Between lines: close reading, quotation, and critical style from practical criticism to queer theory

Between Lines: Close Reading, Quotation, and Critical Style from Practical Criticism to Queer Theory offers a set of theorizations and heuristics with which to investigate the history of close reading in the Anglo-American university. Working from 1920s Cambridge to the American New Criticism, and from the arrival of deconstruction at Yale to the rise of queer theory, it argues that close reading is best understood as a changing but cohering institutional style of writing that runs through twentieth-century literary criticism. In readings of I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Paul de Man, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick it documents unexpected contiguities between close reading, literary modernism, twentieth-century poetics, and autobiography by positing that quotation has a formal and compositional function in critical style. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the history of reading by offering the first sustained history and theory of close reading to account for the practice as it predates and outlasts the New Criticism.