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in an overall loss of opportunity either for the elector or stake holders, one's act
is deemed ill-considered and subject to complaint by those stake holders.
Looking through these texts, the reader sees similar letters of complaints.
Looking at these texts, the reader sees the complaints engaging the reader dif-
ferently. The first letter makes the complaint upfront, as part of the explicit
lexical signaling. The second letter makes the complaint more a part of reader
inference, based upon how a process works and the stress caused when the ad-
dressee elects to act in a certain way. Lanham insists that looking through and
looking at are parallel and equally necessary actions of close reading. A reader
only looking through texts misses important surface differences. A reader only
looking at texts misses important underlying similarities that the textual surface
can't capture. The close reader, according to Lanham's position, can't afford to
stay at the surface. However, neither can he or she afford to discard the surface
as a support for deeper interpretation.
Lanham's observations are astute but they also raise new questions about
what theories of close reading are mainly theories about. Are they mainly theories
about texts at all, or are they mainly about the underlying social assumptions
that govern how we produce and perceive them? The operative term here is
mainly, for most everyone now agrees that close reading requires both knowledge
of the textual surface and knowledge beyond it. Yet most extended discussions
seeking to operationalize close reading tend to give greater weight - at least as
starting points - either to the textual surface or to assumptions of interpretation
that generalize well beyond textual engagements. In literary and cultural theory,
for example, a relevant and well-known rift divides theorists in the cultural
tradition of Fish [7] and those in the deconstructionist tradition of Derrida [8].
Fish and his adherents situate close reading mainly outside of texts and in the
institutional and cultural interests that bring readers to them. Derrida and his
adherents locate close reading primarily in the intensely reflexive textual interest
of deconstruction. Deconstruction makes use of the radical indeterminacy of texts
to rethink how seemingly “settled” and “accepted” meanings within texts (e.g.
the meaning of “citizen” in any constitutional document) are actually the result
of historical and ideological settlements that have worked outside strictly textual
processes.
To give them their due, many formulations of close reading in literary and
cultural studies rightly discredit an incoherent spatial metaphor dividing the
“inside” from the “outside” of text. Still, most formulations take us no further
toward I.A. Richards' original hope to make close reading a “practical” skill. Not
accidentally, literary and cultural theorists who align with either Fish or Der-
rida on the matter of close reading also take a skeptical stance towards practical
theory. Such theorists appear to conflate the truth of textual indeterminacy, the
truth that surface language does not on it own contain interpretative meaning,
with the more dubious conclusion that surface language has no positive and
profound contribution to make toward a relatively determinate, while flexible,
interpretative process. As we see it, the skeptics have overlooked the possibility
that close readers, through a still poorly studied expertise, have learned to re-
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