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There is a lot at stake in close reading. In the eighty years since its initial theorization, close reading has been subjected to a number of historical and ideological critiques.1 We know the long (and often troubling) list of political forces, institutional pressures, and personal biases that had some role in close reading's development. Yet another type of historical work, however, is possible-one that identifies a different set of stakes and that traces how a certain set of cognitive dispositions came to be embedded in close reading's theoretical assumptions, techniques, and rhetoric. That type of work is my goal here: to show what these cognitive dispositions are, how they became part of literary study, and how they continue to shape the possibilities of contemporary criticism.
My argument is that some of close reading's most enduring techniques and assumptions have their origins in psychological behaviorism, the deterministic doctrine made famous by John Watson and B. F. Skinner, among others. This program of reading began in I. A. Richards's insistence in the 1920s that literary criticism reflect behaviorist advances in psychology and neurology. Building on these ideas, Richards theorized a model of literary criticism that would do two things. First, it would treat literary texts as behaviors, as defined by the behaviorists-it would treat them as external phenomena without reference to internal mental states. Second, it would record how the stimuli of poems affected readers physiologically and use these results to ground analyses of meaning and form. Richards's theories met strong resistance from New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, who explicitly rejected the premises of Richards's work but whose own theories came to perpetuate Richards's transposition of behaviorist doctrine. Mediated and translated by seventy years of subsequent literary theory, elements of these ideas remain with us today. When we defer to the authority of the text, or insist on the irrelevance of authorial intent, these actions can be traced back to Brooks, Wimsatt, and Richards. Furthermore, they can be traced to a still controversial set of empiricist interventions made by psychologists a century ago.
In 1911, when psychology was still a largely experimental (rather than clinical) discipline, Edward Lee Thorndike published Animal Intelligence, which explored how animal minds forge associations between experiences. Thorndike's...