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The Fading Promise of Higher Education / Summer 2026 / Notes & Comments
How much pleasure does rigorous reading really bring?
Stephen Akey
In the Atelier of Ahola (Miss Selin), 1895–1900, by Venny Soldan-Brofeldt (1863–1945); Järvenpää Art Museum, Finland, via Unsplash.
At a recent book-group discussion of Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever,” I volunteered that Mrs. Ansley’s habit of knitting, even in so glorious a setting as a terrace café overlooking the Roman Forum at dusk (and much to the annoyance of her more worldly and confident companion, Mrs. Slade), was obviously an allusion to Penelope’s raveling and unraveling of her shroud in The Odyssey, for similar motives of subterfuge and self-defense. It is no such thing. In extenuation of this absurd overinterpretation, I ought to say that although I didn’t believe a word of it, I offered it up primarily as a stimulus to conversation. In fact, I managed to bring the conversation to a halt, and, in the awkward silence that followed, the group leader politely thanked me for my “interesting” contribution and adroitly moved the discussion to more grounded considerations of literary effect.
I offer this parable of literary overinterpretation in a cultural moment when interpretation itself has almost died. Fewer and fewer people care enough to interpret, let alone overinterpret, any serious work of literature—they’d have to read it first, not an especially popular option these days. The handful of die-hards (retirees, students, autodidacts, one or two obsessive-compulsive types) turning out for book discussions like the Edith Wharton one held in a windowless meeting room of the Brooklyn Public Library deserved better than to hear my nonsense. In a way, these untrained readers offer what might be the last, best hope for literary appreciation. I’ve attended a number of these discussions at the Brooklyn Public Library, and, although a few regulars can be counted on for perceptive insights, the attendees aren’t there to demonstrate their interpretive ingenuity. They’ve come to share their love of literature. They may be somewhat naive, but they aren’t going to bore anyone to tears with some obscure reference to Penelope’s weaving in The Odyssey.
At least my overinterpretation of Edith Wharton had the virtue of insincerity. A counter-instance is a notorious passage in F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal critical study American Renaissance, in which Matthiessen riffed elaborately on a striking image in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket:
[H]ardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some “soiled fish of the sea.” The discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.
Matthiessen really believed it. The trouble was, the genius who lighted upon the metaphysical epithet “soiled” was not Herman Melville but a careless type compositor. Melville had written “coiled,” not “soiled.” Matthiessen was working with a faulty text.
Matthiessen’s blunder wouldn’t have bothered Stanley Fish, who, in 1971, conducted an experiment in an English class at the State University of New York at Buffalo in which he asked his students to interpret an anonymous religious poem transcribed on the blackboard. They did so, much to Professor Fish’s satisfaction. In fact, the “poem” was a random list of surnames of linguists left over from a previous class in linguistics that Fish had been teaching moments earlier, thus:
Jacobs-RosenbaumLevinThorneHayesOhman (?)
Fish was especially pleased with his students’ reading of “Ohman” as possibly signifying “omen” or “amen” or even, as he wrote, “Oh Man, since it is man’s story as it intersects with the divine plan that is the poem’s subject.” The moral of this story, according to Fish (who liked to stir things up), was that the wild interpretations cooked up by his students were perfectly legitimate, even laudable, responses to the needs of a particular “interpretive community.” Whereas I think nonsense, even allowing for the occasional throat-clearing or semi-ironic performative display, is, mostly, nonsense. Fish would have loved my preposterous remarks about Edith Wharton.
Whatever “interpretive community” I might or might not belong to, I find, as I grow older, that the ideal of rigorous analysis I imbibed during college and graduate school speaks less to my needs as a reader. What are those needs? To be moved, to be disturbed, delighted, provoked, and consoled, even to shed a tear or two. Of course, I’m more likely to be disturbed, delighted, and provoked if I’m reading carefully and paying the close attention that any good book deserves. I know what “free indirect discourse” means, and I’m familiar with literary traditions and counter-traditions. Sometimes those are useful things to know. But I also know that the kind of interpretive rigor I once aspired to is likely to be, in the words of Susan Sontag, “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.” Yep, that sounds like me.
