In Praise of Ron Rosenbaum

By way of introducing my Rosenbaumian dissection of the Teamsters' peculiar announcement that they aren't endorsing either presidential candidate.

Ron Rosenbaum, the freelance king. Photo by Nina Roberts courtesy of Penguin Random House.

My previous scatological entry obliges me, as my wife would say, to elevate. My wife, Sarah McNamer, is a professor of literature who frequently engages in close reading. What is close reading? Let’s ask Harvard. Close reading, according to its Classics department,

is the technique of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to the larger work. A close reading delves into what a passage means beyond a superficial level, then links what that passage suggests outward to its broader context. One goal of close reading is to help readers to see facets of the text that they may not have noticed before. To this end, close reading entails “reading out of” a text rather than “reading into” it. Let the text lead, and listen to it.

Why, class, do we engage in close reading?

Close reading is a fundamental skill for the analysis of any sort of text or discourse, whether it is literary, political, or commercial. It enables you to analyze how a text functions, and it helps you to understand a text’s explicit and implicit goals. The structure, vocabulary, language, imagery, and metaphors used in a text are all crucial to the way it achieves its purpose, and they are therefore all targets for close reading. Practicing close reading will train you to be an intelligent and critical reader of all kinds of writing, from political speeches to television advertisements and from popular novels to classic works of literature.

In other words, close reading is very much the opposite of checking your social media feed. Here are some strategies to engage in close reading.

I bring up close reading because there’s a version of it that we journalists engage in from time to time. The master of journalistic close reading is Ron Rosenbaum, our greatest living magazine writer since the death of Tom Wolfe (and very possibly before). Rosenbaum writes books, too, and his latest, In Defense of Love, is well worth your time. For an introduction to the breadth and skill of Rosenbaum’s journalism, I recommend The Secret Parts of Fortune an anthology of his magazine pieces, which blend close readings with obsessive shoe-leather reporting, a heavy dose of erudition, and robust humor. You won’t be able to put it down.

In my latest New Republic piece (I’ve been a busy boy this week), I engage in some close reading of my own, of the Teamsters’ baffling announcement that they won’t be endorsing either candidate for president. I won’t pretend that it rises to Ron’s sublime level, but my close reading is somewhat … Rosenbaumian. You can read it here.