AbstractThe activity of close reading lies at the heart of literary studies, a “signature pedagogy” that distinguishes English from other disciplines. Despite its centrality to the discipline, however, close reading has been curiously resistant to analysis. This lesson study aimed to determine where students encounter challenges in close reading. Contrary to dominant narratives in the discipline, the university students in this study were adept at formal analysis. They were challenged, on the other hand, by invitations to make intertextual and personal connections to the text. Analyzing features of successful close reading, the essay proposes that intertextual thinking and personal connection are important components. The essay recommends assessing student skills in the initial stages of teaching close reading and, when warranted, integrating instruction in intertextual thinking and making personal connections alongside formal analysis. It also suggests group discussion may help leverage these neglected components of close reading.

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.