw
as the five external ‘contexts’ of poetry: physiological, psychological, biologi-
cal-psychological, biological-logical, and aesthetic. His subsequent considera-
tion of poems in relation to the neural and intellectual responses they
generated and the ways in which they negotiated between reader, society
and other forms of literary expression were as such all contextual.6 He
celebrated T.S. Eliot precisely because of his use of external material in his
reading of poems: ‘it is Eliot who uses his historical studies for the sake of
literary understanding, and therefore might be called a historical critic’
(Ransom, 1941: 139). Indeed, for Ransom, historical critics were superior for
the way in which they:
Know the threads of factual and intellectual history which connect some
English poet with the incidents of his own life, with the ‘thought’ and
‘interests’ of his age, and with contemporary and earlier poets in the
same ‘school’ or ‘tradition.’ (Ransom, 138).
Perhaps most tellingly, even Cleanth Brooks, the New Critic most openly
antagonistic to the idea of culturally-informed criticism, also ended up
acknowledging the necessary cultural contexts of close reading as a method:
If literary history has not been emphasized in the pages that follow, it is
not because I discount its importance, or because I have failed to take it
into account. It is rather than I have been anxious to see what residuum,
if any, is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix.
(Brooks, 1968: vi)
Brooks’s overarching motivation was to move beyond seeing the poetry of
the past as merely ‘cultural anthropology’ and poetry of the present as merely
‘political, or religious, or moral instrument’ (Brooks, 1968: vi). But his ongoing
rejection of what he perceived to be the crudities of ‘the heresy of paraphrase’
(Brooks, 1968: 164) and his conviction that ‘the poetry must be wrested from
the context’ (Brooks, 1968: 175) also contained within it an acceptance of socio-
cultural considerations and the importance of ‘the response of the reader to a
poem and . . . the nature of that response as the poem makes its impact on
various kinds of people and upon various generations’ (Brooks, 1968: x). Thus
he ended up implying, in a tacit link to later twentieth-century reading
strategies, that reading was not just about ‘a thing that texts can have’ but also
about something that that could ‘be produced’ (Bennett, 1992: 211, original
emphasis). Textual interpretation was seen as akin to ‘[an interaction] between
the culturally activated text and the culturally activated reader, an interaction
Close Reading, Writing and Culture 31

structured by the material, social, ideological, and institutional relationships in

which both text and readers are inescapably inscribed’ (Bennett, 1992: 216,
original emphasis).
What the critical history of twentieth-century close reading thus illustrates
is that there is no necessary, inevitable tension between formalist and non-
formalist approaches beyond the particular ways in which we choose to apply
them:
Formalist critics are always interested in the vast world which lies
outside literature and that the nonformalists who have dominated
literary criticism and theory over the last decades of the twentieth
century do their most persuasive work by attending closely to the artistic
character of the text before them. (Lentricchia & Dubois, 2003: ix)
Historical close reading methods such as Practical and New Criticism
consistently implied ‘an ideal literary critic as one who commands and
seamlessly integrates both styles of reading’ (Lentricchia & Dubois, 2003: ix).
As Julian Wolfreys recognises, in his ostensibly ‘theoretical’ Readings: Acts of
close reading in literary theory, reading closely can still (if carried out in the right
way) be a dynamic process in which texts and knowledges are thrown
together, with the reader opening themselves up ‘to receiving numerous
significations, a complex web of possible meanings, a skein of traces and
inscriptions within the single
and singular word’ (Wolfreys, 2000: vii).
So in thinking about writing and its cultural contexts, its status as
communication in praxis, it becomes clear that close reading need not be
overthrown in order to institute a compulsively interdisciplinary reading
method. Rather a kind of retro-styling of close reading practice is required, one
drawing from critical history in the way it moves away from the functionalist
tendencies of Creative Writing pedagogy towards a form of reading that is
imaginative and dynamic, multi-layered and also (equally importantly) enjoy-
able for its own sake. It should be a process of creative exploration, often without
tangible, directly-related writing outcomes, wherein texts are considered in all
their glory and grubbiness: as they are constructed, as they are interpreted, as
they allow themselves to be imagined. And the introduction of numerous
knowledges (social, cultural, political) is a key element of this. For once texts are
read against a more expansive, fluid discursive backdrop the multiplicity of
potential textual meanings are multiplied a thousand fold. The cultural
background of both reader and text become central to the forming and shaping
of every individual act of interpretation. And student writing development is
therein enhanced by an implicit recognition that texts do ‘not lie innocently in
the world but are themselves constituted by an interpretive act.’ (Fish, 1980: 164)
Reading workshops should never lose sight of the details of content and form,
but neither should these be mistaken for all there is to know.
Returning to the ‘Middlemarch’ question with this in mind, a host of
additional possibilities suggest themselves. George Eliot’s novel suddenly
has all number of things to offer the evolving writer, beyond a simple (some
might say simplistic) heightening of their awareness of a literary ‘classical’
form. By examining the writing closely, and teasing this out in terms of the
infinities of context, the text ends up shedding light on a range of different
32 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

