BUIES CREEK — As an associate professor of English at Campbell University, Kenneth Morefield emphasizes to students he teaches in his British and American literature, academic writing, and film classes the value and practice of “close reading.”
“Close reading” occurs when readers set aside the historical context, biography, political science or psychology of a text and read the text itself critically to glean insights. “It’s just you and the book and nothing else,” Morefield said. “What can you glean just by reading and thinking?’”
Wanting to teach this practice by modeling it, Morefield underwent his own “close reading” of a book his students often read: Jane Austen’s “Emma.” The product of that modeling is his own book, “Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’: A Close Reading Companion.” Volume I will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing this December.
“Part of what I’m trying to do with the book is swing the pendulum back toward some of the traditional notions of what a good liberal arts education is and why it’s important,” Morefield said.
Though it’s impossible for readers to fully divest themselves from assumptions they bring to a book like “Emma,” he added, “I think with the practice of close reading, you try as much as you can.”
Morefield’s “Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’: A Close Reading Companion” has been in the making for the last seven years. It grew from an idea he had to do weekly “close reading” posts for a blog he was writing at the time. Even before that he had written a scholarly article, “Emma Could Not Resist: Complicity and the Christian Reader,” published in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal.
His interest in “Emma” began with a Summer Literary Institute program the National Humanities Center hosts. Under the guidance of Patricia Meyer Spacks, the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Morefield and 11 other academics from around the country spent a week analyzing Jane Austen’s “Emma.” From there, Morefield expanded his own analysis.
He compares his “Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’: A Close Reading Companion” to Biblical commentaries — or works which accompany the selected text with an in depth reading and analysis of each individual section. “The purpose of the commentary would be reading the book of the Bible [and running] into a passage where you say, ‘I don’t get that,’ so you look it up by the chapter or the verse,” he said.
Though Morefield’s forthcoming book can be used as a literary tool and offer assistance to readers of “Emma,” he said he hopes the work will be enjoyed for its own sake, too. “I hope it will be like talking to a friend about the book,” he said, and that “it will be a pleasurable book for someone to just sit down and read who likes ‘Emma.’”
So what did Morefield glean from his own close reading of Emma? “We are too quick to give up on people, especially young people. And we are way too quick to judge,” he said. “Emma genuinely cares for other people, and she is willing to learn from her mistakes. If you can combine those two things, you have the capacity for greatness.” — Rachel Davis and Cherry Crayton