Close Reading: A Brief Note
BY NASRULLAH
MAMBROL on MARCH 17, 2016 • ( 1 )
A technique advocated by the New Critics in interpreting a literary work,
Close Reading derived from (I A Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929)
and William Empson’s The Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930). Endorsing
the concept of “autotelic text”, that a text is a unified entity, complete in
itself, and containing meaning without any reference to external evidence such
as the author’s intention/history, biography or the socio-cultural condititns
of its production, the New Critics, Wimsatt and Beardsley cautioned against the
fallacies of judging a literary work based on the author’s intention or its
impression on the reader, what they called “intentional Fallacy” and “Affective
Fallacy”. Instead, close reading focuses on the formal aspects or the
verbal/linguistic elements of a text such as figures of speech, images,
symbols, interaction between words, rhythm and metaphor. The form of the work
is said to be a “structure of meanings”, in which an organic unity is achieved
by the play and counterplay of “thematic imagery” and “symbolic action”. In a
successful work of literature, the linguistic elements manifest tension, irony,
ambiguity and paradox, to achieve a “reconciliation of diverse impulses” and
“an equilibrium of opposed forces” to protect the work, according to Cleanth
Brooks, from the “heresy of paraphrase”. While the New Critics proposed close
reading to highlight the unity of a work, poststructuralists endorsed a
deconstructive close reading to reveal the fissures and disunities within a
work.
How to Begin a Close Reading
A close reading should never be your
first reading of a text. Before focusing on the details of a text or passage,
it is important to have an understanding of the text as a whole.
· Read the text! Make sure
that you understand its plot, who the characters are, etc. For more difficult
texts, it may take more than one read to do this. That is normal. The better
your overall understanding of the text, the easier it will be to focus on its
details and/or the details of your chosen passage.
· When you are ready to
begin your close reading, take your time! Read the text actively. Take notes.
You may write on a separate sheet of paper, directly in your book, or you may
even choose to make a photocopy of the text or passage and take notes on that.
Choose the method which works best for you.
· Do not be afraid to pause
to think over what you read as you read! Do not hesitate to read and re-read
sentences or sections several times before moving on. Take note not only of the
details in the text, but also of the impressions which those details create in
you as a reader. The purpose of a close reading is to squeeze the details from your chosen text and use those
details to formulate an interpretation of a deeper meaning or impression
present in the text.
A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis
Use the guidelines below to learn
about the practice of close reading.
Overview
The Poem
Subject
Form
Word Choice, or Diction
Theme
Sample Analysis
Further Reading
Overview
When your teachers or professors ask you to analyze a
literary text, they often look for something frequently called close reading.
Close reading is deep analysis of how a literary text works; it is both a
reading process and something you include in a literary analysis paper, though
in a refined form.
Fiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components,
including subject, form, and specific word choices. Literary analysis involves
examining these components, which allows us to find in small parts of the text
clues to help us understand the whole. For example, if an author writes a novel
in the form of a personal journal about a character’s daily life, but that
journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do we learn about that
character? What is the effect of picking a word like “tome” instead of “book”?
In effect, you are putting the author’s choices under a microscope.
The process of close reading should produce a lot of
questions. It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to
participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper
that makes the most of your close reading work.
Close reading sometimes feels like over-analyzing, but
don’t worry. Close reading is a process of finding as much information as you
can in order to form as many questions as you can. When it is time to write
your paper and formalize your close reading, you will sort through your work to
figure out what is most convincing and helpful to the argument you hope to make
and, conversely, what seems like a stretch. This guide imagines you are sitting
down to read a text for the first time on your way to developing an argument
about a text and writing a paper. To give one example of how to do this, we
will read the poem “Design” by famous American poet Robert Frost and attend to
four major components of literary texts: subject, form, word choice (diction),
and theme.
If you want even more information about approaching poems
specifically, take a look at our guide: How
to Read a Poem.
