How Not to Re-read Novels: The Critical Value of First Reading

The temporal dimension of reading became, in the early twentieth century, a source of critical anxiety about the novel’s status as high art. As a result, most critical approaches have since implicitly examined novels’ forms from the perspective of a reader who has read the whole work. Reimagining close reading as attentive instead to the constraints and investments of the first-time reader compels us to rethink both the purposes of modernist formal innovation and the ideal of “critical distance” more broadly. The valorization — today and in the modernist period — of a detached, spatial analyses of fiction neglects the ways in which novelists — even difficult modernists — develop styles designed to keep first-time readers in the flow of the temporal experience of reading. A form of close reading permits a model of critical reading that seeks to recapture, rather than to erase, the experience of first reading.