Sontag delivered that judgment in “Against Interpretation,” a 1964 essay that called for “an erotics of art” to supplant the deadening hermeneutics of the literary critical establishment of that era. It’s not that interpretation didn’t have its uses; Sontag herself did plenty of interpreting. But the sort of thing she objected to was exactly the sort of thing I was doing in that reading group at the Brooklyn Public Library: interposing an interpretive screen between the work itself and the direct, intimate experience of the work. “[I]nterpretation,” she concluded in a magnificent aperçu, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
An “erotics of art” sounds all very well, but how do you practice it? Sontag didn’t, or couldn’t, say. That task she left to one of her intellectual heroes, Roland Barthes. “The pleasure of the text,” Barthes wrote in the book of that title (Le plaisir du texte), “is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss.” If you like that sentence, you’ll love The Pleasure of the Text. The only thing I really like about that book is the title. (Barthes’s gnomic assertions and rebarbative jargon certainly challenge conventional notions of “pleasure.”) But maybe that’s enough to work with. In fact, what Barthes was saying isn’t all that different from what many great writers and legions of common readers have always said: that the “text” must give pleasure. The pleasure given may be problematic, disturbing, scandalous, possibly antisocial, but when all the big themes and earnest sociology have lost their purchase, what remains is what William Wordsworth (not exactly a frivolous sybarite) called “the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.”
So how much pleasure does rigorous interpretation add to the experience of any work of literature? A little? A lot? None at all? All of the above? I have surely benefited from astute critical readings of William Butler Yeats, a poet I revere, and no one has read Yeats more astutely than Helen Vendler, who was, especially in her shorter books and essays, more than capable of writing lucid, readable explications of difficult poetry. Yet a few years ago, I turned to her massive monograph Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form and found myself more exhausted than enlightened. It’s not as if Vendler was wildly free-associating, like the students in Stanley Fish’s class; after all, Yeats was (or became) a poet of enormous depth and complexity. Thirty-five densely reasoned pages on the two Byzantium poems wouldn’t seem to be too much; all the implication and thematics that Vendler finds in those poems are plausibly there, at least arguably so. But after a while, Vendler’s impeccable scholarship and ruthless impersonality struck me as faintly inhuman. Maybe it’s not fair to cite Yeats’s “The Scholars” (“Old, learned, respectable bald heads / Edit and annotate the lines / That young men, tossing on their beds, / Rhymed out in love’s despair”), which is not an especially deep or complex poem. But it makes a point. What bothered me most about Vendler’s book was the unspoken assumption that all this rigor and erudition constitute the only serious method for reading Yeats’s poetry—that anything less would be soft, impressionistic, smacking of the decadent belletrism that Yeats himself repudiated. Maybe I have gone soft, but it seems to me that the humorless, impersonal, imperious model that Vendler offered as an alternative (at least in her Yeats book) is not a model that most readers outside of a seminar room will want to embrace. Put it like this: Do you really have time to read four hundred fifty pages of microscopically analytical interpretation of Yeats’s “lyric form”? Wouldn’t you rather read, well, Yeats?
In spite of its marginalized status, critical interpretation still gets written (good luck finding a publisher), and I will continue to read it. Edwin Frank, Edward Mendelson, Michael Schmidt, and others go on writing exemplary interpretive studies as if literary criticism still mattered. Maybe it does. What differentiates them from the School of Rigor, as exemplified by Helen Vendler, is that they all sound like human beings. Edwin Frank begins Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel with an anecdote about listening to Radiohead’s Kid A while washing the dishes. Why not? Radiohead’s “keening, staticky, doom-laden anthems,” as he describes them, would seem to provide an apt entrée into the hard-to-handle novels of the previous century. Furthermore, while Frank doesn’t hesitate to take a hard look at the component parts, he doesn’t fetishize close reading. By “contextualizing” (dreadful word) literature with history and social circumstances, by not disdaining biographical or commercial considerations, and, above all, by writing what sounds like conversation rather than “discourse,” he manages to get pretty close to the text after all. But not too close. He’s just as likely to clinch his case with a metaphor as with an argument. Yes, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a lofty masterpiece. It’s also a “crossword puzzle the reader is left to fill in,” “an iridescent bubble,” even “something small and dear and useful…like, say, a pencil.”
Of course, sometimes it’s necessary to take the engine apart and put it back together again, as Edward Mendelson does in his nine-hundred-page Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. Certain types of writing and certain types of writers—the erudite, allusive poetry of W.H. Auden, for example—virtually demand scrupulous analysis. Mendelson’s book is certainly that, but it doubles as an intellectual adventure story. It reads like a history of modern ideas, with Auden as its protagonist. Even so, I prefer his more modestly scaled later books, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, partly because they don’t take two months to read but also because they’re far less specialized. Mendelson writes, he says in the preface to The Things That Matter, “from an individual perspective that every reader is free to judge, and the dialogue between reader and writer is inseparable from the process of understanding.” No advanced degree required. The Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University is writing for the ordinary intelligent reader because he is, in the best possible sense, exactly that himself.
