Writing at Length About a Single, Short Piece

From Maze

Writing a whole book about one line of code: has it ever been done? Writing a whole book about a single line of poetry is quite rare [I’ll have to find so examples; I’m quite sure it has been done], but a monograph about a single work is rather less unusual. Close readings, if not always published as book, certainly offer readers full, if not definitive, treatments of a single works. Whether in literature, music, the visual arts, film, or architecture, individual works have long seduced critics into offering complex and in-depth interpretations.

Examples abound of works about a single work. In our proposal to the MIT Press, we mentioned Rudolf Arnheim's Genesis of a Painting: Picasso's Guernica (1962), Roland Barthes's S/Z (1970), and Samuel Beckett's Proust (1931). We were mistaken (my bad!) in including Michel Foucault's Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973), whose subtitle, “deux lettres et quatre dessins de René Magritte,” indicates that it is about more than one work. I’ll be looking for more examples in case anyone comes across any, please let me know.

[I want to address breadth, context, frames in close reading, which are usually sidelined in favor of depth and detail.]