Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others [Hardcover]

Dealing mainly with the works of William Shakespeare, the essays in Close Readings without Readings reflect Stephen Booths lifelong interest in uncovering the ways great literature works upon readers. As the books title suggests, the author does not aim to create new or novel interpretations or to uncover the political agendas of literary works, but to notice language patternsrepetitions, analogies, correspondences, echoes, overtonesand other ways in which the choice and the arrangement of words affect readers. For Booth, close reading is a practice of attentiveness. He notices how, why, and in what ways Shakespeares works affect his readers. Whether readers agree with the premises of a literary work or not, they subject themselves, knowingly or not, to its effects. For Booth, what we value in literature is the experience. He has devoted his own work to recognizing the nature, process, and functions of reading literature, and to teaching others to do the same. Recent years have seen Booths efforts recognized by volumes dedicated both to close reading and to his achievements as editor, scholar, critic, and teacher.Stephen Booth is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

This collection of 13 essays by influential scholar Stephen Booth includes some heretofore unpublished conference papers and some previously published works. As a deconstructionist pioneer, Booth discusses the unsettled meanings in literary works, some 'irritants,' and insists (as Prospero does with Miranda) that readers must be attentive to primary texts. Booth offers, for example, close readings of Julius Caesara play that 'makes fools of its audience'and the 'editor-made text' of Hamlet. Booth also explores Marlowes Hero and Leander, Miltons Paradise Lost,and Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, The Winters Tale, Twelfth Night,and Othello. In all of the essays, Booths tone is humorous and vital, even visceral. As in every perfect pieclC¥