In the face of institutional and economic pressures that privilege the “supra-disciplinary” organization of knowledge and emphasize “humanism” broadly conceived, Jonathan Kramnick believes that the knowledge practices of distinct disciplines are worth preserving. In Criticism and Truth, his name for the distinctive practice of literary studies is “close reading,” or “the craftwork of spinning sentences from sentences already in the world.” Close reading is ubiquitous to the discipline and “that ubiquity,” he writes, is “part of the democratic ethos of this book.” Close reading is thus both the “baseline competence” of the discipline and the permitting condition for all subsequent scales of argumentation across the wide range of theoretical axes that characterize “criticism as it is practiced all the time, everywhere, as part of the ordinary science and everyday brilliance of the discipline.”

Criticism and Truth proceeds by offering us a close reading of close reading. Tracking one writer’s syntactical bend as she accommodates her prose to this clause or that line and another writer’s imitation of the figurative language that she studies, Kramnick asks us to think about the creative dimension of criticism. As “craft knowledge,” close reading treats the many objects of its study as “enabling constraints” for thought. The critic’s woven sentences are an expression of those constraints. Our evaluation of criticism is therefore an aesthetic judgment. When we call a piece of criticism “apt,” our evaluation of the achievement presupposes its truth as the necessary condition of its “elegance.”

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld (CRR): You begin your recent book, Criticism and Truth, by describing a looming extinction event in the history of knowledge and in the discipline of literary studies. Can you set the scene for us?

Jonathan Kramnick (JK): The humanities in general and literary studies in particular have been experiencing a chronic, now acute crisis of employment for the past quarter century, a crisis stemming from defunding and austerity within higher education. The situation got worse after the financial crisis of 2008 and then again at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Prior to the pandemic, the downturn in jobs had been close to 50 percent over ten years; then, for a time at least, hiring ceased entirely. Hiring has returned in the last couple of years to something like a new and unsustainably shrunken equilibrium.

What all that has meant is an entire generation of younger scholars has been left marooned, without a sense of future employment. That’s the most urgent ethical situation for the discipline: creating good and sustainable jobs for its younger and precarious scholars.

That said, what the book is principally concerned with is something related: namely, that without younger scholars moving up through the ranks—inheriting skills of the practice; and then, in inheriting these skills, transforming them—the discipline itself ceases to exist. No discipline of study exists without an infrastructure of training. Training and younger scholars moving up through the ranks are the lifeblood of any discipline of study: inheriting practices and skills and transforming them as you inherit them by asking questions and pursuing lines of inquiry that senior scholars don’t necessarily think of pursuing on their own. Training and challenging what has come before you keeps the discipline alive and gives shape to its desires to understand and change the world.

So what I wanted to do in writing the book was to describe, at this moment of real peril, some of the tacit knowledge of the field. What are the highly skilled and yet seemingly intuitive practices that ground the discipline and give it coherence and standing? I wanted to celebrate the everyday practice of critics everywhere as they write articles and books on all the topics that interest literary studies today and that might tomorrow.

CRR: You describe “close reading” as the bare competence or baseline practice of the discipline. What are you hoping to do in grounding both questions of disciplinary knowledge and larger interdisciplinary conversations in that practice?

JK: I was hoping to focus on one thing that makes the discipline special, that grounds its claims to tell truths about the world and that might be brought into conversation with the truth claims of other disciplines. Close reading is not the only skilled practice that literary critics have, but close reading is a foundational practice and skill shared among almost all literary critics. It’s a practice that gives us a special purchase on our objects of analysis: by writing about them in a certain way, by turning them in a certain way, by matching our words to theirs in a way that gives us a sense of their worlds and the worlds they are a part of.

So I wanted to focus on what was distinctive, what was special to the discipline. I also wanted to focus on what gave the discipline claims to tell truths about its corner of the world and the rest of the world that its corner engages with. Let’s say literature and all that literature takes up, treats, turns, and so forth. And I wanted to show how that special practice gave a grounding and rationale for the discipline.

I wanted to say that close reading allows us to make truth claims and to have disagreements about these claims. We can’t have disagreements if they’re not against the background of a shared assumption about how we adjudicate arguments, for example.

CRR: Can you elaborate a little bit on that? What about close reading permits for disagreement, or what about the activity of close reading enables disagreements?

