How to Do a Close Reading of a Passage
Close reading
Elaine Showalter describes close reading as:
...slow reading, a deliberate endeavor to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attending to language, imagery, innuendo, intertextuality, syntax and form.
It is, in her words, 'a class of defamiliarisation we use in order to break through our habitual and casual reading practices' (Teaching Literature, 98).
As readers, we are accustomed to reading for plot, or allowing the joy of the reading feel to accept over and carry us along, without stopping to ask how and why a item passage, sentence, or give-and-take achieves its furnishings.
Close reading, then, is near pausing, and looking at the precise techniques, dynamics, and content of the text. It's not reading between the lines, but reading further and further into the lines and seeing the multiple meanings a turn of phrase, a description, or a give-and-take can unlock.
Information technology is possible to close read an extended passage, but for essays it is often a proficient technique to do the close reading first and and so to utilise 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'south Dream *in* your essay, you would do it independently, and then cite and explain three primal phrases, relating them conspicuously to your developing argument.
Close reading is also sometimes known as Practical Criticism, rooted in the techniques espoused by the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards.
He felt information technology 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 whatever data nearly who wrote them or why they were written.
In the hands of subsequent critics, like William Empson, the technique became a way to offer virtuoso accounts of particular poems and literary works, with an emphasis on ambivalence and the multiplication of possible meanings.
In essence, close reading means taking a step back from the larger narrative and examining the constituent parts of a text.
Remember of shut reading as something that you do with a pencil and book in your hand. Mark up the pages; fill the margins.
And so transcribe the verse form, the passage, the quotation.
Accurate transcription of quotations is, for some, the showtime and last dominion of close reading. If your passage isn't transcribed meticulously, down to the concluding comma and (with poetry) spacing on the page, you lot can't read information technology closely.
Careful transcription volition too assist you become within a passage: you'll get a feel for its rhythms, its twists and turns, its breathing. Look at the words.
Don't take your eyes off the words. Work from the actual text in front of you, not from a sort of mental paraphrase of what the text says. As you do and then, remember to call up carefully about sound, not only when reading poetry but likewise when analysing prose.
Read the passage aloud, paying close attention to the rhythms of sentences. You might be surprised by what you hear: the eye tin often glide over aspects of a text that the ear is keen to pick up. Remember, too, that it'southward important not merely to find certain features merely also to consider their furnishings. If you need to break to catch your jiff in the center of a sentence, ask yourself why. How are form and content working together?
Close, non airtight 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 important to think almost the purpose behind your close reading – we are looking for close readings, not airtight readings. Essentially, the shut reading is the starting point for your essay, letting y'all detect what is interesting, intricate, and unexpected about a literary text.
In the essay itself, you need to stitch that revelation almost the complexities and ambiguities of detail terms, phrases and passages into a larger statement or context – don't only list everything you take found; craft information technology into an argument, and be prepared to downplay or leave out some of the elements y'all have spotted if they don't relate to the larger motion picture.
For this reason, you might desire to follow the "Rule of two". Your analysis of your quotation should be twice as long as the quotation itself. It'due south a nice reminder that we always need to go back and explain the textual bear witness that'due south existence cited.
Each piece of textual evidence needs and deserves detailed analysis if it's existence used to back up the statement's claims. Information technology also helps to remind us to vary the lengths of quoted textual evidence so that an essay doesn't cease upwards with only very brief quotations or long cake quotations, but includes a mixture of different lengths that volition best arrange the claim being developed at any given point in the argument.
Some questions yous may similar to inquire
- Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? What is the reader causeless to know/non know? (Academy essays aren't written for an interested aunt or friend on a different course, only for an audience familiar with the themes and readings under discussion. Students are writing for an audience of engaged and interested peers. This ways that the writer can assume that their reader knows the text and doesn't need extensive plot summary in the introduction or beginning of the essay. This frees up space for analysis and the laying out of each section's claims. It also helps to develop an authoritative voice: you lot are an good speaking to other experts.)
- What is the bespeak of the details included in the passage (eg if mundane things are mentioned, why is that; if at that place are elements of description that don't seem to contribute to the plot what exercise they do instead)?
- What generic clues are here (what kinds of writing are hinted at)?
- Are at that place words or phrases which are ambiguous (could mean more than one matter)? If so, are nosotros directed to privilege one reading over the other or exercise nosotros keep both in play? Does 1 meaning open upward an alternative story/history/narrative? What are the connotations of the words that are called? Practise any of them open new or different contexts?
- Are there patterns which emerge in the linguistic communication (the repetition of words or of sure kinds of words? Repeated phrases? Rhymes or half-rhymes? Metrical patterns?). What effects exercise they create?
- Is there any movement in the passage yous are reading? Are there any shapes or dominant metaphors?
- What kind of rhythm does the passage accept? What is its cadence?
- Is there anything that troubles you about the passage or that you're not sure you fully understand?
- Accept you been to the lexicon (recollect the full Oxford English language Lexicon is bachelor online through the library)?
For more than specific advice, yous might want to read our Ways of Reading series
- Ways of Reading a Novel
- Ways of Reading a Poem
- Ways of Reading a Film
- Ways of Reading a Play
- Ways of Reading a Translation
Extra Reading (and call back you tin shut read secondary too as primary texts)
Thomas A. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (Harper, 2003).
Elizabeth A. Howe, Close Reading: an Introduction to Literature (Prentice Hall, 2009).
George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool 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 than on Practical Criticism, with some useful online exercises, effort the Virtual Classroom on Practical Criticism
There'southward a peachy example by Patricia Kain at Harvard Higher's Writing Heart.
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 employ 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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