cultural and writerly aspects: gender studies and literary history allow us to
think about the ways in which the femininity (or otherwise) of an author
impacts upon writing and its interpretation (do we read it differently if we
don’t know that George Eliot was a woman?); socio-linguistics and sociology
facilitate an examination of language and identity construction within the
imagined organic social framework; English studies and philosophy enlighten
the omniscient, intrusive third person narrator and its embodiment of
particular ideas of objectivity and perception; history and scientific theory
illuminate Eliot’s use of the evolutionary ‘web’ metaphor as her fictional social
structure; theology connects the novel form to the artistic exploration of faith
and science through the characterisation of the flawed empiricist Dr Lydgate;
education studies provides a context for Eliot’s extremely intellectual,
untypical (especially for a nineteenth-century woman writer) frame of
reference; and criminology provides tools to consider the construction of
criminality and moral deviancy through a form of social ‘labelling’. Read
closely, the words of the novel thus illuminate ‘multiple speaking
positions . . . [and] concrete textual utterances,’ part of ‘the verbal-ideological
life’ of the text ‘as a literary participant in ‘‘public’’ discourse.’ (Dawson, 2004:
214) The social role of the writer and writing itself are thrown into ever sharper
focus.
As such, a model of enlightened close reading facilitates a broader sense of
writerly and intellectual development, in which the words on the page are but
the first step in a wider cultural interaction. It is a method that steals from the
formalist processes of reading as well as from the culturally-sensitive,
discursive transgressiveness of strategies of critical reading that are firmly
located within the episteme(s) in which the texts are conceived, produced, and
read. Creative Writing curricula can therein be enriched through an open
engagement with a variety of cultural materials, debates, and experiences.
Modules within writing programmes such as ‘Writing and Responsibility’ at
the University of Derby, ‘Language and Gender’ at Roehampton, and ‘What is
Contemporary?’ at Sheffield Hallam illustrate that this work has already
begun. As do developments in the discipline illustrated in the 2010 NAWE
(National Association of Writers in Education) conference programme, which
includes papers on the intersection of writing and class, race and gender, and
on utilising concepts drawn from the biological sciences in creative writing
workshops. At my own institution the undergraduate Creative Writing
curriculum now includes a raft of new modules bringing texts and cultures
together, with crime adaptations read in light of criminological discourses;
writing for galleries and exhibitions viewed in terms of ideas of heritage and
national identity; metafiction positioned in terms of metaphysics; and utopian
and dystopian writing read against the backdrop of environmental politics.
These recent revisions deliberately engage with broader, cross-disciplinary
issues and debates as well as with the intricacies of language and form,
continually striving to resolve the tensions between what Dawson called ‘a
formalist . . . and a sociological poetics.’ (Dawson, 2003:)
The desired outcome is for students to be looking in a more explicit and
more sustained fashion not just at publishing environments and writing trends
but also the ideological, philosophical, and political arenas of words and
Close Reading, Writing and Culture 33

language; to repeatedly consider the interactions between what they write and
issues of human identity, meaning and communication. In so doing they will
better understand the role of language, writing and the writer, and be able to
make connections between texts and the issues they confront, considering the
impact of an almost limitless range of knowledges. The words on the page will
be sparked to life in new and exciting ways, encouraging students to become
more astute and more aware, writers ‘with a passion for the political inference
of writerly action’ (Harper, 2010a: xiv). And Creative Writing itself will
develop ever more sophisticated lines of communication with the culture(s)
within which it participates and thrives.

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to . . . Neil McCaw, (Neil.Mccaw@
winchester.ac.uk).

Notes
1. A resumé of many of these debates can be found in S. Barker and J. Gill (eds.)
(2009) Literature and History: Essays in Honour of Peter Widdowson (London:
Continuum).
2. Even in 2010, 25 universities only allow the study of Creative Writing as part of an
overarching English degree. These are: Aberystwyth, Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham,
Canterbury Christ Church, Cardiff, Goldsmiths, Huddersfield, Kent, Lampeter,
Lancaster, Leeds Trinity, Northumbria, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Plymouth,
Queen’s University Belfast, Reading, Ruskin, Salford, Southampton, Sunderland,
Swansea, Teeside, Warwick and Westminster.
3. These are: Bath Spa, Bedfordshire, Bolton, Brunel, Buckinghamshire, Derby, Essex,
Gloucestershire, Greenwich, Liverpool John Moores, London Metropolitan, North-
ampton, St. Mark and St. John, Roehampton, Sheffield Hallam, Staffordshire,
Trinity UC and Winchester.
4. See programmes at Bangor, Bournemouth, University of East London, Lancaster,
Leeds City, Middlesex, Portsmouth, Southampton Solent, South Essex College, St
Mary’s and Thames Valley.
5. See (for example) Wimsatt’s (1954) The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press).
6. See Ransom (1979: 90
92) for a more detailed discussion of these contexts.

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