A Haunted House

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The technique of "close reading" was created by critics such as F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks, and it's not a coincidence that it came to the fore in the wake of High Modernism. If one didn't engage in "close reading" of authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or William Faulkner, one couldn't read them at all. Old techniques such as reading for the plot result in one getting to the bottom of the first page of one of these writers' works and saying, "Huh?" I had this experience again when reading Woolf's brief 1921 story "A Haunted House" the other day. I hadn't sat down with a piece of high-modernist writing in five years, and I was confronted with how slothful a reader I'd become in the interim. I know from experience that writers such as Woolf aren't incomprehensible; one simply n...