The
Poem
As our guide to reading poetry suggests, have a pencil out
when you read a text. Make notes in the margins, underline important words,
place question marks where you are confused by something. Of course, if you are
reading in a library book, you should keep all your notes on a separate piece
of paper. If you are not making marks directly on, in, and beside the text, be
sure to note line numbers or even quote portions of the text so you have enough
context to remember what you found interesting.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
Subject
The subject of a literary text is simply what the text is
about. What is its plot? What is its most important topic? What image does it
describe? It’s easy to think of novels and stories as having plots, but
sometimes it helps to think of poetry as having a kind of plot as well. When
you examine the subject of a text, you want to develop some preliminary ideas
about the text and make sure you understand its major concerns before you dig
deeper.
Observations
In “Design,” the speaker describes a scene: a white spider
holding a moth on a white flower. The flower is a heal-all, the blooms of which
are usually violet-blue. This heal-all is unusual. The speaker then poses a
series of questions, asking why this heal-all is white instead of blue and how
the spider and moth found this particular flower. How did this situation arise?
Questions
The speaker’s questions seem simple, but they are actually
fairly nuanced. We can use them as a guide for our own as we go forward with
our close reading.
- Furthering the
speaker’s simple “how did this happen,” we might ask, is the scene in this
poem a manufactured situation?
- The white moth and
white spider each use the atypical white flower as camouflage in search of
sanctuary and supper respectively. Did these flora and fauna come together
for a purpose?
- Does the speaker
have a stance about whether there is a purpose behind the scene? If so,
what is it?
- How will other
elements of the text relate to the unpleasantness and uncertainty in our
first look at the poem’s subject?
After thinking about local questions, we have to zoom out.
Ultimately, what is this text about?
Form
Form is how a text is put together. When you look at a
text, observe how the author has arranged it. If it is a novel, is it written
in the first person? How is the novel divided? If it is a short story, why did
the author choose to write short-form fiction instead of a novel or novella?
Examining the form of a text can help you develop a starting set of questions
in your reading, which then may guide further questions stemming from even
closer attention to the specific words the author chooses. A little background
research on form and what different forms can mean makes it easier to figure
out why and how the author’s choices are important.
Observations
Most poems follow rules or principles of form; even free
verse poems are marked by the author’s choices in line breaks, rhythm, and
rhyme—even if none of these exists, which is a notable choice in itself. Here’s
an example of thinking through these elements in “Design.”
In “Design,” Frost chooses an Italian (or Petrarchan)
sonnet form: fourteen lines in iambic pentameter consisting of an octave (a
stanza of eight lines) and a sestet (a stanza of six lines). We will focus on
rhyme scheme and stanza structure rather than meter for the purposes of this
guide. A typical Italian sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme for the octave:
a b b a a b b a
There’s more variation in the sestet rhymes, but one of
the more common schemes is
c d e c d e
Conventionally, the octave introduces a problem or
question which the sestet then resolves. The point at which the sonnet goes
from the problem/question to the resolution is called the volta, or turn. (Note
that we are speaking only in generalities here; there is a great deal of
variation.)
Frost uses the usual octave scheme with “-ite”/”-ight” (a)
and “oth” (b) sounds: “white,” “moth,” “cloth,” “blight,” “right,” “broth,”
“froth,” “kite.” However, his sestet follows an unusual scheme with
“-ite”/”-ight” and “all” sounds:
a c a a c c
Questions
Now, we have a few questions with which we can start:
- Why use an Italian
sonnet?
- Why use an unusual
scheme in the sestet?
- What
problem/question and resolution (if any) does Frost offer?
- What is the volta in
this poem?
- In other words, what
is the point?
Italian sonnets have a long tradition; many careful
readers recognize the form and know what to expect from his octave, volta, and
sestet. Frost seems to do something fairly standard in the octave in presenting
a situation; however, the turn Frost makes is not to resolution, but to
questions and uncertainty. A white spider sitting on a white flower has killed
a white moth.
