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Although the history of close reading as a set of practices has been the focus of many excellent studies, the history of how the phrase "close reading" came to be remains largely untouched.1 This article examines the beginnings of the term "close reading" in order to identify the rhetorics of scale employed in debates and arguments surrounding the practices behind the term, and how those rhetorics have set up the debates around "close" and "distant" reading today.
The first section of this essay thus sketches a history of "close reading" as a phrase predominantly found in general usage in primary and secondary education handbooks during the 1930s that subsequently takes on more specialized usage in academic books and essays during the following two decades. This section then details the issues of scale that crystallized in arguments about close reading once they came to focus on the "closeness" of "close reading"-which is to say, once "close reading" became an available term for the next half century against which "adjectival reading" (slow, distant, surface, deep, etc.) could push and define itself. Such arguments revolved around the synecdochic logic of part-representingwhole that governs "close reading," revealing its ability to scale from any amount of evidence (a word, a line, a sonnet) to any level of interpretation (the poem, poetry in the nineteenth century, poetic language in general).
The essay's second section looks at contemporary debates of scale that surround "distant reading" and "close reading," which often take the former to be a macroscopic view of corpuses consisting of thousands of texts and the latter to be the microscopic view of a single text, a few passages, or even a couple of lines. I argue, instead, that various rhetorics of scale involved in "distant reading" can be understood metonymically, structured by the logic of part-part relationships. This mapping of a synecdoche/metonymy distinction onto the "close"/"distant" one is a preliminary response to Alan Liu's call "to discover technically and theoretically how to negotiate between distant and close reading"2 and to Ted Underwood's important pronouncement "that it is now possible to leave the reading wars behind."3 A fuller theorization of synecdoche, metonymy, and scale is outside the scope of this essay, but I conclude with a brief discussion of the synecdoche/...