Scholarship in literacy and education has depicted reading as an active, multidimensional, and complex process. However, an often more reductive version of reading, close reading, has been advocated frequently for use in secondary and postsecondary literacy classrooms. The author examines materials created to help teachers implement close reading strategies to demonstrate the New Critical assumptions that undergird some close reading pedagogies. The author ends by recommending genre analysis as a way for educators to broaden students' conceptions of reading.