- How did these
elements come together?
- Was the moth’s death
random or by design?
- Is one worse than
the other?
We can guess right away that Frost’s disruption of the
usual purpose of the sestet has something to do with his disruption of its
rhyme scheme. Looking even more closely at the text will help us refine our
observations and guesses.
Word
Choice, or Diction
Looking at the word choice of a text helps us “dig in”
ever more deeply. If you are reading something longer, are there certain words
that come up again and again? Are there words that stand out? While you are
going through this process, it is best for you to assume that every word is
important—again, you can decide whether something is really important later.
Even when you read prose, our
guide for reading poetry offers good advice: read with a pencil
and make notes. Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions
you have in the margins or on a separate piece of paper. If you have ideas that
may possibly answer your questions, write those down, too.
Observations
Let’s take a look at the first line of “Design”:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and
white
The poem starts with something unpleasant: a spider. Then,
as we look more closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may see
connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural. When we imagine
spiders, we do not generally picture them dimpled and white; it is an uncommon
and decidedly creepy image. There is dissonance between the spider and its
descriptors, i.e., what is wrong with this picture? Already we have a question:
what is going on with this spider?
We should look for additional clues further on in the
text. The next two lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding
spider:
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Now we have a white flower (a heal-all, which usually has
a violet-blue flower) and a white moth in addition to our white spider.
Heal-alls have medicinal properties, as their name suggests, but this one seems
to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider? Does the mutation that
changes the heal-all’s color also change its beneficial properties—could it be
poisonous rather than curative? A white moth doesn’t seem remarkable, but it is
“Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth,” or like manmade fabric that is
artificially “rigid” rather than smooth and flowing like we imagine satin to
be. We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a coffin, but even
that is awry, for neither should be stiff with death.
Questions
The first three lines of the poem’s octave introduce
unpleasant natural images “of death and blight” (as the speaker puts it in line
four). The flower and moth disrupt expectations: the heal-all is white instead
of “blue and innocent,” and the moth is reduced to “rigid satin cloth” or “dead
wings carried like a paper kite.” We might expect a spider to be unpleasant and
deadly; the poem’s spider also has an unusual and unhealthy appearance.
- The focus on
whiteness in these lines has more to do with death than purity—can we
understand that whiteness as being corpse-like rather than virtuous?
Well before the volta, Frost makes a “turn” away from
nature as a retreat and haven; instead, he unearths its inherent dangers,
making nature menacing. From three lines alone, we have a number of questions:
- Will whiteness play
a role in the rest of the poem?
- How does “design”—an
arrangement of these circumstances—fit with a scene of death?
- What other
juxtapositions might we encounter?
These disruptions and dissonances recollect Frost’s
alteration to the standard Italian sonnet form: finding the ways and places in
which form and word choice go together will help us begin to unravel some
larger concepts the poem itself addresses.
Theme
Put simply, themes are major ideas in a text. Many texts,
especially longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes. That’s
good news when you are close reading because it means there are many different
ways you can think through the questions you develop.
Observations
So far in our reading of “Design,” our questions revolve
around disruption: disruption of form, disruption of expectations in the
description of certain images. Discovering a concept or idea that links
multiple questions or observations you have made is the beginning of a
discovery of theme.
Questions
What is happening with disruption in “Design”? What point
is Frost making? Observations about other elements in the text help you address
the idea of disruption in more depth. Here is where we look back at the work we
have already done: What is the text about? What is notable about the form, and
how does it support or undermine what the words say? Does the specific language
of the text highlight, or redirect, certain ideas?
In this example, we are looking to determine what kind(s)
of disruption the poem contains or describes. Rather than “disruption,” we want
to see what kind of disruption, or whether indeed Frost uses disruptions in
form and language to communicate something opposite: design.
Sample
Analysis
After you make notes, formulate questions, and set
tentative hypotheses, you must analyze the subject of your close reading.
