Close Reading Exercise Guidelines

For this assignment, choose a passage  either Girls at War or Country Lovers. Then analyze your passage using the different close reading methods outlined below. For each section of this assignment, you should write at least a paragraph although you may have much more to say--in that case, write it!  The goal of this exercise is to train you in the key techniques of literary criticism: finding patterns in very small, specific details of the text and relating those patterns to larger issues throughout the text as a whole. I am asking you to focus first on the form of the text, and to think about the content only in relation to the form.

For this exercise, you should be concise and precise. Your goal is to  do the analysis that goes into literary criticism without the "baggage" that comes with writing a paper. Don't add any sort of introduction or conclusion, and don't add topic sentences or concluding sentences to your paragraphs. Don't worry about transitions. All those sorts of "paper-writing things" are just icing on the cake. Your underlying analysis must be solid for the cake to have any substance, and that's what I want you to work on. Above all, do not add any "filler" to pad out your writing. I want your writing to be filled with analytical nuggets. (This should be a dense and chewy cake!) If you run out of things to say, it means you need to think harder and more deeply about the passage. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me.

You will probably need to finish this over the weekend. It is due in class next meeting.

Section 1:

Choose a word from your passage, and look that word up in the  Oxford English Dictionary (OED) at http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl?side=S Be sure to look at the full entry for your word. The full entry includes examples from different historical periods, not just the definition.

Analyze how that word's history, etymology, and usage affects one's understanding of the passage.

You will be exploring how alternate meanings of a word have certain connotations and affect meaning in the text in certain ways. How do these other meanings affect and inflect the text? Look at the resonances created by using your particular word in the particular examples you investigate. Don't want  make pithy remarks about how "knowing" the "true" meaning of your word helps you gain a "deeper understanding" of the text or helps you understand what the writer "intended."

Section 2:

Choose one kind of imagery that is used in your passage, and analyze how that imagery is used in specific examples from your passage. For each example, you should think about what it means that the text is using this particular image rather than a different one in a particular line or phrase. What connotations does this image have? How does using this image affect how one understands the "content" of the particular line in which it appears (i.e. how does it affect what the line is saying)?

At the very end of the section, please write two to three sentences discussing how the kind of imagery you have analyzed relates to other issues in the larger text. In other words, why is it significant in relation to larger issues in the text that this particular kind of imagery is used?

Section 3:

Choose 3-5 examples from your passage. For each example, describe (1) what the example implies about the reader's response to that example, (2) where in the example you get the sense that it implies that kind of response, and (3) how that implication affects what the line says (its "content"). You might also consider the implied relationship between the speaker/narrator/author and the reader.

At the end of this section, in no more than two to three sentences, describe (1) what kind of response from the reader the passage as a whole anticipates and (2) how such positioning of the reader relates to larger issues in the text as a whole.