The Problem of the Parlor

Douglas Dowland close-reads Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant’s new edited volume, “Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century.”

By Douglas DowlandOctober 21, 2025

• Education

• Literary Criticism

• Politics

WHEREVER YOU GO in the humanities, you will encounter Kenneth Burke’s “parlor metaphor.” Described in his 1941 book The Philosophy of Literary Form, the metaphor continues to serve as an introduction to humanistic thinking, appearing in almost every contemporary textbook in writing and literary studies. Burke, in capsule form, instructs the reader:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion […] You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you […] However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

The parlor is a promise: that analysis and argument are part of an “unending conversation” that, though begun long before us, is one to which each of us can contribute. We are mortal, but the conversation is not. If anything, we can depart the parlor confident that the conversation will go on indefinitely.

The work of the parlor is the work of the mind. But it is the work of the heart, too warm from the heat of discussion, it is not the time or the place to isolate. The parlor needs people: those who agree and those who disagree, those willing to listen and those willing to help. To me, the appeal of the parlor stems from its democratic potential: the tenor is there for anyone to catch, anyone can put in their oar, and everyone’s contribution has an effect. Argument leads not to enmity but to intimacy and community. The parlor is no place for a demagogue.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: the parlor—if you can keep it. Eighty-four years since Burke developed the “parlor metaphor,” both its democratic potential—and democracy itself—are under threat. In such times, the best strategy is to make public exactly what goes on in the parlor. It is time to invite more people to it too, by making its stakes clearer, not just for its own good but also for the greater democratic good that humanistic thinking serves.

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What goes on in the parlor that is literary criticism? Jonathan Kramnick writes in his book Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (2023) that close reading is “the symbolic as well as beating heart of literary studies.” Yet, like the human heart and the heart of many subjects, close reading is both central to literary study and a bit mysterious. Kramnick hesitates to define it. John Guillory, in his book On Close Reading (2025), only goes so far as to say that close reading is “showing the work of reading.”

Enter Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant—and 22 contributors—whose new anthology Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century offers a much-needed clarity on the exact work of close reading. Their book is in part a response to Kramnick and Guillory: where those authors eschew specifics, Sinykin and Winant provide examples, worksheets, even flowcharts. Each of the book’s contributors takes the work of a critic and demonstrates how that critic used close reading to make a claim that has permanently shaped literary criticism’s practice. Overall, the effect is refreshing. Instead of mystery, Sinykin and Winant see possibility: to them, close reading is a practice that anyone can learn. And in the very structure of their book, they make clear that the presence of others is vital to close reading’s doing. “Close readings emerge out of conversations and they flow back into conversations,” they write. As such, it is the epitome of the Burkean parlor.

A close reading, for Sinykin and Winant, involves a five-step process. It begins with scene setting, a way of introducing the reader to what’s to come. Then the close reader notices something—it can be anything but “it must really be there on the page, and ideally it should be small enough to fit under your fingertip.” The next step is a local claim that asks us to understand what the close reader has noticed in a particular way. After local claim comes regional argumentation, showing that the local claim isn’t confined to just something small, but ties to a larger concern within the entire text. Then finally, having moved from the local to the regional, the close reader engages in global theorizing to make an argument that goes beyond the text to say something about its author or its literary or historical context, or to make a broader claim about the world.

Close readings start small. But watch what happens after the noticing stage. Local, regional, global—close reading claims space of increasing scale for the critic to practice their art, make their claim, and have their impact. As Stephanie Insley Hershinow writes in her included essay, the goal of a close reading is to show how the tiniest detail “holds the secret to a global theory.” Thus with close reading comes a global ambition—through a text, to reinterpret the world and to see it anew. Yet the contributors to Close Reading wisely caution against confusing ambition with domination. Close reading is often assumed to be tense, nitpicky, even litigious. (T. S. Eliot once called it the “lemon-squeezer school of criticism,” evoking images of wrenching and pressure, of pith and bitter.) But it need not be so impersonal or so destructive. For the purpose of a close reading, Beci Carver’s chapter argues, is “not to resolve or dissolve […] obscurity, but to see it the better for what it is.”