Literary analysis is another process of reading (and writing!) that allows you
to make a claim about the text. It is also the point at which you turn a
critical eye to your earlier questions and observations to find the most
compelling points, discarding the ones that are a “stretch.” By “stretch,” we
mean that we must discard points that are fascinating but have no clear
connection to the text as a whole. (We recommend a separate document for
recording the brilliant ideas that don’t quite fit this time around.)
Here follows an excerpt from a brief analysis of “Design”
based on the close reading above. This example focuses on some lines in great
detail in order to unpack the meaning and significance of the poem’s language.
By commenting on the different elements of close reading we have discussed, it
takes the results of our close reading to offer one particular way into the
text. (In case you were thinking about using this sample as your own, be
warned: it has no thesis and it is easily discoverable on the web. Plus it
doesn’t have a title.)
Excerpt
Frost’s speaker brews unlikely associations in the first
stanza of the poem. The “Assorted characters of death and blight / Mixed ready
to begin the morning right” make of the grotesque scene an equally grotesque
mockery of a breakfast cereal (4–5). These lines are almost singsong in meter
and it is easy to imagine them set to a radio jingle. A pun on “right”/”rite”
slides the “characters of death and blight” into their expected concoction: a
“witches’ broth” (6). These juxtapositions—a healthy breakfast that is also a
potion for dark magic—are borne out when our “fat and white” spider becomes “a
snow-drop”—an early spring flower associated with renewal—and the moth as “dead
wings carried like a paper kite” (1, 7, 8). Like the mutant heal-all that hosts
the moth’s death, the spider becomes a deadly flower; the harmless moth becomes
a child’s toy, but as “dead wings,” more like a puppet made of a skull.
The volta offers no resolution for our unsettled expectations. Having observed
the scene and detailed its elements in all their unpleasantness, the speaker
turns to questions rather than answers. How did “The wayside blue and innocent
heal-all” end up white and bleached like a bone (10)? How did its “kindred
spider” find the white flower, which was its perfect hiding place (11)? Was the
moth, then, also searching for camouflage, only to meet its end?
Using another question as a disguise, the speaker offers a hypothesis: “What
but design of darkness to appall?” (13). This question sounds rhetorical, as
though the only reason for such an unlikely combination of flora and fauna is
some “design of darkness.” Some force, the speaker suggests, assembled the
white spider, flower, and moth to snuff out the moth’s life. Such a design
appalls, or horrifies. We might also consider the speaker asking what other
force but dark design could use something as simple as appalling in its other
sense (making pale or white) to effect death.
However, the poem does not close with a question, but with a statement. The
speaker’s “If design govern in a thing so small” establishes a condition for
the octave’s questions after the fact (14). There is no point in considering
the dark design that brought together “assorted characters of death and blight”
if such an event is too minor, too physically small to be the work of some
force unknown. Ending on an “if” clause has the effect of rendering the poem
still more uncertain in its conclusions: not only are we faced with unanswered
questions, we are now not even sure those questions are valid in the first
place.
Behind the speaker and the disturbing scene, we have Frost and his defiance of
our expectations for a Petrarchan sonnet. Like whatever designer may have
altered the flower and attracted the spider to kill the moth, the poet built
his poem “wrong” with a purpose in mind. Design surely governs in a poem,
however small; does Frost also have a dark design? Can we compare a scene in
nature to a carefully constructed sonnet?
A
Note on Organization
Your goal in a paper about literature is to communicate
your best and most interesting ideas to your reader. Depending on the type of
paper you have been assigned, your ideas may need to be organized in service of
a thesis to which everything should link back. It is best to ask your instructor
about the expectations for your paper.
