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.