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Various practical challenges deter scholars from writing single-author teaching books, but such books have particular virtues to offer pedagogy. This article describes some of the choices made in the writing of a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. It is presented not as a set of final rulings on best practice, but as an account of decisions made, to lift the lid on the work and support the creation of more pedagogical tools in future.

This paper constitutes a radical re-reading of W. S. Graham’s long poem, The Nightfishing (1955). It begins by attending to the poet’s brief but significant time spent in New York and how the resonant influence of Marcel Duchamp may have unexpectedly influenced Graham’s composition of The Nightfishing, which has previously been read as a metaphysical journey out into language-as-ocean, and while such a reading is valid, it is also selective; this paper, instead, reads The Nightfishing as equally – if not more – indebted to Graham’s parallel experiments with and interest in what he calls ‘already made phrases’. John Cage is introduced as a comparable second-generation Duchampian, and whose experiments with tape-recorders form an important parallel example to Graham’s own interest in vocal materiality. The paper thereby provides a new transatlantic inflection to Graham’s verse-composition, and reveals it as structured by the indeterminate qualities of recording equipment, radio, quotation, citationality, and sampling. In this light, his work becomes recontextualised as a curation of found voices – a reading that relates also to larger questions of intention, contingency, and the critic’s own mode of composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of remote learning courses, the humanities instructor struggled more than most to translate the many familiar techniques of close reading to the unfamiliar realm of technology. Oftentimes instructors have depended on facsimiles of traditional methods: a shared passage annotated by the class digitally, or small groups sent to individual breakout rooms which will eventually rejoin the class and share their findings. This article offers a methodology which incorporates the beneficial technologies which were necessary in remote classrooms into the traditional classroom, encouraging students to collaborate and debate through the shared digital annotation of primary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film representations of transport networks' closure events are valuable materials in a critical, comparative urban studies. Here, 1953 and 1962 films commemorating the last nights of the London and Glasgow tramways exemplify such use. The present study examines them as part of work towards an understanding of public transport as a type of contested public space, since publics can have them removed. On the one hand, both films manufacture consent for the removal of on-street electric public transport on rails at a time when internal combustion engine vehicles, both private and public, were becoming more and more widespread in the UK. On the other, the film-makers provide affectionate views of urban transport modes which in the late twentieth century were largely considered obsolete, thus paving the way for heritage discourses of transport and even anticipating sustainability-led positions on the city that would only gain traction decades after these networks closed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThrough recovered biographies and unpublished archival papers, I examine the connection of two Black clubwomen, Frances Reynolds Keyser and Mary McLeod Bethune, who shared a modest ceremony that bonded them for life. I argue that their private relationship was deeper than they could credibly portray through their public image at the time, bound as they were by the strictures of respectability politics. Their cultivation of respectability was an irreplaceable asset in, and indeed a necessity of their work, but it also demanded the presentation of normative heterosexuality. In addition, I conducted a creative investigation of the archives to draw attention to their everyday lives and experiences in Daytona. Many Black women activists’ experiences do not conform to the white male-centric narrative ethos present and the assumption of heterosexuality is a dominant yet wholly inaccurate narrative on Black club women’s legacies and activism. Biographical recoveries can change, complicate, and enhance our understanding of these women’s relationships regarding their well-curated public personas as clubwomen. This study aims to provide an intellectual history of Black women through the club movement by putting biographical data front and center, especially by examining their own words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal close reading is a common approach to teaching reading and analyzing texts, it is possible that there are other, closer approaches to situating reader and text. Perhaps reading has been seen as dangerous and liberating because it is true that texts can draw us into their landscapes and fundamentally alter our orientations to the world, an important consideration for scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the idea of distant reading and explores the ways in which it can be conducted in research. It focuses especially on how distant reading can contribute to the study of cultural history, which is often regarded as a domain of close reading. The article argues that distant reading methods can successfully be applied in the analysis of cultural transmission in the past, where it is often essential to combine the study of textual signification with the idea of textuality as material flow. The article draws on an example from press history and especially discusses text reuse detection as a strategy for identifying textual amplification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness. Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author's close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, based on Prof. Hessing's keynote lecture delivered at the opening of the Gronemann-conference in 2022, explores notions of "Jewish wit" in Sammy Gronemann's German novel Tohuwabohu (translated as Utter Chaos). It focuses on the incongruities and comic potential of the tensions between German and Yiddish in the novel, questioning notions of "original" and "translation" as applied to the interrelationships between Eastern European and German Jewish cultures. By highlighting the linguistic and cultural shifts experienced by these Jewish communities, Gronemann's novel serves as a focal point for dissecting the nuances of multilingual Jewish humor and the underlying tragedies of Jewish life, especially amidst historical upheavals like World War I and the Holocaust. The essay concludes with insights into Gronemann's ironic perspective on Zionism and the thematic significance of "Tohuwabohu" as a metaphor for the modern Jewish experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can primary literacy teachers effectively identify, adapt, and incorporate developmentally appropriate technologies to support their students' reading development? This article reports results from a case study attempting to digitize a classroom literacy practice—close reading—for Year 2 students. It suggests that digital tools can effectively support close reading practices and students' literacy learning. Results also identify some unique affordances that digitization offers. The author provides suggestions and tips for practitioners interested in incorporating technology into their regular close reading routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses J. H. Prynne’s ‘Blue Slides at Rest’ (2004) in relation to his own poetic theories. By bringing together Prynne’s poetry and theory, I show how ‘Blue Slides at Rest’ encourages a special type of reading: increasingly close rereading. Sense is made at multiple levels: words, syllables, even letters come together to signify in unconventional ways. Turning to Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s theory of ‘good naturalisation’, I demonstrate how each type of closer reading integrates and elucidates previously obscure elements of the poem. At the level of words (where the familiar sense-making of intertext occurs) and at the level of syllables (where the less familiar sense-making of diachronic phonology occurs), my analysis fits in well between Prynne and Forrest-Thomson’s theories. But by reading even more closely, at the level of letters, I argue additionally that ‘Blue Slides at Rest’ evolves Prynne’s poetic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of remote learning courses, the humanities instructor struggled more than most to translate the many familiar techniques of close reading to the unfamiliar realm of technology. Oftentimes instructors have depended on facsimiles of traditional methods: a shared passage annotated by the class digitally, or small groups sent to individual breakout rooms which will eventually rejoin the class and share their findings. This article offers a methodology which incorporates the beneficial technologies which were necessary in remote classrooms into the traditional classroom, encouraging students to collaborate and debate through the shared digital annotation of primary texts.

The purpose of this note is to explore the theme of language as an object of reception, to highlight the interrelationship between some key concepts, and to sketch, however briefly, a conceptual thread that will allow us to present some of the points of a philosophical and epistemic map of analysis developed by Marine Picon in her volume Norm and Objects of Knowledge.

When we think of a person engaged in the act of reading literary fiction, the mental image that readily comes to mind is one of focused concentration. In our current information age, such a form of reading seems especially necessary, and often lacking. This causes a change in how we read, often described in terms of close reading versus hyperreading. Literary reading is typically associated with the former; screen‐based reading of information texts with the latter. Accounts of attention and distraction in reading research are often informed by a binary way of thinking. Literary reading, while often aligned with close reading, also involves selection, strategic allocation of attention informed by textual cues, condensation, and mind‐wandering. It never occurs in a state of continuous attention: we combine different modes, triggered by both textual and readerly characteristics. A challenge for literary studies in the present media landscape is to determine more precisely when readers read with close attention and when they skim, or what they skip. This article presents a theoretical contribution to studies of literary reading in the form of a literature review and a framework for attentional modulation. Education might benefit from a more sophisticated concept of such attentional modulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a comprehensive framework (iDISC) for the close reading of informational texts for elementary students that may need additional language, social, memory, or behavioral supports. The article introduces concrete tools that are used before, during, and after close reading, including cue‐cards, language stems, discussion behaviors, anchor posters, and graphic organizers. The tools provide teachers with instructional scaffolds that can support their students to undertake more educative discussions with peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical treatments of Argentinian author Rodolfo Walsh's watershed Operación Masacre (1957) often read the book as the explanatory force behind Walsh's later commitments to the militant leftist Peronist Montoneros. In this article, I attempt to complicate such interpretations somewhat: first, by analyzing