Knowing how to organize these papers can be tricky, in
part because there is no single right answer—only more and less effective
answers. You may decide to organize your paper thematically, or by tackling
each idea sequentially; you may choose to order your ideas by their importance
to your argument or to the poem. If you are comparing and contrasting two
texts, you might work thematically or by addressing first one text and then the
other. One way to approach a text may be to start with the beginning of the
novel, story, play, or poem, and work your way toward its end. For example,
here is the rough structure of the example above: The author of the sample
decided to use the poem itself as an organizational guide, at least for this
part of the analysis.
- A paragraph about
the octave.
- A paragraph about
the volta.
- A paragraph about
the penultimate line (13).
- A paragraph about
the final line (14).
- A paragraph
addressing form that suggests a transition to the next section of the
paper.
You will have to decide for yourself the best way to
communicate your ideas to your reader. Is it easier to follow your points when
you write about each part of the text in detail before moving on? Or is your
work clearer when you work through each big idea—the significance of whiteness,
the effect of an altered sonnet form, and so on—sequentially?
We suggest you write your paper however is easiest for you
then move things around during revision if you need to.
Close Reading for English Literature Assignments What is a close reading? A close reading is a very in-depth, careful analysis of a short text. This text can be a passage selected from a novel, a poem, an image, a short story, etc. The analysis looks carefully at what is happening in the short text, but isn’t necessarily isolated from references outside the text. For example, a close reading of a passage of a novel can invoke or refer to the novel more broadly, but focuses its analysis and thesis on just a small section. Crucially, the thesis of a close reading must argue why and how this reading is important in a context beyond the text itself. Here’s how to get started: I. Literal reading: First, read to understand on a literal level what is going on in your passage: who, what, when, where, why, how? ● List characters, setting attributes, motivations within the text. Create a simple plot summary for yourself to ensure you understand what is happening, what the setting is, who is involved, and especially why it’s happening. What are the sources of conflict? Then, start analyzing… Use a pencil to write and mark up the passage, if possible! II. Figures of speech: Does the passage contain significant metaphors, similes, allegory, personification, ellipsis, alliteration, etc.? ● Depending on the length of the text you’re looking at, these literary devices might be broad and stretch out an entire length of a book, or they may be tucked away in a single line of text. For now, look at ones contained in the language of a single passage. ● Consult the list at https://literary.edublogs.org/. It offers definitions and examples for many literary devices. Some of the most common to begin with are metaphor, simile, allegory, alliteration, repetition, allusion, archetype, and imagery. ● Make physical annotations on the text you are reading (if possible) to mark the literary devices in use. As you read closely, think about what the effect of each device is and why the author might have made the choice to use this device in this particular way and place. III. Grammatical structure: Look at syntax or word arrangement, grammar, parallel structures/grammatical repetition, punctuation, length and structure of the sentence or line, ambiguous pronouns, word choice, the overabundance of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. ● The exact way something is written out affects the way we interpret it even if we don’t notice. Your job is to understand why and how this is happening. Some things to pay attention to are: ○ What strikes you as strange or interesting about the way the passage is written? Is it different or similar to the structure and tone of other texts you’ve read? If it’s located within a longer text, how does it compare to other portions of the text? ○ Are there words that have multiple meanings? Do these meanings, in the context of the passage, change the way you interpret the significance? ○ Is there an absence or overabundance of any particular grammatical structure? For instance, if there is no punctuation in a passage, you might be inclined to read it very rapidly without stopping or slowing down. If there are lots of adjectives, you might see something materialize visually more clearly than in other passages. How does this affect your experience of reading and what you take away? IV. Images and Themes: Words within a passage can evoke previous scenes, images or ideas that the text has already presented. You can often build a strong argument by analyzing a repeating image in a text. ● Think about what in the passage is repeated, or alludes to something that is built in other places of the text. Repetitive elements can be words, storylines, images, ideas, forms, or structure that shows up more than once. ○ What are “structure,” “form,” and “language” in