What do we mean by "reading"? How have literary critics sought to differentiate "good" readers from "bad" ones? What, exactly, is "close reading" and what is its role in our discipline? In this seminar, we will examine various approaches to reading and readers that literary scholars have taken from New Criticism to the present, ranging from psychoanalysis to phenomenology, from book history to cultural histories of reading and readers, and from reader-response theory to the psychology of reading comprehension. This course will not only equip students to develop their own perspective on recent disiciplinary debates about the relative merits of close, distant, paranoid, reparative, surface, and symptomatic reading, but also serve as an occasion for rigorous reflection on their own readerly aims and methods. Primary literary texts will include Jane Austen's Emma and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.