Close Reading and Comparative Literature: Histories, Debates, and New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (A CLS Forum)
Description
Conversations about the state of the field in literary studies have lately renewed attention to the question of close reading—as method, as pedagogical tool, and as a constitutive feature of the discipline in US academe (e.g. Guillory, On Close Reading; Sinykin and Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty First Century). Close reading has also been a vital concern for Comparative Literature, particularly with the rise of world literature as an organizing matrix for literary studies in the last three decades. See, for instance, the consideration of the institutional and intellectual intersections between comparative literature and area studies that in Death of a Discipline (2003) Spivak argued would be crucial to the expansion of comparative literature beyond its traditionally Euro-centered boundaries, precisely because it facilitated the approach to those traditions not as stable “fields” but as “active cultural media” requiring knowledge practices beyond the mechanics of information accumulation. Since then, close reading has remained the critical practice and method attuned to the historical, often multilingual, textures of language employed to take on these challenges.
A century since the rise of close reading in the secular academy and twenty-five years since Death of a Discipline, the panorama is shifting. One of the reasons for the persistence of close reading in literary studies was not only that it promoted critical thinking and reasoned argumentation, but also that it was easily teachable and suited to a changing landscape of both students and scholars. Now that generations have learned the method, we are witnessing the reproduction of what was thought to be the core of ethical humanist methodology in unlikely places—from contemporary reactionary political discourse to the output of large language models (LLMs). What, for instance, does the fact that “AI” can give a (putatively) plausible close reading of a poem mean for the future methods of literary study? Given the rise of computer-assisted translation, why insist on the value of language learning and what is the place of such work in literary studies? What, given current circumstances, are the ethics of close reading? If “mastery” becomes the purview of the machine, what is the place of the human—embodied, flawed, and so on—in the work of reading? What, ultimately, is the role of close reading when it comes to what Harry Levin once termed “comparing the literature”?
The aim of this seminar is to take stock of the relationship between close reading and comparative literature. We invite papers that address the questions above, take up the historical relationship between close reading and comparative literature (in the US and elsewhere), or propose questions not posited here. The conveners of this seminar are working with the editors of CLS: Comparative Literature Studies and plan to develop this conversation for publication in the journal.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019) as well as numerous articles and essays. Together with Anne Garland Mahler, she is also co-director of the digital platform Global South Studies.
Speaker Bio
R. John Williams is Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of "The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West" (Yale University Press, 2014), and "Out of Mind: Media, Meditation, and the Problem of the Inner Self" (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press, 2026). He is currently at work on a manuscript titled "Absent Theory: The Comparative Origins of Close Reading."
Speaker Bio
Dr Patrick Jones is a Maître-assistant (Lecturer) in Modern English Literature at the Université de Genève. His research primarily explores the relationship between modern literature and continental philosophy, with a particular focus on modernist fiction and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of life. His first monograph, Henry James and the Question of Living, will be published with Bloomsbury in May 2026.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yael Segalovitz is the 2025–26 Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley, Jewish Studies Teaching Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is the author of How Close Reading Made Us (SUNY, 2024) and co-organizer of the 2026 UC Berkeley symposium “Modes of Reading.” Her new project explores psychoanalysis and contemporary literature.
Speaker Bio
Zhuoyu Lin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard. His research examines the paradigmatic shift of reading as a mode of knowledge production and aesthetic experience in China. He holds an AM in Comparative Literature from Harvard, an MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation from Pembroke College, Oxford, an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from King’s College, Cambridge, and a BA in Creative Writing, English, and Philosophy from the University of Arizona.
Speaker Bio
Katharina N. Piechocki is Associate Professor in French and Romance Studies at UBC, Vancouver. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (NYU) and is the author of Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The co-editor of a special double issue of Romance Quarterly on “Clouds” (2021), Katharina is currently completing her next monograph, “Procreative Poetics: Hercules and the Origins of the Opera Libretto.”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Soelve Curdts holds the Chair in Comparative Literature at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her academic distinctions include a DFG Heisenberg Professorship (2018-2023), and this year’s Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Davis (spring 2025). She has published on Wordsworth, Hegel, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky i.a.
Speaker Bio
Rose Casey is associate professor of English at West Virginia University. Her first book, Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, was published by Fordham University Press in July 2025. Her scholarship has appeared in academic and public venues, including NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, the Journal of Global and Postcolonial Studies, and the Boston Review. She’s working on a new book on inheritance law, racial dispossession, and narrative temporalities in South African novels.
Speaker Bio
Ashley Brock is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained in comparative literature, she researches Latin American cultural production in a trans-American context and is interested in tensions between the local and the global and the role of Latin America in conversations about world literature. Professor Brock is the author of Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023).