the nonpartisan and deliberative qualities of the text which eschew political pigeonholing, and second, by remembering Walsh's shifting politics over the course of his life. Through close analysis of the text as well as later editions and paratexts, I show how Walsh's performance of uncertainty and verification on the page paradoxically strengthen his call for remedial action and lends moral urgency to the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of Laura Marcus's styles of close reading, taking as its point of departure a lockdown recording (in spring 2020) of her lyrical rendition of the 'Time Passes' section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The essay pays particular attention to the enduring place lyricality occupied in Marcus's critical imagination, both as an object of analysis and as a feature of her own prose. David James argues that Marcus often modelled a mode of critical practice oriented around affectively attentive, densely exemplified, and above all intimate explications of literary expression – a practice whose lyrical textures were themselves a performative affirmation of what that intimacy could creatively and analytically achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractSecond-graders engaged in complex reading, writing, and thinking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Close readings of secondary and primary sources situated students to discover incongruencies between what is reported within trade-books and what is revealed within historical documents. Scaffolding directed students’ scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps and of primary sources for historical significance. The scaffolding was differentiated for both text-based and visually oriented primary sources. The assessment—creation of a faux primary source—was discipline-specific and completed through peer- and teacher-led review. Students demonstrated historical literacy, thinking, and argumentation during different phases of this guided inquiry. Teachers and researchers can gain rich, nuanced understandings from examining classroom-based learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how literature education has changed in Finnish upper secondary school and what kind of theoretical background assumptions are made in the processing of literature. Early on, the aim of teaching literature in Finnish upper secondary schools was to emphasize national identity. Literary works about Finnish people were considered the strength of the young nation. The teaching of literature focused on learning national literature, and on knowing the authors and their works. From the 1950s onwards, new criticism influenced the teaching of literature, and close reading became the key tool for approaching literature. Gradually, the teaching of literature expanded from national literature to young adults’ literature, popular literature, and contemporary literature. In the 1980s, various literary approaches and background theories were emphasized in the learning materials. However, current literary teaching is still tied to new critical and formalistic theory. At the end of the article, the question is asked whether it would be necessary to change this approach so that literature would continue to attract young readers.

Although emotional labor—defined as the process(es) by which a worker manages their feelings in order to produce the desired emotional response in a customer—has been studied in various fields and specific domains of librarianship, this topic has yet to be examined in school librarianship. In this exploratory article, I perform a close reading of school librarian job postings to surface expectations of emotional labor and explicate connections to the feminized history of librarianship. The article closes with a call to action, outlining steps for administrators and researchers to prevent the potential harms of emotional labor in school librarianship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a full text search for the term 'provincialism' across all entries in the OED Online , this article tracks 'provincialism' through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term 'provincialism' drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a synchronic literary reading, Jonathan Grossman concludes that Genesis 1-3 represents two autonomous creation stories that must be interpreted independently of one another. Grossman's conclusions, therefore, share much in common with classic diachronic scholarship. This article shows how the narrative analogy in Genesis 5-9 is the best defense for a synchronic, cohesive, and unified reading of Genesis 1-3, and consequently affirms an interpretation that is theologically consistent with the perspective of the New Testament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complexities of creating an archive – in our case, a digital archive of eighteenth-century manuscript letters, The Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO). Elizabeth Montagu was one of the most prominent and well-connected women in eighteenth-century polite society. EMCO faces a variety of challenges. Firstly, the project aims to trace all extant letters in different libraries and public/private collections; secondly, it seeks to amalgamate the extant correspondence into one digital repository and a comprehensive inventory; thirdly, it mobilises a team of scholars to transcribe, annotate and develop a critical apparatus; fourthly, EMCO seeks to develop digital tools that foster novel methods of scholarly research and debate. Taking recent scholarship on board, this article concludes by reflecting on the complexities of marrying a data-rich digital edition with literary methodologies that allow both close reading and analysis of the scope and materiality of the archive and its objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story? To what extent are their attentional modulations influenced by textual characteristics and personal