Close readers do this by staying close to the text—and by staying true to themselves. To notice means to realize that a detail has “a hidden center of gravity that draws in and changes everything around it,” Sinykin and Winant write. This realization is often so exciting that one must reenact what is on the page: writing it out, ringing up a friend, reading it aloud. The eyes are not enough: one feels compelled to use the hand, the tongue, the voice. Yes, close reading is that close.

And like any form of closeness, easier said than done. The finished product of a close reading exudes confidence, obscuring how much of close reading is uncertainty, insecurity, the smell of ink as entire pages of analysis are crossed out, the sweat of revision. Also, there are risks. It’s easy to get sidetracked: noticing is addicting. Grab too many examples and your regional argument will end up becoming general. And one’s global theorizing need not gild the lily: Christopher Spaide warns in his essay that “carelessly applying theory is like carelessly applying sunscreen: what should be a delicate and thorough act of care turns into something clumsy, imbalanced, ickily slick.”

The parlor of close reading showcases the promises and pitfalls of getting close to something: a text, an idea about a text, an idea of perhaps global importance. Ideally, this is a closeness that leans toward friendship: the critic “wants to help the poem be what it is, to shore it up,” as Emily Ogden writes. A close reading need not lean into conspiracy, the unmasking of a mastermind. The close reader need not be judge or jury issuing a verdict. You can rough a text up, but expect to miss something crucial in the process. Bend the text too much, and your reading will come back to haunt you, as several contributors note of close readings gone awry, even in the hands of veteran critics.

By the end of a close reading, there should be a sense of satisfaction—one should leave the parlor glad to have spent some time there. And there should be a feeling that though the close reading has concluded, the conversation has not. A close reading is like a pebble tossed into water. It creates ripples of readings: an energy radiates from it. For close reading has its own sense of delight, one that comes from pursuing a path where, as Hershinow writes, the “audacious, difficult, risky […] and thrilling” align. It’s enough to make the heart skip a beat.

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The parlor has democratic potential. But in literary criticism’s parlor, this potential has seldom come to be. Its master close readers were both famous and infamous: racists, abusers, charlatans who remind us that being close to words is not always synonymous with being close to humanity. And more generally, the very closeness of close reading encourages exclusivity. From granular noticing can come the epic snobbery of those so infatuated by their theories that the indifferent can become the subject of scorn. Sinykin and Winant have tried to break from these pasts to envision close reading for the new century—their book healthily includes both veteran and emerging critics, coming from almost every theoretical orientation. It’s a diverse, welcoming crowd. But there is a strain of close reading’s pasts—the pretenses of its parlor—that continues to linger.

Sinykin and Winant’s book is timely and useful. I know of no other book that shows the how of close reading so well. As models, each chapter makes every step of close reading less mysterious. At the same time, the cultural capital one must arrive to the book with is staggering: an essay on Sianne Ngai’s reading of Alfred Hitchcock depends on being familiar with Ngai’s awesome reach—Kant, Melville, Freud, Heidegger. The book’s central conceit—that one can learn close reading by reading critics reading critics reading texts—can at times be claustrophobia-inducing: an essay on Barbara Johnson’s reading of Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano requires understanding how Johnson quotes Peter Sacks’s own close reading of Greek myth, in addition to Johnson’s reading of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” You can get by if you don’t know the references and read for the method, but there’s something jarring in all the reader is supposed to know.

This hints at a larger problem that looms throughout the book. Overall, there is a sense throughout Close Reading that one has been invited to a circle that is eager to constrict. Sinykin and Winant begin the book by writing that close reading’s audience is many: “an undergraduate, a graduate student, a professor, or an everyday reader.” But the everyday reader vanishes as soon as they are mentioned. More worrying, Sinykin and Winant imply that not all of close reading’s steps are available to everyone. They see global theorizing in particular as a step that only takes place in the domain of professional scholarship, writing that “it is worthwhile, though, for undergraduates to be familiar with global theorizing because, even if you do not plan on pursuing graduate work in literary studies, this is the horizon at which all your work is aimed.”

