It is a professional embarassment that I have no working definition of close reading, especially since it is quite clearly the silver spoon in the mouth of literary criticism. But given that it is scientific to quantify our work numerically, I now wonder whether close reading could be accurately defined as citing the same passage twice (or even better: thrice) within a paragraph of critical prose. Ideally, the latter should be an example of close writing, defined as the use of a critical register whose concepts have two or even better three senses at once.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 