JK: Because it’s a shared practice, it allows us to understand when work is done well or not done well, to understand what we are disagreeing about when we’re disagreeing about a reading. It gives us a handle on not only our objects of analysis, but our arguments about them.

CRR: What is the relationship between your understanding of close reading and craft knowledge?

JK: The epigraph for the book’s introduction is taken from a virtuoso work of craft studies by David Pye, a woodworker who wrote about how we make and judge the making of bowls, tables, cabinets, and so on. I am very interested in the way that criticism is handiwork along these lines, and some of my key terms are taken from that tradition, like “deftness” or “adroitness.”

For me, “craft epistemology” means that the truth of a work of criticism consists in how well it has been made, less the accurate statement of facts out there in the world than the apt placement of one’s own words among words that already exist. What is true is both getting a sense of the world, changing it a little bit, and remaining true to the work itself. It’s knowledge that resides in practice.

The truth of a craft lies in the fingers that are doing it, as much as a narrowly accurate cognition of the world. The key idea of craft knowledge is that the knowing is in the practice itself. It’s about making something, a skilled engagement with the world.

Close reading allows us to make truth claims and to have disagreements about these claims. We can’t have disagreements if they’re not against the background of a shared assumption about how we adjudicate arguments.

CRR: In the epigraph, Pye writes, “The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continuously at risk during the process of making.” Could you talk about that in relation to close reading: the relationship of risk to the process of making?

JK: Don’t we all feel when we are writing sentences about sentences, composing words about words, that there is something always at risk in what we’re making? A risk that it won’t work well or will break and fall apart? And don’t we also have that feeling of getting it right when it all fits together?

My contention is that close reading isn’t really reading, it’s writing. Or that when we talk about close reading as an interpretative practice and when we say that such and such is a reading of a poem or when we refer to this article or chapter as a reading of x, what we’re talking about is not reading in the sense of words coming in through our eyes and then being processed and understood semantically or otherwise. Rather, we are talking about attaching our words to other words and creating something. As the term circulates in the profession, close reading is in this way a practice of writing more than it is one of reading.

CRR: In the book, you say that criticism is a world-making activity. At least one of the reasons to study literature is because you can imagine its worlds as operating according to physical, social, and imaginative laws that are distinct from those that govern the world in which we operate. Movement between these worlds is not always seamless and you describe criticism as creating something like a third space: one in which the critic’s words and the art object’s words engage in a process of mutual alteration.

What is this third space? Is it a toggling between, on the one hand, imaginative worlds, with all of their richness and integrity, and, on the other hand, the world that we inhabit, the historical world, with its full range of complexities?

JK: That third space follows from the creative dimension of literary criticism, which is its making of something new from a work in the act of having something to say about it. One of the things that defines the specialness of a literary criticism is that we operate in the same medium as the works that we’re discussing. We write words about words.

Now, the order and form of the words that we’re writing about constrain what we can do with them, in ways that are enabling, because they allow us to make something from them. But, nevertheless, we are composing something, every time that we write, in the same way that the artists that we’re writing about are also composing something. In the melding of our own words with the words that are out there in the world, we create a third space—a space that’s separate from the world of literature and separate from the world of the critic.

CRR: So, let’s talk a little bit about craft practice. The first example you give us is the seemingly simple act of quotation, which you describe throughout the book as akin to weaving.

Why is quotation the practice that you begin with? How do you see the artistry in spinning two strands of sentences together?

JK: I begin with quotation, because it’s the foundation of everything.

We begin to say something about our objects of study by reaching out and touching them, turning them a little bit, incorporating their words into our words. This is an extraordinarily simple practice and yet also extremely difficult to do well.

Consider what I call in-sentence quotation, where you quote within your own sentences. As soon as you try to embed more than a word, you are constrained by order and syntax; and even with just a word, you’re constrained in all sorts of ways by the word’s sound, shape, meaning, so on. But that’s the nature of creativity.

Joining one’s own words with words out there in the world: that’s in-sentence quotation, and it happens at the foundational level of embedding. But then take block quotation, where you’re not embedding the words, you’re putting your words adjacent to other words and then trying to pick up something from them in the gap in between. And related to block quotation, consider what I call critical free indirect discourse, where you stylistically imitate the sound and verbal texture of the words that immediately preceded your own. This is gliding between the quoted words and your own words, in such a way that the joint between the block and what follows the block is as smooth as possible.

