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.”
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n 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.”