That is a cringey sentence, implying that each step of close reading is tied to a stratum of academic distinctiveness. (Undergraduates can theorize!) There’s also a further implication that the apex of close reading resides in the exclusive clutch of the research university. (Faculty anywhere can close-read!) This problem is most telling in the book’s final section, “Practical Materials,” where the role of close reading in dissertation chapters, conference presentations, and journal articles is explored. It is practical, yes, but for a very particular parlor. The book’s overall trajectory suggests an arc that begins with a novice close reader and concludes with one particular type of close reader—the college professor.

Perhaps Sinykin and Winant have made evident what has been implicit in this parlor all along in their mapping the stages of close reading to the hierarchies of the research university. Yet in doing so, they place close reading in the 20th century, not the century the book is intended to create. Sinykin has gone on record in Defector to state that “close reading is for everyone,” and he is right. But that claim isn’t fully fulfilled in this book.

I cannot help but wonder what the effect would have been if the editors had expanded the circle to include those who follow different arcs. Where are the examples from students and other beginning close readers? More importantly, where is the doctor close-reading the ill patient, or the lawyer close-reading the testimony? Where is the convener of the book club, and where is the lay reader? If close reading is nothing more than professionalization, promotion, and tenure, then only its fossils will remain by the end of this century.

I suspect that its editors, navigating the sea of recent takes on the practice, picked up a few of the latest polemics’ assumptions. But there is no need to dim close reading’s horizon or limit its steps to a few. The student who arrives to the appreciation course having had few opportunities to read and write, the laborer who thinks about returning to community college and skims blogs between shifts, the professional who needs a podcast for their commute home: The horizon of close reading includes everyone under the sun.

As the book’s contributors show, its license is an egalitarian one. Its origin is in the insight, as Noreen Masud writes, that close reading is “less a case of what the students didn’t know, so much as a case of what they didn’t know they were allowed to know when reading a poem.” This is close reading at its friendliest and most democratic, as the ally who reminds you that your instinct is a smart one, that all you know and all you are is of value and can be brought to the act of reading, and, in doing so, how you read offers illumination to others. Such horizon-broadening moments occur in the classroom and outside of it, and there is no need to correlate them to the Carnegie Classification. Close reading endures beyond the classroom—if we look for it. The practice of close reading spans careers, connects people, and changes lives. Its durability comes from its democracy.

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Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century goes far to make public what happens in the parlor of literary criticism. This was needed well before the 21st century began and is absolutely necessary now. In the past two years, at least 130 universities in the United States have either closed outright or restructured themselves, consolidating or gutting departments where close reading was formerly practiced. The elites are not immune: there is talk of restructure and elimination of humanities programs at the University of Chicago, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. Even though the unemployment rate is currently lower for English than for computer engineering majors; even though English courses not only pay for themselves but also fund pet projects and subsidize money-losing portions of the university—even so, the parlor doors are closing.

The latest books on close reading do not help to prevent this. Instead, they offer yet another round of disciplinary “crisis” discourse that ultimately detracts from our real and present crises. Kramnick’s argument that close reading is a “craft” might make the practice sound hands-on (which it is) but at the expense of suggesting that only specialists can perform it (which is not the case). And Guillory assumes in his book that close reading “resides at the pole of dispersion defined by a small number of practitioners,” as if rarity justifies itself. But craft implies guild, and guild implies gate: such expertise means little when its utility is marked by insularity toward outsiders and condescension toward allies, making for an easy target in times of institutional retrenchment and democratic backsliding. Attempts to position close reading as closed, instead of close, will only make the parlors of humanistic thinking all the more barren and fragile. Now is not the time for professors to lock anyone out.

