What is "close reading"

In literary criticism, the term close reading describes, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text.

In contemporary English practice, the technique of close reading was pioneered by I. A. Richards and his student William Empson; close reading then was technically developed by the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century, and so became the fundamental method of modern criticism. Moreover, in French criticism, close reading is explication de texte, the tradition of textual interpretation in literary study, as proposed by Gustave Lanson.

As an analytical technique, close reading compares and contrasts the concept of distant reading, the technique for “understanding literature, not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data”, as described, by Kathryn Schulz, in “What is Distant Reading?”, an article about the literary scholar Franco Moretti.