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What Was "Close Reading"? A Century of Critical Method

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Thursday, September 29, 2016
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Professor Emerita, Literature Program

Barbara Herrnstein Smith will talk about the origins and history of "close reading," understood as a practice central to 20th-century literary studies, vis-à-vis the current promotion of "distant reading," a set of computational methods often seen as its due contemporary successor. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University. Her publications include Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poem End (1968); On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Language to Literature (1978); Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988); Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997); Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2005); and Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (2010). Smith's recent work focuses on the historical, intellectual, and institutional relations between the sciences and the humanities.