Format of a Close Reading Literature Paper
Close reading
Elaine Showalter describes close reading as:
...slow reading, a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and form.
It is, in her words, 'a form of defamiliarisation nosotros use in order to suspension through our habitual and casual reading practices' (Teaching Literature, 98).
As readers, nosotros are accustomed to reading for plot, or allowing the joy of the reading experience to accept over and carry u.s.a. along, without stopping to ask how and why a particular passage, judgement, or word achieves its effects.
Close reading, then, is nearly pausing, and looking at the precise techniques, dynamics, and content of the text. It's not reading between the lines, simply reading further and further into the lines and seeing the multiple meanings a plough of phrase, a description, or a discussion can unlock.
It is possible to shut read an extended passage, merely for essays it is often a skilful technique to do the close reading first and so to use very short extracts or even single words to demonstrate your insights. Then instead of doing a close reading of twenty lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream *in* your essay, yous would exercise information technology independently, and and then cite and explain three key phrases, relating them clearly to your developing statement.
Close reading is also sometimes known equally Applied Criticism, rooted in the techniques consort past the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards.
He felt it was essential that students put aside their preconceptions and learn to appreciate the liveliness and multiplicity of linguistic communication.
With that in mind, he gave students poems without any information about who wrote them or why they were written.
In the hands of subsequent critics, like William Empson, the technique became a fashion to offer virtuoso accounts of particular poems and literary works, with an accent on ambiguity and the multiplication of possible meanings.
In essence, close reading ways taking a pace back from the larger narrative and examining the constituent parts of a text.
Think of close reading equally something that y'all practice with a pencil and book in your mitt. Marking up the pages; fill the margins.
And then transcribe the poem, the passage, the quotation.
Accurate transcription of quotations is, for some, the first and last rule of close reading. If your passage isn't transcribed meticulously, downwards to the final comma and (with poetry) spacing on the page, you can't read it closely.
Careful transcription will likewise help you get inside a passage: yous'll go a feel for its rhythms, its twists and turns, its animate. Look at the words.
Don't take your eyes off the words. Work from the actual text in front of you, non from a sort of mental paraphrase of what the text says. Equally you do and so, think to call up carefully virtually audio, not but when reading poetry simply also when analysing prose.
Read the passage aloud, paying close attending to the rhythms of sentences. You might be surprised by what you lot hear: the eye can often glide over aspects of a text that the ear is keen to pick upward. Think, too, that it'south important non only to detect sure features but also to consider their effects. If y'all need to pause to catch your breath in the heart of a sentence, ask yourself why. How are course and content working together?
Close, non closed readings
Shut reading has been criticised for being divorced from context and for pulling away from the historical and political engagements of the literary text.
Partly for that reason, it is of import to remember about the purpose behind your close reading – nosotros are looking for shut readings, non closed readings. Essentially, the shut reading is the starting point for your essay, letting you discover what is interesting, intricate, and unexpected nigh a literary text.
In the essay itself, you need to stitch that revelation about the complexities and ambiguities of particular terms, phrases and passages into a larger argument or context – don't only list everything y'all take found; craft it into an statement, and be prepared to downplay or leave out some of the elements you have spotted if they don't chronicle to the larger picture.
For this reason, you might want to follow the "Rule of 2". Your analysis of your quotation should exist twice as long as the quotation itself. It's a prissy reminder that we always need to go dorsum and explain the textual prove that'due south being cited.
Each slice of textual evidence needs and deserves detailed assay if it's beingness used to support the argument's claims. Information technology also helps to remind us to vary the lengths of quoted textual prove and then that an essay doesn't end up with only very cursory quotations or long block quotations, but includes a mixture of different lengths that will all-time adjust the claim being developed at any given bespeak in the argument.
Some questions you may like to enquire
- Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? What is the reader assumed to know/not know? (Academy essays aren't written for an interested aunt or friend on a dissimilar class, but for an audience familiar with the themes and readings under discussion. Students are writing for an audience of engaged and interested peers. This means that the writer can assume that their reader knows the text and doesn't need extensive plot summary in the introduction or start of the essay. This frees upwards space for analysis and the laying out of each section'due south claims. It too helps to develop an authoritative vocalism: you are an expert speaking to other experts.)
- What is the point of the details included in the passage (eg if mundane things are mentioned, why is that; if there are elements of clarification that don't seem to contribute to the plot what do they do instead)?
- What generic clues are here (what kinds of writing are hinted at)?
- Are there words or phrases which are ambiguous (could mean more than ane thing)? If then, are nosotros directed to privilege one reading over the other or do we keep both in play? Does 1 meaning open up upwards an alternative story/history/narrative? What are the connotations of the words that are called? Exercise any of them open up new or dissimilar contexts?
- Are there patterns which sally in the linguistic communication (the repetition of words or of certain kinds of words? Repeated phrases? Rhymes or half-rhymes? Metrical patterns?). What effects do they create?
- Is in that location whatsoever movement in the passage yous are reading? Are there any shapes or dominant metaphors?
- What kind of rhythm does the passage have? What is its cadence?
- Is there anything that troubles you lot about the passage or that you lot're not sure you fully sympathise?
- Have y'all been to the dictionary (recollect the full Oxford English Lexicon is bachelor online through the library)?
For more specific advice, you might want to read our Means of Reading series
- Ways of Reading a Novel
- Ways of Reading a Poem
- Means of Reading a Moving-picture show
- Ways of Reading a Play
- Ways of Reading a Translation
Extra Reading (and remember you can close read secondary as well as chief texts)
Thomas A. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Betwixt the Lines (Harper, 2003).
Elizabeth A. Howe, Shut Reading: an Introduction to Literature (Prentice Hall, 2009).
George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Absurd Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, 1989).
Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois (eds), Close Reading: the Reader (Duke, 2002).
Christopher Ricks, The Forcefulness of Poetry (Oxford, 1995).
Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).
For more on Practical Criticism, with some useful online exercises, attempt the Virtual Classroom on Practical Criticism
At that place'due south a great instance by Patricia Kain at Harvard Higher's Writing Center.
Trev Broughton, Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Chloe Wigston-Smith, Hannah Roche, Helen Smith, and Matthew Townend April 2018
This article is available to download for free every bit a PDF for use as a personal learning tool or for use in the classroom every bit a teaching resource.
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Source: https://www.york.ac.uk/english/writing-at-york/writing-resources/close-reading/
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