characteristics? This study uses response data from group discussions of the short story "Where are you going, where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates (1966). Participants read the story in advance, color-coding words or lines to indicate different modes of attention employed and annotated the text with text-related and unrelated mind-wandering thoughts. The results show how attentional allocation is driven by textual elements as well as readers' choices, resulting in a complex interaction of elicited and volitional attention to certain elements of the text– not just focused or distracted attention, but a "modulated" and "integrated" experience that is dynamic and personal. These modulations are also impacted by contextual factors and the reader's personal history that impact which aspects of a text are salient and how attention is directed. The results might provide an empirical basis for, but also challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a preface to her book, Freeman begins from Robert Graves’s poem “It’s A Queer Time.” Freeman finds many chapters of her book answers to the poem. She explains that the introduction to her book projects a theory on the interconnectedness of time and history, and she explains main themes of the book’s chapters. The chapters are to constitute thought experiments in which Freeman explores not only remnants of failed revolutions but also moments when the established order of time is interrupted. Freeman’s book is to refer to the historical “post-ness,” namely visual works and ephemeral art that are deliberately selected from outside of canonical works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how an increased awareness of translation in the language classroom might impact the instruction of Comparative Literature, and literary studies more broadly. Despite the arguments for translation’s centrality to the study Comparative Literature (Apter, 2006; Bassnett, 2006; Newman 2017) translation pedagogy is still under-studied and under-practiced in the Comparative Literature classroom. Among Comparative Literature instructors, close reading is often given pride of place, an emphasis echoed in commonly-assigned textbooks such as Writing Analytically (Rosenwasser and Stephen, 2014). Yet the practice of close reading is arguably one of the most challenging concepts for beginning literature students to master, in part due to the resistance of some instructors and other literary professionals in modeling how to close read a translated text (Venuti, 2004; 2017). By outlining specific lessons, this article shows how employing a hermeneutic translation model (Steiner, 1975; Venuti, 2017; 2019; Laviosa 2019) in the literature classroom can help literature students conceptualize this central building block of literary studies. The article closes with a discussion of some of the ways in which a greater awareness of Translation Studies in the Comparative Literature classroom could unite theory with practice.

This paper reviews the preparatory and operational stages that led to the development of the digital scientific edition of 57 musical dramas staged in the Republic of Lucca between 1636 and 1705 to celebrate an important political event. This case study prompts a reflection on the relationship between digital humanities and opera theater by providing a detailed state of the art: the increased interest in databases and the significant number of amateurs of the genre explain both the detected distance from the textual data and the poor online availability of philologically curated libretti. Instead, the present edition focuses on the content of the operas in terms of textual typologies, use of sources and characters and, in particular, political ideas. In describing the XML-TEI encoding scheme, this paper aims to show interpretive close reading can enhance the analysis of certain concepts, political in this case, through markup. Although acknowledging some limitations, such as the risk of overlapping and the lack of unambiguous IDs, the results highlight a new way of conceiving the commentary of digital editions which provides scholars with the possibility of using digital tools to annotate and visualize exegetical reading.

Close reading has long been heralded as a humanities-specific methodology with significant potential for SoTL. This essay fills a gap in SoTL literature with a full case study demonstrating what, exactly, close reading shows us about our data that social science-based quantitative and qualitative analyses may not. Close reading-based analysis of first-year writing students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language entails attention to the interrelated form and content of students’ self-reflections. This analysis reveals nuances and complexities that, if overlooked, would result in inadvertent misrepresentation of the data. This case study responds not only to calls for humanities-specific SoTL methodologies but also to related calls for greater legitimation of diverse forms for SoTL dissemination, some of which originate in the humanities. It is therefore cast as a reflective essay based on its author’s scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as a new, humanities-based SoTL researcher. Finally, this case study demonstrates the value of flexible, deliberately unscientific study designs that are responsive to emergent conditions but foreign to SoTL’s dominant social science paradigm. As guides to instruction, pre-surveys are necessary complements to pre-quizzes: learning what students think they know about a concept or skill, their attitudes towards it, and their contexts of prior learning about it—not just their knowledge of it, which is all pre-quizzes can tell us—is an important precursor to effective instruction. But maximizing pre-surveys’ potential to guide instruction requires flexible study designs so we can change our pedagogy, including our study’s “intervention,” if necessary, on the fly.

