American New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s anchored their views in similar fashion, and promoted close reading as a means of understanding that the autonomy of the work (often a poem) mattered more than anything else, including authorial intention, the cultural contexts of reception, and most broadly, ideology.
[5] For these critics, including Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, only close reading, because of its attentiveness to the nuances and interrelation of language and form, could address the work in its complex unity.
The articles were motivated, as all of the scholars remarked, by the changes they had observed in the work of their colleagues and students—as well as in contemporary culture—that made them think again about why close reading mattered to the study of literature.
As John Guillory points out, close reading entails "a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.
"[15] A tendency towards what Vincent B. Leitch calls "canonical statements"[6] appeared in essays and book-length studies, from John Crowe Ransom's "The New Criticism" (1941) and Allen Tate's "A Note on Autotelism" (1949), to Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947),[16] Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949),[17] and W.K.
As Culler notes in his essay for the 2010 bulletin of the American Departments of English, this tendency not to make statements of method meant that most students of the New Critics learned by example.
Further, if he claims that this history is uncertain because it's not clear "what men or gods" feature in it, he continues that line of thinking as he proceeds through the ode's stanzas: when he emphasizes that the "unheard melodies" of the figures depicted on the urn's face are "sweeter than any audible music", that "action goes on though the actors are motionless", that "the maiden, always to be kissed, never actually kissed", that the "boughs...cannot shed their leaves", and when he claims that this "ironic undercurrent" only increases over the course of the poem, to culminate in those infamous lines (156–159, 164).
Yet scholars have also found close reading productive for more politically and socially invested work, thereby refusing the New Critical belief in literary transcendence while seizing on the care with which it treated textuality.
The sixteen chapters of Madwoman thus pursue their arguments—that women writers expressed their anxiety about authorship, their rage over being constrained to docile femininity, their canny encoding of their patriarchal critique—with the attention to language, imagery, and form Gilbert and Gubar had been trained to wield as graduate students in the late 1960s.
Reviewers—academic and mainstream—recognized this trait, describing the two scholars as "gnostic heretics who claim to have found the secret code that unlocks the mysteries in old texts" (Schreiber 11)[22] and their interpretations as a "skillful joint peeling away of the layers" of women's writing" (129).
[24] The push for more close-reading instruction in primary and secondary education is partially due to increased feedback from college professors in the early-mid 2000s that students were arriving in university classrooms with few comprehension skills.
[25] The increased demand for students to acquire concrete skills in high school that they would need in transitioning to higher education and to adult life culminated in the creation of the Common Core State Standards in 2009.
[29] Another resource, developed by Beth Burke (NBCT) for the Tampa Bay Times NIE (Newspaper in Education), presents the steps involved in close reading and how to scaffold the strategies for students.