CRR: So, when the critic imitates the phenomenon she is studying, she explicates that phenomenon by making more of what is already there. This seems like one way in which the critic creates what you described earlier as the third space. If part of the job of criticism is to sustain the immersive environment of the literary, then in imitating the art object, the critic also invites the reader to inhabit its style of thinking from within this third space.

What would happen if the critic imitates a style or a set of features that are utterly alien (whether historically, temperamentally, however you want to describe it) to their object of study?

JK: There are probably many rich examples of this in the ordinary practice of the discipline: creating friction or dissonance between your prose and what lies adjacent or nearby it.

CRR: Do you think there is value to the inept performance of criticism?

JK: Of course. In the simple sense that ineptness reveals something about its contrary, but also because it is important to take risks.

On your earlier point, the stylized, quite skillfully done friction between your writing and the writing you’re engaging, the staged failure to be adroit or apt or smooth, might fall under what we would now call experimental criticism, something that the book doesn’t cover at all because I’m more interested in the everyday and ordinary practice of the field, the highly skilled intuitive knowledge that is exhibited in works of criticism published everywhere all the time, the uncelebrated article that is just in the fall issue of a period journal or something like that. I was not interested in self-consciously avant-garde criticism, or experimental criticism, or criticism that in style and form seems to be trying to cut across the grain of ordinary practice. That type of criticism is, however, extraordinarily interesting and valuable. And I want to understand it better and perhaps write about it more. Maybe what you’re describing is more common to that.

CRR: One of the things that I was interested in with this book is that you don’t address creative criticism, or what you’re calling experimental criticism, as a separate category.

I’m wondering: Does the argument remain central for you as the discursive organizing principle of criticism? And does highlighting the creative dimension of criticism maybe open up alternatives to the argument?

JK: I don’t understand argument to be a separate criterion of value for criticism. That is to say, I don’t think we evaluate the logic of the argument independent from the aptness of practice. Rather, we say the argument makes sense when the practice is compelling.

What I’m describing is argument that emerges from practice, practice done well but not evaluated as the logic of the argument itself.

CRR: Maybe what I’m responding to is the sense that an argument is extractable from the context of criticism, whereas, throughout the book, you’re committed to the idea that the knowledge literary studies has to offer is embedded in the critical performance itself. You distinguish that embeddedness from the spectacular, virtuosic display designed to shore up the ego of the critic. We value embedded knowledge independently of the persona of the critic. But I think “the argument” has a formal ambition to leave its discursive context, like argument wants to be requoted on its own.

JK: I think readings add up to arguments ambitious to be announced and referred to on their own, but I think that these are still grounded and evaluated in practice. In fact, I think arguments in literary criticism can’t really be summarized. Or if they are, often the summary is trivial. Which is why I go on for a page or two about our refusal to summarize criticism on PowerPoint and to distill our writing into bullets in the same way that the analytic philosophers or social scientists do. If you were to turn a close reading into numbered bullet points on PowerPoint, it would just be absurd.

Individual readings might be scaled up and combined with other kinds of research to create something that can be summarized but the point or thesis of any given reading consists entirely in the way that it’s done. If you want to look at an argument of a chapter of a book of criticism or an article, you need to read it, because the argument consists in the practice. If you ask someone what was he arguing or she arguing, what was her point, you get something that is denatured from that practice and is often inaccurate.

The situation is analogous to when students ask you what they missed on a day they didn’t come to class. As Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan put it, you missed everything. Your friends’ notes aren’t going to be at all helpful.

Similarly, you can’t exactly paraphrase a work of criticism, and you can’t put its readings on PowerPoint in bullet points. Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well. In fact, arguments and practice are synonymous.

CRR: If there is one thing you would like your reader to live with and think with after reading this book, what is it?

JK: That literary criticism as practiced everywhere is a skilled and creative practice that tells us something about the world. Enough to be valued and supported. And without an infrastructure or training from one generation to the next, this form of knowledge and this practice will just simply fade from the world.

We’d know less about the world and less about the works of literature that are within it, the writers who created them, and the readers who read them. And that would be a real shame.