Close Reading After Distraction: Attentional Discipline and the Futures of Interpretation

• In Event: Imagining the Future(s) of Close Reading

Abstract

1. Objectives
This paper reconceptualizes “close reading” as a cultural and pedagogical response to historically specific forms of distraction. It explores how close reading persists not only as an interpretive technique, but as a discipline of attention and a mechanism for rarifying particular texts in the English classroom. We ask: what kinds of subjects—and what kinds of texts—does close reading produce and preserve in the age of platform media, generative AI, and curricular diversification?

2. Theoretical Framework
Our argument builds on John Guillory’s On Close Reading (2025), which situates the practice as a response to a shifting “social ecology of attention.” Guillory shows how close reading, since its New Critical origins, has “rarefied” certain texts—distinguishing them from mass-market forms—as a way to preserve interpretive difficulty and justify disciplinary methods. We pair this analysis with Caleb Smith’s (2019, 2023) genealogy of attentive reading. For Smith, attention is not a stable cognitive function but a historically contingent ethic, renovated by Anglo-Protestant reformers who reconceived religious practices to remedy “the psychic damage wrought by modernity” (2019, p. 887) on our collective ability to focus amidst distraction—a concern that persists today. In this view, close reading survives because it disciplines both how and what we attend to. Together, these frameworks reconceptualize close reading as a historically contingent method for cultivating attentional ethics.

3. Modes of Inquiry
This theoretical paper draws on literary theory and conceptual history to trace how close reading functions as a cultural technology of attention and value, particularly within secondary ELA classrooms where media forms and literacy practices are rapidly evolving.

4. Data Sources
We analyze theoretical texts (Guillory, Smith); historical examples that demonstrate close reading’s evolving role in ELA classrooms; and contemporary discourse about attention and distraction and its implications for education.

5. Findings
The paper argues that close reading persists because it performs cultural work beyond interpretation. It signals which texts and practices deserve sustained attention by training readers in the diminishing values of patience, focus, and seriousness. Once deployed to distinguish literature from mass entertainment, close reading now adapts to a media ecosystem where attention itself is commodified. Moreover, it not only disciplines readers, it sacralizes texts: to close read is to declare that a text—whether Shakespeare, a TikTok video, or an iPhone game—merits serious attention. Smith’s genealogy clarifies that close reading has always been a form of “discipline”—an ethical response to the problem of distraction. Its continued relevance lies in this capacity not merely to decode text, but to train presence. Through this practice, educators continually reshape the cultural authority of English class itself.

6. Scholarly Significance
The paper contributes to the English education and curriculum studies literatures. Theoretically, it integrates Guillory and Smith’s frameworks and extends them to digital contexts, demonstrating how attentional discipline adapts to new media ecologies. In doing so, it reveals how English, as a discipline, maintains relevance in the curriculum not through its emphasis on interpretive practice, but on the cultivation of attention. Pedagogically, it offers educators conceptual resources for understanding close reading’s enduring value amid technological changes.

Authors

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University