Should College English Be Close Reading?

When I was first asked what college English should be, I was tempted to answer an enthusiastic yes to the question in my title and jump on the read ing bandwagon. It is crowded these days with critics of widely divergent tribes, some of whom have gotten on by themselves and others of whom have been loaded aboard by genial smoothers-over of their differences.11 was tempted, for, after all, the college course I am most deeply invested in teaching?we call it Introduction to Critical Reading at Pitt?cultivates a kind of and the phrase reading would affiliate what I'm doing there with courses taught by numerous colleagues at the college level (and many at the secondary level). So also would the course's titular phrase reading, which is sometimes identified with reading but more often separated from it, an uncertain distinction that gives me the first reason to pause before climbing aboard.2 If close and critical differ at all, is it in their distance from the text they attend to, the one getting up and attending to detail, the other standing back to observe and judge?3 To literalize the spatial metaphor reveals its absurdity, for we