literature? Good question. Check out this link for examples of how they operate in poetry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zcrpycw/revision/4 ● What is the significance of these repetitions? ○ A theme in literature is an organizing principle that the text will explore in various ways. Some examples might be, “war,” “love and loss,” “masculinity,” “crossing borders,” “race,” “mortality,” “intergenerational wisdom,” etc. As you can see, themes night be either broad categories or specific concepts played out in your text. Regardless of the breadth of the theme, it is important to develop an understanding of how the theme operates in your specific passage/text, and how this theme relates to other literary devices you’ve analyzed. ○ How do the repetitive elements build a theme throughout the text that ties its various parts together? ● Start thinking about context: once you have developed some ideas about theme, contextualize them with the work. What is the text trying to say about the issues which it explores? How is this done? Why does the author make the choices that they make? V. Context (IF ANALYZING A PASSAGE IN A BROADER TEXT) When you analyze a passage you are temporarily taking it out of context. Make sure that you can put it back into context. That is, how does this passage connect with the rest of the work? ● How is this passage different from or characteristic of the rest of the text? Are the ideas you’re extracting from it relevant and true more broadly across the rest of the text? When constructing a thesis, make sure you locate your ideas as part of something larger than just your passage. VI. Putting it all together: After you have some ideas about the literal meaning, form, figures of speech, themes, images and context, develop an idea of what your passage communicates. ● You do not (and should not) need to incorporate every single literary device that you’ve analysed into your thesis. Instead, focus on one or a few that communicate something you can organize around a single idea. Hold on to your other thoughts, because they might be useful to include later in your paper. ● Useful questions to think about are: ○ Why did the author choose to use literary devices the way they did? ○ What effect does reading the passage this way have? ○ What does the passage communicate about the broader world? ○ Why is this particular analysis of the passage important? VII: What does a good thesis statement look like? ● A good close-reading thesis statement should be clear, concise, argumentative (but still provable) and specific. ● Make sure your thesis refers to the specific devices/themes/concepts in the text that you will be analyzing in your paper, but also expresses what your reading of them is and why it’s important. ● Talk to your professor or make a WC appointment if you have trouble crafting your thesis statement, since this is the organizing principle for your entire paper. Here is Prof. Asali Solomon’s “Quick and dirty” thesis test to see if you have an argumentative thesis, taken from Suzanne Keen: -Will everyone agree with it? Then it’s too obvious or something we already figured out in class. Keep refining. -Will everybody say I’m crazy? Then it’s controversial, which is good, but unconvincing. Keep refining. -Can a reasonable person disagree with it? This is what you want. -Does it explore complex relationships between aspects of the text or text(s)? This is also what you want. Pointers for writing your paper: 1. Try writing your introduction last. Begin with your thesis, write your paragraphs, and then your conclusion. By the time you get to the conclusion, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to introduce. You may even realize that your thesis changed over the course of writing your paper. Don’t be afraid to change your thesis statement to reflect what you’re actually arguing. 2. Check your topic sentences. Each paragraph should open with a “mini-thesis” about what you’re going to argue in that paragraph. Often, what you initially write as the concluding sentence of the paragraph makes the strongest topic sentence since it is a culmination of all your thoughts from writing. If this is the case, use it as your topic sentence! 3. Do a reverse outline. Highlight just your thesis statement, topic sentences, and concluding sentences of every paragraph. Then read them in order. Does the argument make sense? Does it flow in a logical direction? Does it actually reflect what you’re discussing in each paragraph? 4. Stay grounded in the text. In a literary essay specifically, you don’t want to make any claims you can’t back up with textual evidence. If you’re arguing something that isn’t already proven in earlier evidence or analysis, find a place in the text where you can support your claim. 5. Be specific. Try to avoid making generalizing statements in your writing. Literature is complex, nuanced, and thought provoking. Your writing should reflect this by making specific statements that state what you actually mean to say about the text. For example, instead of saying, “Everyone spends the summer on vacation,” you might write: “Because most of Amanda’s peers had extravagant vacations planned for the summer, she felt particularly unexcited about getting a job at the new pizzeria.”