What’s “New Critical” about “Close Reading”?: I. A. Richards and His New Critical Reception

Within the United States, debates about “close reading” often proceed as if the method were first developed by the New Critics. Indeed, the association between the two has sometimes been used as a stick with which to beat “close reading”: if the method is seen as having its origins in the New Criticism, then the suspicion arises that it is somehow at root a creature of Kantian aesthetics, decontextualising, dehistoricising and depoliticising—in a word, conservative. But what if “close reading” were originally developed by a very different intellectual formation—one with more liberal sensibilities, and, as a consequence, a very different account of the aesthetic? Taking a closer look at the history of the method allows us to see that “close reading” is now being critiqued on the grounds of its purported origins in the very kinds of views it was built to oppose.