Reading the Word, Not the World: A Critical Analysis of Close Reading

Abstract

This article critically analyzes a Common Core-aligned English Language Arts curriculum with particular attention paid to the ways in which it constructs docile subjects in and through literate practices. Through a critical reading and content analysis of this textbook--one that the author was required to teach to her eighth grade students--this paper argues that under the guise of “college and career readiness,” the curriculum contained within the textbook represents a neoliberal approach to literary criticism, one whose ideology is evident through the material practices of “close reading” and in the disciplinary methods it employs in teaching students the “correct” way to read a text. In so doing, students become participants in a mass standardization effort that ultimately works to distort the myriad manifestations of power in K-12 public education today.

Keywords

• secondary literacy
• neoliberalism
• critical theory