Example to Change the Curriculum for Low Reading
Employ the guidelines below to learn near the practice of close reading.
Overview
When your teachers or professors enquire you to analyze a literary text, they frequently await for something oft called close reading. Shut reading is deep analysis of how a literary text works; it is both a reading process and something you lot include in a literary analysis newspaper, 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 empathise the whole. For example, if an writer writes a novel in the class of a personal periodical about a character's daily life, only that journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do nosotros learn about that character? What is the issue of picking a word like "tome" instead of "book"? In effect, you are putting the writer'southward choices under a microscope.
The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. It is when you brainstorm to answer these questions that you are prepare 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 similar over-analyzing, only don't worry. Close reading is a process of finding equally much data equally you tin in gild to class as many questions as you can. When it is fourth dimension to write your paper and formalize your shut reading, you will sort through your work to figure out what is most convincing and helpful to the argument you lot hope to brand and, conversely, what seems like a stretch. This guide imagines you are sitting down to read a text for the first time on your style to developing an argument about a text and writing a paper. To give one instance of how to exercise this, we will read the poem "Design" by famous American poet Robert Frost and attend to four major components of literary texts: subject, course, word choice (diction), and theme.
If yous want even more data about budgeted poems specifically, accept a wait at our guide: How to Read a Poem.
The Verse form
Equally our guide to reading verse suggests, have a pencil out when you read a text. Brand notes in the margins, underline important words, place question marks where yous are confused by something. Of form, if you are reading in a library volume, you should keep all your notes on a split piece of paper. If you are non making marks directly on, in, and abreast the text, be sure to notation line numbers or even quote portions of the text then you have enough context to remember what y'all found interesting.
Blueprint
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin material—
Assorted characters of expiry and blight
Mixed set up to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a blossom like a froth,
And dead wings carried similar a paper kite.
What had that flower to practise with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that superlative,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What simply design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a affair so small.
Subject
The subject of a literary text is simply what the text is almost. What is its plot? What is its most of import topic? What paradigm does it draw? It'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to think of novels and stories as having plots, but sometimes it helps to remember of poetry as having a kind of plot as well. When yous examine the discipline of a text, you desire to develop some preliminary ideas about the text and make certain you understand its major concerns before you lot dig deeper.
Observations
In "Pattern," 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 and 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, simply they are actually fairly nuanced. Nosotros tin can use them as a guide for our ain every bit we go forrard with our close reading.
- Furthering the speaker's unproblematic "how did this happen," we might inquire, is the scene in this verse form a manufactured state of affairs?
- The white moth and white spider each utilise the singular white flower as camouflage in search of sanctuary and supper respectively. Did these flora and fauna come together for a purpose?
- Does the speaker take 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 beginning look at the poem's subject?
After thinking about local questions, we accept to zoom out. Ultimately, what is this text near?
Grade
Grade is how a text is put together. When you wait at a text, discover how the writer 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 cull to write short-course fiction instead of a novel or novella? Examining the form of a text tin 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 enquiry on form and what different forms can hateful makes information technology easier to effigy out why and how the author'southward choices are of import.
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—fifty-fifty if none of these exists, which is a notable choice in itself. Here's an example of thinking through these elements in "Design."
In "Blueprint," 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
In that location's more variation in the sestet rhymes, but one of the more common schemes is
c d e c d due east
Conventionally, the octave introduces a trouble or question which the sestet then resolves. The indicate at which the sonnet goes from the problem/question to the resolution is called the volta, or plow. (Note that we are speaking simply in generalities hither; there is a slap-up bargain 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 accept a few questions with which nosotros can offset:
- Why use an Italian sonnet?
- Why use an unusual scheme in the sestet?
- What trouble/question and resolution (if any) does Frost offering?
- What is the volta in this verse form?
- In other words, what is the betoken?
Italian sonnets have a long tradition; many careful readers recognize the class and know what to look from his octave, volta, and sestet. Frost seems to do something fairly standard in the octave in presenting a state of affairs; 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 expiry random or by design?
- Is i worse than the other?
We tin can guess right away that Frost's disruption of the usual purpose of the sestet has something to exercise with his disruption of its rhyme scheme. Looking even more than closely at the text will help u.s. refine our observations and guesses.
Give-and-take Choice, or Diction
Looking at the word choice of a text helps u.s.a. "dig in" ever more than deeply. If yous are reading something longer, are in that location sure words that come again and again? Are there words that stand up out? While you are going through this process, it is best for you to presume that every give-and-take is important—again, y'all tin 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 brand notes. Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions you have in the margins or on a split up slice of paper. If yous take ideas that may maybe respond your questions, write those down, too.
Observations
Let'southward take a wait at the first line of "Design":
I found a dimpled spider, fatty and white
The verse form starts with something unpleasant: a spider. And then, as we look more than closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may meet connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural. When we imagine spiders, nosotros do not by and large picture them dimpled and white; information technology is an uncommon and decidedly creepy paradigm. There is noise between the spider and its descriptors, i.eastward., what is wrong with this picture? Already nosotros have a question: what is going on with this spider?
We should look for additional clues further on in the text. The next 2 lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding spider:
On a white heal-all, holding upwards a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin fabric—
Now we have a white bloom (a heal-all, which unremarkably has a violet-bluish flower) and a white moth in addition to our white spider. Heal-alls accept medicinal properties, as their name suggests, only this one seems to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider? Does the mutation that changes the heal-all'due south color also change its beneficial backdrop—could information technology exist poisonous rather than curative? A white moth doesn't seem remarkable, simply information technology is "Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth," or like manmade fabric that is artificially "rigid" rather than polish and flowing like nosotros imagine satin to be. We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a bury, but even that is awry, for neither should be potent with expiry.
