Reading Derrida Close Reading Doug Lemov Defining Close Reading, or, The Hermeneutics of Doug Lemov

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Competing and Compelling Curriculum: Posthumanism, Crowdsourced Knowledge, Eco-Justice, Multicultural Education, and Disrupting Close Reading

Abstract

By playing with notions of close reading, a term used by Lemov and associated with Derrida (Miller, 2009), this paper aims to productively suggest certain unknowable possibilities for acts and experiences of reading. Through Derridean deconstruction, I close read Lemov's definition of close reading. Folding these notions of close reading into one another, I disrupt transcendental meanings for acts of reading, proposing instead a reading curriculum where readers are not centrally defined by comprehension levels and reading itself is not dictated by accuracy, correctness, or objective meaning. Instead, reading becomes an unqualified event of possibility.

Author

• Jordan Corson, Teachers College, Columbia University