Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld in Public Books:
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.”
Criticism and Truth proceeds by offering us a close reading of close reading. Tracking one writer’s syntactical bend as she accommodates her prose to this clause or that line and another writer’s imitation of the figurative language that she studies, Kramnick asks us to think about the creative dimension of criticism. As “craft knowledge,” close reading treats the many objects of its study as “enabling constraints” for thought. The critic’s woven sentences are an expression of those constraints. Our evaluation of criticism is therefore an aesthetic judgment. When we call a piece of criticism “apt,” our evaluation of the achievement presupposes its truth as the necessary condition of its “elegance.”
More here.
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