Dr. Scott Newstok, executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes, has collaborated with John Guillory on a new book titled On Close Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
According to the publisher: At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study.
Reviewer Timothy Aubry recently noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education: While literary scholars never stopped doing close reading, in recent years many have come to its explicit defense. The very useful annotated bibliography at the back of the book, produced by Scott Newstok, which cites numerous examples and discussions of close reading, attests to its return to prominence in recent years.
In conjunction with the volume, Newstok also has produced the Close Reading Archive, a free public humanities database that compiles over 600,000 words of commentary, ranging from 1930s Rhodes faculty Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren to scholars currently working in the field. Rhodes student Ahyoung Hwang ’27 provided extensive data cleaning for the Archive. Her efforts were supported by a Rhodes College Student Research Assistantship, administered by Dr. Brian Larkins, associate professor of computer science and director of fellowships and undergraduate research at Rhodes. Also for the Archive, the website design and database conversion were undertaken in conjunction with Lili Hsu, a graduate student at New York University.