David Mikics (Get this book)Although University of Houston English professor Mikics presents the guidelines in this thoughtful book as an antidote to the "continuous partial attention" that comes with distracted reading on the Internet, they are in fact the ground rules of the lit-crit technique known as "close reading, " pioneered by American academics in the middle of the 20th century. As he ably demonstrates, those rules are still valid for understanding literature today, and for an enriched reading experience. The reader who picks up this volume will likely already have been won over to Mikics's argument, but the book's pedagogical value for students is considerable.--Publisher's Weekly