Questions
The first three lines of the poem's octave introduce unpleasant natural images "of expiry and blight" (equally the speaker puts it in line four). The flower and moth disrupt expectations: the heal-all is white instead of "bluish and innocent," and the moth is reduced to "rigid satin cloth" or "dead wings carried like a paper kite." Nosotros might expect a spider to be unpleasant and mortiferous; the poem's spider also has an unusual and unhealthy appearance.
- The focus on whiteness in these lines has more to do with decease than purity—can nosotros empathize that whiteness as beingness corpse-like rather than virtuous?
Well before the volta, Frost makes a "turn" abroad from nature every bit a retreat and oasis; instead, he unearths its inherent dangers, making nature menacing. From three lines solitary, we accept a number of questions:
- Will whiteness play a role in the residuum 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 class: finding the ways and places in which form and give-and-take option go together volition assist us brainstorm to unravel some larger concepts the poem itself addresses.
Theme
Put merely, themes are major ideas in a text. Many texts, peculiarly longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes. That's expert news when you are close reading because information technology ways there are many different means yous tin think through the questions you lot 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 y'all accept made is the first of a discovery of theme.
Questions
What is happening with disruption in "Design"? What point is Frost making? Observations nigh other elements in the text help you address the idea of disruption in more depth. Here is where nosotros look back at the work we have already washed: 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," nosotros want to see what kind of disruption, or whether indeed Frost uses disruptions in form and linguistic communication to communicate something opposite: design.
Sample Analysis
Subsequently you make notes, formulate questions, and set tentative hypotheses, you must analyze the subject of your close reading. Literary assay is another process of reading (and writing!) that allows you to make a claim nigh the text. It is also the point at which you turn a critical middle to your before questions and observations to detect the most compelling points, discarding the ones that are a "stretch." By "stretch," we hateful that we must discard points that are fascinating but have no clear connexion to the text every bit a whole. (We recommend a carve up document for recording the brilliant ideas that don't quite fit this time around.)
Here follows an excerpt from a cursory analysis of "Design" based on the shut reading above. This example focuses on some lines in not bad detail in order to unpack the meaning and significance of the verse form'southward language. By commenting on the dissimilar elements of close reading we have discussed, it takes the results of our close reading to offering i particular way into the text. (In case you were thinking about using this sample as your own, exist warned: it has no thesis and it is easily discoverable on the web. Plus it doesn't have a championship.)
Excerpt
Frost's speaker brews unlikely associations in the first stanza of the poem. The "Assorted characters of decease and blight / Mixed set to begin the morning right" make of the grotesque scene an as grotesque mockery of a breakfast cereal (4–v). 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 bane" into their expected concoction: a "witches' goop" (half dozen). These juxtapositions—a salubrious breakfast that is also a potion for nighttime magic—are borne out when our "fatty and white" spider becomes "a snow-drop"—an early on leap flower associated with renewal—and the moth as "dead wings carried similar a newspaper kite" (1, 7, 8). Like the mutant heal-all that hosts the moth'southward death, the spider becomes a deadly blossom; the harmless moth becomes a child's toy, only as "dead wings," more than like a boob 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 bluish and innocent heal-all" end up white and bleached like a bone (x)? How did its "kindred spider" detect the white flower, which was its perfect hiding place (xi)? Was the moth, and so, also searching for camouflage, merely to meet its end?
Using another question as a disguise, the speaker offers a hypothesis: "What only design of darkness to appall?" (13). This question sounds rhetorical, as though the only reason for such an unlikely combination of flora and animate being is some "blueprint of darkness." Some force, the speaker suggests, assembled the white spider, flower, and moth to snuff out the moth'southward life. Such a design appalls, or horrifies. Nosotros might also consider the speaker asking what other force but dark design could utilize something every bit simple as appalling in its other sense (making pale or white) to result death.
However, the poem does non close with a question, but with a statement. The speaker's "If design govern in a thing so pocket-sized" establishes a condition for the octave'south questions subsequently the fact (14). At that place is no point in considering the dark design that brought together "contrasted characters of decease and blight" if such an issue is besides small-scale, too physically small to exist the work of some force unknown. Ending on an "if" clause has the event of rendering the poem still more uncertain in its conclusions: not just 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 agonizing 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 verse form "wrong" with a purpose in mind. Design surely governs in a poem, withal 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 well-nigh literature is to communicate your best and most interesting ideas to your reader. Depending on the type of newspaper you accept 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 nearly the expectations for your paper.
Knowing how to organize these papers tin can be tricky, in part because in that location is no single right answer—only more than and less effective answers. You may decide to organize your paper thematically, or past tackling each idea sequentially; you may cull 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 offset one text and and so the other. One way to approach a text may be to kickoff with the beginning of the novel, story, play, or verse form, and work your way toward its finish. For example, here is the rough construction of the example above: The author of the sample decided to use the verse form itself as an organizational guide, at least for this part of the analysis.
- A paragraph well-nigh the octave.
- A paragraph about the volta.
- A paragraph nigh the penultimate line (xiii).
- 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 mode to communicate your ideas to your reader. Is information technology easier to follow your points when you write about each part of the text in particular 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 class, and so on—sequentially?
We propose you write your paper however is easiest for you then move things around during revision if you lot demand to.
Further Reading
If you lot really desire to master the practice of reading and writing most literature, nosotros recommend Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain's wonderful volume, A Brusque Guide to Writing about Literature. Barnet and Cain offer not only definitions and descriptions of processes, but examples of explications and analyses, every bit well every bit checklists for you, the author of the newspaper. The Brusk Guide is certainly non the only bachelor reference for writing nigh literature, just information technology is an excellent guide and reminder for new writers and veterans akin.
Source: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/assignments/closereading/
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