Paper #1
Close Reading / Literary Analysis
Van Noy

What:  Provide a detailed close reading or literary analysis of one of the stories we have read so far. In a close reading, you provide a careful, detailed examination of a text, paying particular attention to language, structure, and theme, and how they all fit together.

Why:  A close reading, or an explicacin de text, provides the basis for virtually any type of critical analysis.

Mode: Analytical (but not necessarily excluding the use of the first person)

Length: 3 – 4 pages

Format: MLA-Style Layout and Documentation.

Getting There: Explications follow the traditional essay format, with introduction, thesis, topic sentences, carefully developed paragraphs, etc. For a short story, you need not examine every feature of the text; however, you must be careful to attempt to account for all of the elements that are connected with your chosen focus and provide sufficient textual examples to make your case. Do not feel that you have to provide a complete, definitive reading. You should not need to use secondary sources for this particular assignment, although you are certainly welcome (and encouraged) to discuss the story with me and your colleagues.

You will want to choose some part of the text for some micro-level analysis, and show interrelationships of parts to the whole. How are the elements of character, setting, plot, point of view, theme interdependent on one another? Pay attention to the sounds of words, their connotative/denotative meanings,  the shape of sentences. Choose a paragraph, a section, but no more than a page for this intensive reading. This analysis should probably constitute at least a third of your paper.

Focus on a place where there is ambiguity, or many possible interpretations. That helps to give you your thesis. “At the end of story x, readers may wonder what is meant by y? A close reading shows z.” However, you might want to show the story indeed as many possible meanings. Also focus on places in the story where things change, such as a change in point of view, or words change in meaning (or are used more than once in new ways). Think about how the words pile on one another. It may be useful to make lists of words to describe characters (clean and neat, Liz; rumpled, Jim). What do these relative meanings show?

You need not restrict this to formalist elements. You can also do a kind of “political formalism,” where you expose how the text treats gender, race or class. But you must unpack the obvious, dig into the details. Think of writing for an audience that has read the story but not read it as responsively or insightfully as you have.


More Tips on Paper #2 the Close Reading.

 

  1. Re-read the assignment and re-think your purpose: are you doing a close reading, focusing in on at least one passage for micro-analysis and showing how it can illuminate the whole? Showing how the text works, how form and content, arrangement and theme work together.

 

  1. You’re purpose isn’t really to do a character analysis, unless that analysis is one of the keys to the story’s overall theme.

  2. After having discovered the theme in your first draft, re-read the story for more evidence. Re-read it again. Where can we see this theme played out on a smaller scale?

 

  1. None of the that stuff about “life” or “society”—Focus more on how the text was put together—what unifying principles? What patterns, irony, paradoxes, ambiguities, tensions?

  2. The “what it teaches” school is the traditionalist approach (looks for moral rather than theme).

  3. Check out this web page on close readings, especially item 1 on figurative language and 2 on diction. These are the elements most missing from the papers—a close look at the language (especially figurative) and diction.  Here is another from the Purdue online Writing Center (OWL).

 

Criteria for Grading

 

The best papers:

 

  1. Not only fulfill the assignment (a close reading, with micro-analysis) but do so in a fresh and mature way.  Accommodate themselves well to the intended audience. 
  2. Say something:  are precise, illustrate generalizations fully and appropriately, define key terms, develop and explore the implications of their own ideas, and are reasonably sophisticated.  Analyze and reflect rather than merely describe.
  3. Are well written:  the prose is clear, apt, and occasionally memorable.  Contain few errors by contemporary American Standard English criteria. 
  4. Are well organized:  are tightly unified and develop a thesis and/or sustain a line of thought clearly and logically, without unnecessary digressions.  Paragraphs are fully developed, with clear topic sentences, and follow naturally from what precedes them; the conclusion reinforces the reader’s confidence in the writer’s control of the argument.
  5. Are formatted according to standard conventions.  Use MLA notation correctly. 
  6. Take into consideration the process as well as the product, such as peer review or a good draft (if applicable).