Close reading need not be narrow or cloistered. In the hands of William Empson, possibly the greatest close reader of them all, it was often wicked, insouciant fun. Seven Types of Ambiguity is a little too clinical for my taste, but, in its creative energy and intellectual reach, Milton’s God almost rivals Paradise Lost itself. Also, it’s a lot funnier. And only Empson could have demonstrated with such matter-of-fact acuity that the dark, secret, metaphysical guilt carried by the haunted Reverend Hooper in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” arises from a very unmetaphysical source: habitual masturbation.
Still, how many more specialized critical monographs do I have time for in my reading life? It’s not merely that few literary critics practice or have ever practiced explication de texte with anything like the genius of William Empson. There are a lot of books to read. If I’m going to get around to even 10 percent of the fiction and plays and poems and sundry other things on my wish list, I must, like any dedicated reader, be selective. As it happens, the publishing industry has taken upon itself to do some of the selecting for me by declining to publish traditional critical monographs. Even university presses shun them. (Exceptions are made for superstars.) We will probably never again see a published monograph on ambiguity and irony, or encoded racism, or homoerotic signaling in Moby Dick. What the publishing industry prefers is nonspecialized, essayistic reflections on writers and writing, where tact, sensitivity, and knowing when to shut up do the job of close reading. I’m OK with that.
T.S. Eliot claimed there is no critical method “except to be very intelligent.” He didn’t do close readings either. Nevertheless, his generalizing essays profoundly shaped (not always for the best) the course of literary study. He also said, “The more seasoned reader…does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I understand yet.” How’s that for unclose reading? Eliot didn’t need three hundred densely packed pages to make the case for John Donne or against romantic poetry (or, lamentably, for the undesirability of “any large number of free-thinking Jews”); indeed, he probably would have been a less influential critic if he had. And while an entire generation of scholars dedicated their careers to analyzing his poetry to death, that is not a mistake Eliot made with any of the authors in his critical purview. In later life, he apologized for “the occasional note of arrogance, of vehemence, of cocksureness or rudeness, the braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter.” The mild-mannered man behind his typewriter was simply talking about literature very intelligently.
Talking about literature: Isn’t criticism, in some fundamental sense, a way of keeping the conversation going? As Eliot himself said, “criticism is as inevitable as breathing.” One way or another, we’re going to talk about the books we love (or hate). Although critical fashions change radically, the voice of personal, informed critical appraisal and appreciation is still with us. Really, wouldn’t you rather read Zadie Smith’s elegant and balanced essay “E.M. Forster, Middle Manager” than “Forster’s Italian Comedies: Que[e]rying Heterosexuality Abroad”? Besides, you don’t have much choice. Specialized studies of Forster—or any other author, for that matter—are vanishingly rare these days, whereas essays for general readers with a literary bent seem to proliferate as never before. For once, I have no quarrel with the publishing industry. Why bring out money-losing monographs on discursive modalities in Jackie Collins when brilliant critics—some famous, some as little known as the online journals and Substacks they write for—are carrying on the conversation in the form of reader-friendly essays accessible to anyone with a laptop? Similarly, the growing popularity of what is sometimes called “memoir criticism,” which some deplore as criticism lite, seems to me entirely explicable and commendable. When, in My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead confesses to feeling “defensive” on Eliot’s behalf (“I can’t pretend to be above caring about Eliot’s physical features”), she’s certainly not pretending to any sort of scholarly objectivity. Why should she? All critical perceptions, even the most “disinterested,” necessarily issue from particular subjective experiences. When I read Helen Vendler, I think, Who is this person handing down these Olympian judgments? With Rebecca Mead, I have a pretty good sense of the person making the judgments. And they’re not Olympian. I’m inclined to trust her.
It’s true that the Rebecca Mead approach can lead to the sort of thing that many of us have experienced in our various book discussion groups, when someone uses a Rachel Cusk novel as a pretext to natter on about her strained relationship with her sister. Also, there are only so many ways of saying, “Hey, I really loved this book.” Yes, we understand that. But what’s the book about? What ideas does it express? How does it express them? A little rigor—sometimes a lot of it—will go a long way toward answering those questions. But the conversation is always more important than the conclusions, and the best conversations are wayward, unexpected, intimate. Does close reading conduce to that sort of conversation? Well, it can, but it’s just as likely to move in the opposite direction: away from the personal, the passionate, the deeply felt, away from all the reasons we read literature in the first place.
Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 28.2
(Summer 2026). This essay may not be resold, reprinted,
or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact
The Hedgehog Review for further details.