ABSTRACT
This chapter considers proposals for Anthropocene reading in relation to current-traditional protocols for scholarly reading and the institutional structures that reinforce and reproduce them. Because the Anthropocene forces a reckoning with the strengths and weaknesses of methods of reading in the professional study of literature and culture, my essay argues, the promise of close reading in the Anthropocene begins with acknowledging the limits of demonstrative reading and embracing the constitutive power of close reading as a collective practice. To refocus a professionalized preoccupation with scholarly reading, however, requires rethinking - and resisting - entrenched institutional incentives and rewards that devalue pedagogical labor. The essay concludes by resituating close reading in the classroom: by defining our intellectual collaborations with students as a collective scholarly and pedagogical project, I suggest that reading beyond the parochial concerns of scholarly communities, and in proximity to others, may be the closeness of reading that matters most.
