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From the Close Reading For The 21st Century Symposium, hosted by Emory University. What are the challenges, strategies, and rewards for teaching close reading? What are the stakes of teaching close reading through the nightmare of the contemporary?
This is the third episode in this miniseries from Emory, following from “Close Reading For The 21st Century” and “Close Reading Is A Conversation.”
Date Recorded: November 7, 2025
Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby
Cast (in order of appearance): Johanna Winant, Brian Glavey, Matt Seybold, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Lindsay Reckson, Christopher Spaide, Katie Kadue, Dan Sinykin, Jeff Dolven, John Lysaker, Omari Weekes, Patrick Sui, Oren Izenberg, Paul Buchholz, Farah Bakaari, Annie Abrams, Beci Carver
Featured Speakers
Brian Glavey is Associate Professor of English at University of South Carolina and the author of Relatability: Sharing & Oversharing with the New York School Poets, forthcoming in 2026 from U. Chicago Press.
Katie Kadue is Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (U. Chicago, 2021)
Lindsay Reckson is Professor and Chair of English at Haverford College, as well as the author of Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, & Performance in American Literature (NYU, 2020)
Christopher Spaide is Assistant Professor of English at University of Southern Mississippi and a columnist at LitHub.
Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and the co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025).
Johanna Winant is Associate Professor of English & Humanities at Reed College, co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025), and the author of Lyric Logic, forthcoming from Columbia UP.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
Episode Bibliography
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)
Honore de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832)
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (U Texas, 1981)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)
Sean Bonney, “What Teargas is For” (2016)
Peter Brooks, Reading For The Plot: Design & Intention in Narrative (Harvard UP, 1992)
Douglas Dowland, “The Problem of the Parlor” Los Angeles Review of Books (October 21, 2025)
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy (Algonquin, 2022)
Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991)
John Guillory, On Close Reading (University of Chicago, 2025)
bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress (Routledge, 1994)
Fredric Jameson, “Reification & Utopia in Mass Culture” Social Text (Winter 1979)
Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago P, 2023)
Richard Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (1974)
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1977)
Alexander Manshel, “High School English & The Making of American Readers” American Literary History (Winter 2025)
John McPhee, “Omission” New Yorker (September 7, 2015)
James Metcalf, “Close Reading in Crisis Times” Textual Practice (February 2026)
Fred Moten, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me” from Moten/Lopez/Cleaver (2022)
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005)
John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941)
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)
Sonya Posmentier, “Your Studies Shall Become Life Studies” ELH (Fall 2025)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke UP, 2003)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Anality: News From The Front” Studies in Gender & Sexuality (Summer 2010)
Matt Seybold, et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)
Dan Sinykin, “Sufficient Passion: An Epistemology of Historicist Close Reading” New Literary History (Summer 2025)
Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)
Hortense Spillers, Black, White, & in Color (U Chicago, 2003)
Wallace Stevens, “Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction” (1942)
Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats & Lyric Form (Harvard UP, 2007)
Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard UP, 1983)
Johanna Winant, “The Claims of Close Reading” Boston Review (November 26, 2025)
Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn To Sit Down Together & Talk About A Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays (Peepal Tree Press, 2022)
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