“[C]lose reading isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the fusty peccadillo of the elbow-patched elite,” Hershinow writes, a sentiment all the authors in Sinykin and Winant’s book seem to share. Their book not only counters the fustiness of today’s elbow-patched elite but also anticipatorily corrects a different figure that literary studies will see more of as the 21st century progresses: the edgelord-turned-professor ready to tell the right wing what it wants to hear. In January, Michael W. Clune, author of the much-discussed A Defense of Judgment (2021), offered testimony as a proponent of Ohio Senate Bill 1, now law. Clune’s testimony had tones of Kramnick and Guillory with its talk of truth and expert technique. But Clune had a more pointed purpose: to expose a “shadow curriculum” developed by “bloated, unaccountable university administrations” in cahoots with “politicized” activist faculty. Together, he testified, they have created “suffocating political orthodoxies” that don’t just imperil students—they harm the “state and nation’s intellectual, scientific, and cultural health” as well. The solution, Clune inferred, is for the state to require universities to be less “political.” Some of the strongest advocates of close reading have invited the police into the parlor to monitor it for any signs, to quote the senate bill, of “controversial belief or policy.”

Clune’s testimony was not close reading but conspiracy theorizing replete with Illuminati. It is a mode of reading whose global ambition is antagonistic and opportunistic. Shortly after testifying, Clune joined the faculty of a center initiated by the Ohio Legislature to uphold the “American constitutional order” (by inviting conservative spokesman George Will to campus) and promoting “the intellectual diversity of the university’s academic community” (by developing a major and minor in “Great Books”).

In the years to come, close reading may be poached by centers like these, serving as marketing spin behind attempts to further tilt public education toward right-wing ends. But as they are interested more in order than in ambiguity, in “intellectual diversity” rather than diversity of people, the close readings such centers foster will be little more than the putting of monochrome oars into a sterile sea of sameness.

Where Sinykin and Winant’s work may prove the most useful is the counter-genealogy they provide, one in which close reading isn’t just a white man sitting at his desk with his brandy and his bitterness but is instead, even in times of demagoguery, the practice of a diverse coalition of critics from multiple theoretical orientations and from around the world, using a shared method to converse with each other, across turn, -ology and -ism. Close reading need not be a return of the repressed, reappropriated by 21st-century facsimiles of its highly problematic 20th-century founders. It can offer insight on the oldest and the newest of texts. It can lead one to explore irony, paradox, and ambiguity, but it can also lead one to explore race, class, and gender. It can lead one to the cloister but can also lead one to the rally. As long as one is open and friendly, to a text and to others, close reading offers its own rewards.

It is tempting, in antidemocratic times, to look upon the parlors of humanistic thinking as inessential, as anachronisms. But look at Burke’s parlor metaphor again and see the little democracies that happen inside it. A little bit of listening for context and one—anyone—can jump into the conversation. In the exchange, strangers become allies, and even the stranger who counters you still offers you something: enough respect for you and your position to disagree with it. In the back-and-forth, in the stammering and the raised voices and the laughter, a web forms, so much so that all lose track of time. And with all that comes the pain of pulling apart, the sadness of knowing it’s time to leave those you have conversed with. This is the human in humanistic thinking. It’s the realization of knowing we need each other more than we think: we need each other in order to think. Leaving the parlor, one does not look at other people, or the world, in the same way again.

Close reading, in the hands of the book’s contributors, brings words and people together. As much as it reflects the parlor’s problems, Sinykin and Winant’s book ultimately makes the parlor of close reading public and revels in its promise. It is a promise that ought not to be consigned to the research university or the state-mandated right-wing center, for it is a promise that is stronger when there are more people in it, and it buzzes with life when its door is fully open. To have close reading transpire otherwise is to risk too much—stuffiness, isolation, elitism. The price of doing literary criticism that way is the cost of its perpetuity.