Close Reading
The OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab is a solid resource for students: this page details close reading, giving direct examples by laying out a close read of a Shakespeare sonnet:
“The first phrase (in this case a full sentence) of the poem flows into the next line of the poem. This is called enjambment, and though it is often made necessary by the form of the verse, it also serves to break up the reader’s expectations. In this case, the word “impediments” is placed directly before the bleak and confusing phrase “love is not love,” itself an enjambment. How does this disconnection between phrase and line affect the reader? How does it emphasize or change the lines around it?”
The University of Guelph also offers a good overview: pay attention to their suggestions on how to select a passage from a text, as well as the section on identifying diction and language in the original poem and (crucially) what to do with those observations:
“Transform your descriptive thesis into an argument by asking yourself WHY language is used in this way:
What kinds of words are used (intellectual, elaborate, plain, or vulgar)? Why are words being used in this way?
Why are sentences long or short?
Why might the author be using complicated or simple sentences? What might this type of sentence structure suggest about what the passage is trying to convey?
Who is the narrator?
What is the narrative voice providing these particular descriptions?
Why are we given access to the consciousness of these particular characters? Why not others?
What images do you see in the passage? What might they represent?
Is there a common theme?
Why might the tone of the passage be emotional (or detached)?
To what purpose might the text employ irony?
What effect/impact is the author trying to create?”
Here is a lecture that professor Jarrell D. Wright from the University of Pittsburgh gives on the subject of close reading, and an accompanying text discussing the practice. While the page itself is geared more towards the practice of teaching close reading, I think there is a good amount of frank and refreshing material here that may help direct you in your work.
If you follow the download link given on his page, you will receive a complete slideshow and lecture in which he takes his class through an attentive close reading of Ozymandias.
WORD OF WARNING: As this is one of your options for the upcoming essay, I expect you to be applying *your own thought* and *your own words* - this lecture is indeed a secondary source, meaning that you may not quote it or use this material in your papers. If the professor makes an observation that you have also made, I trust that you are able to express that thought originally (as it came to you). Please read over the Academic Integrity / Plagiarism statement that Concordia expects you to understand and uphold if you are unclear in any way.
“There is nothing mystical about what critics do when they analyze texts—rather than being issued magic goggles that enable them to see things in a text that are invisible to others, critics actually engage in a process that anyone can learn.
This is an important point to convey because students often approach close reading as if it were a kind of hocus-pocus, leading them into other common mistakes, like making things up that merely sound good rather than actually observing and explaining textual details.
Close reading is not speculation. Students can make two mistakes when they attempt to perform close readings without sufficient preliminary guidance. First, they may try to discern characters’ motives: for example, asking why Caroline Compson is such an inadequate mother in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Short of some expertise in psychoanalytical criticism, which of course our beginning students lack, this type of question is not one that a text can answer for us. Second, students may try to discern an author’s intentions. As we know, authorial intent is forever hidden from us (or can be unreliable when it is available), and therefore such questions lead in an unproductive direction. By addressing these potential mistakes very explicitly, we can encourage students to avoid them and to instead focus on tangible textual details to analyze and explain.
Close reading is not BSing or fancy, pretentious, abstract theorizing. Under the rubric of “making things up,” all too many of our students were rewarded in high school for producing deep-sounding but virtually empty or contentless accounts of the texts that they studied. Students will duplicate this error in their early college-level work unless they are explicitly instructed that the object of literary analysis is not merely to sound smart but rather to generate coherent arguments, based on objective textual facts, that any reasonably sensitive reader of a text can understand.”
I suspect that the above source might be of the greatest use to many of you, and encourage you to read it through. Wright breaks close reading down into three steps: Understanding, Noticing, and Observing. The professor explains the process thoroughly, and demystifies it as well.