Close Reading, Writing and Culture

Abstract

This paper examines the status and impact of close reading practice within the discipline of Creative Writing and argues that the overly narrow, practice-based form of textual interpretation that dominates in the writing workshop is limiting and unhelpful within the context of a broader sense of student writing and learning development. What is required is for reading to be broadened to take into account a much wider sense of culture and knowledge, and for other subject domains to be brought into the Creative Writing classroom in order to bring to life the words on the page far beyond the implications of the process of learning the writing ‘craft’. The history of close reading theories in the twentieth century is referenced as a means of identifying a potentially more symbiotic relationship between ‘close’ and ‘cultural’ reading methods. It is only when such cultural knowledges are taken into account that the texts students are expected to read and learn from can truly become useful, encouraging writing students with a much sharper awareness of the cultural and ideological implications of language and text, within a discipline that much more readily acknowledges its wider role as communication in praxis.

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