Prayer, the central spirituality in the theological and ethical life of Christ’s disciples, has not yet received significant attention from Johannine scholars. Although some scholars emphasised and discussed prayer in the New Testament, Johannine scholars have failed to recognise the significance of prayer in the Fourth Gospel. Using narrative criticism the article aims to uncover the relationship between prayer and koinonia in the Fourth Gospel. The research on the theme of prayer and koinonia conducted in the Fourth Gospel has yielded the finding that prayer was a manifestation of abiding in Jesus. Koinonia was a form of prayer. Contribution: The article fills the lacuna in Johannine studies, more specifically, in the field of prayer and koinonia. The article, which is in line with the scope of HTS Theological Studies, and offers a new interpretation of prayer and koinonia in the Fourth Gospel.

Must we avoid the subjective and the personal when we stick to the text as close readers? By examining a moment of affective disruption in an advanced seminar, this autoethnographic account suggests that students should engage with their feelings as they develop meaningful readings of cultural texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline of literary studies finds itself in a nebulous zone that has been dubbed "postcritique". The term recognises that the age of critique (for forty years the dominant paradigm within "literary theory") is over. Teachers and researchers appear somewhat divided as to how to proceed. This article suggests that the answer lies in a return to "precritique"—not an era in time but a position created by review of the logical misstep that made possible the application of theory to the practice of literary criticism in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Valéry's postulation (Cahiers, 1923) that critics should work on discovering the « problem » experienced by the author consciously or unconsciously and decide whether it was successfully resolved. Three years later, Valéry added that critics should therefore concentrate their attention on the work itself and try to decipher all its meanings through close reading (Cahiers, 1926). Through interviews and multiple exchanges with readers, Ferrier, the author, himself a seasoned critic, provides many reading clues. Such practices, however, threaten to kill critics' efforts by turning them into parrots, less good than their master, and perhaps kept away from offering new perspectives. Also, another trap for critics is to take their own reading problems for those the writer might have had. The only solution is to reject the « affective fallacy » denounced by The New Critics, and to consider texts between author, narrator, contexts and critic. This article deals with François, portrait d'un absent, and Scrabble. Une enfance tchadienne. The conclusion briefly examines Valéry's negative attitude towards novels, wondering what his reactions might have been, if confronted, for instance, with Glissant's or Ferrier's poetic novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines reports of natural disasters in the 18th century Austrian newspaper "Wienerisches Diarium" to gain insights into how people captured the extraordinary sensory experiences of such events in written form. By analysing a digitised corpus of over 300 newspaper issues, the study identifies 302 text passages referring to natural disasters, among them 285 news reports, and explores textual traces of (multi)sensuality present within this material. The close reading and semantic annotation of the textual findings reveals that comparisons to familiar sensations are commonly used to convey the sensory experiences of natural disasters, allowing readers to (better) relate to and understand the extreme events. At the same time, touch and vision constitute the most frequently mentioned senses, while smell and taste only play a minor role in early modern disaster depiction. In addition, the study finds that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more likely to include multisensory descriptions compared to other types of disasters. These and further findings shed light on when and how (multi)sensory impressions of disasters were conveyed in written form within early modern news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given evidence that adolescent students' motivation to read and write about literature declines with age, we proffer an approach called dialogic literary argumentation (DLA) that asks students to explore literature through argumentation in pursuit of understanding the meanings and possibilities of being human. This quasi-experimental study compared the effectiveness of DLA with close reading (CR), a common approach to teaching literature in high school English language arts classrooms, in improving students' motivational beliefs about writing and literature-related argumentative writing. The study also examined how the links between motivational beliefs and argumentative writing performance varied by instructional contexts. Participants were 278 high school students in 14 classrooms across 8 public high schools. Classrooms of students received either DLA or CR throughout the academic year. While both the DLA and CR groups improved in literature-related argumentative writing, the DLA group demonstrated more growth than the CR group. Neither group exhibited changes in motivational beliefs. However, at the end of the year, both DLA and CR students' transactional writer beliefs were predictive of writing self-efficacy. Transmissional writer beliefs negatively correlated with argumentative writing in the CR group and had a null relationship in the DLA group. Overall, motivational beliefs and argumentative writing were more positively correlated in the DLA group than the CR group after the intervention. We posit that the argumentative elements unique to DLA may act to protect students from the negative impacts of transmissional beliefs. Our findings provide theoretical explanations and pedagogical recommendations on how DLA and CR can be jointly employed to heighten students' motivation and strengthen their argumentative writing competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]