Word Itself against the Word: Close Reading After Voloshinov | James R. Siemon, Boston University
James R. Siemon, Boston University
Every element of form is the product of social interaction.
—V. N. Voloshinov, "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry"
The practice of close reading deserves reconsideration outside the confines of its appropriation by New Criticism and the political agendas to which its foremost American practitioners directed it.1 Provisionally dislodged from its New Critical appropriation and considered according to certain underdeveloped implications of Bakhtinian sociolinguistics, the activity of close reading may yet prove useful to various forms of social analysis while, simultaneously and paradoxically, suggesting a possible alternative to current interpretive modes. Specifically, close reading that investigates the formal elements of texts in the light of socially and historically conjoined...
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