difference between close reading essay

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Use the guidelines below to learn about the practice of close reading.

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 .

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.

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Further Reading

If you really want to master the practice of reading and writing about literature, we recommend Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain’s wonderful book, A Short Guide to Writing about Literature . Barnet and Cain offer not only definitions and descriptions of processes, but examples of explications and analyses, as well as checklists for you, the author of the paper. The Short Guide is certainly not the only available reference for writing about literature, but it is an excellent guide and reminder for new writers and veterans alike.

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How to do a close reading essay [Updated 2023]

Close reading refers to the process of interpreting a literary work’s meaning by analyzing both its form and content. In this post, we provide you with strategies for close reading that you can apply to your next assignment or analysis.

What is a close reading?

Close reading involves paying attention to a literary work’s language, style, and overall meaning. It includes looking for patterns, repetitions, oddities, and other significant features of a text. Your goal should be to reveal subtleties and complexities beyond an initial reading.

The primary difference between simply reading a work and doing a close reading is that, in the latter, you approach the text as a kind of detective.

When you’re doing a close reading, a literary work becomes a puzzle. And, as a reader, your job is to pull all the pieces together—both what the text says and how it says it.

How do you do a close reading?

Typically, a close reading focuses on a small passage or section of a literary work. Although you should always consider how the selection you’re analyzing fits into the work as a whole, it’s generally not necessary to include lengthy summaries or overviews in a close reading.

There are several aspects of the text to consider in a close reading:

• Literal Content: Even though a close reading should go beyond an analysis of a text’s literal content, every reading should start there. You need to have a firm grasp of the foundational content of a passage before you can analyze it closely. Use the common journalistic questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why?) to establish the basics like plot, character, and setting.
• Tone: What is the tone of the passage you’re examining? How does the tone influence the entire passage? Is it serious, comic, ironic, or something else?
• Characterization: What do you learn about specific characters from the passage? Who is the narrator or speaker? Watch out for language that reveals the motives and feelings of particular characters.
• Structure: What kind of structure does the work utilize? If it’s a poem, is it written in free or blank verse? If you’re working with a novel, does the structure deviate from certain conventions, like straightforward plot or realism? Does the form contribute to the overall meaning?
• Figurative Language: Examine the passage carefully for similes, metaphors, and other types of figurative language. Are there repetitions of certain figures or patterns of opposition? Do certain words or phrases stand in for larger issues?
• Diction: Diction means word choice. You should look up any words that you don’t know in a dictionary and pay attention to the meanings and etymology of words. Never assume that you know a word’s meaning at first glance. Why might the author choose certain words over others?
• Style and Sound: Pay attention to the work’s style. Does the text utilize parallelism? Are there any instances of alliteration or other types of poetic sound? How do these stylistic features contribute to the passage’s overall meaning?
• Context: Consider how the passage you’re reading fits into the work as a whole. Also, does the text refer to historical or cultural information from the world outside of the text? Does the text reference other literary works?

Once you’ve considered the above features of the passage, reflect on its relationship to the work’s larger themes, ideas, and actions. In the end, a close reading allows you to expand your understanding of a text.

Close reading example

Let’s take a look at how this technique works by examining two stanzas from Lorine Niedecker’s poem, “ I rose from marsh mud ”:

I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds.

First, we need to consider the stanzas’ literal content. In this case, the poem is about attending a wedding. Next, we should take note of the poem’s form: four-line stanzas, written in free verse.

From there, we need to look more closely at individual words and phrases. For instance, the first stanza discusses how the speaker “rose from marsh mud” and then lists items like “algae, equisetum, willows” and “sweet green,” all of which are plants. Could the speaker have been gardening before attending the wedding?

Now, juxtapose the first stanza with the second: the speaker leaves the natural world of mud and greenness for the “rich/ rich silence of the church.” Note the repetition of the word, “rich,” and how the poem goes on to describe the “little white slave-girl/ in her diamond fronds,” the necessarily “rich” jewelry that the bride wears at her wedding.

Niedecker’s description of the diamond jewelry as “fronds” refers back to the natural world of plants that the speaker left behind. Note also the similarities in sound between the “frogs” of the first stanza and the “fronds” of the second.

We might conclude from a comparison of the two stanzas that, while the “marsh mud” might be full of “noisy/ birds and frogs,” it’s a far better place to be than the “rich/rich silence of the church.”

Ultimately, even a short close reading of Niedecker’s poem reveals layers of meaning that enhance our understanding of the work’s overall message.

How to write a close reading essay

Getting started.

Before you can write your close reading essay, you need to read the text that you plan to examine at least twice (but often more than that). Follow the above guidelines to break down your close reading into multiple parts.

Once you’ve read the text closely and made notes, you can then create a short outline for your essay. Determine how you want to approach to structure of your essay and keep in mind any specific requirements that your instructor may have for the assignment.

Structure and organization

Some close reading essays will simply analyze the text’s form and content without making a specific argument about the text. Other times, your instructor might want you to use a close reading to support an argument. In these cases, you’ll need to include a thesis statement in the introduction to your close reading essay.

You’ll organize your essay using the standard essay format. This includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Most of your close reading will be in the body paragraphs.

Formatting and length

The formatting of your close reading essay will depend on what type of citation style that your assignment requires. If you’re writing a close reading for a composition or literature class , you’ll most likely use MLA or Chicago style.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing. If your close reading is part of a longer paper, then it may only take up a few paragraphs.

Citations and bibliography

Since you will be quoting directly from the text in your close reading essay, you will need to have in-text, parenthetical citations for each quote. You will also need to include a full bibliographic reference for the text you’re analyzing in a bibliography or works cited page.

To save time, use a credible citation generator like BibGuru to create your in-text and bibliographic citations. You can also use our citation guides on MLA and Chicago to determine what you need to include in your citations.

Frequently Asked Questions about how to do a close reading

A successful close reading pays attention to both the form and content of a literary work. This includes: literal content, tone, characterization, structure, figurative language, diction, sound, style, and context.

A close reading essay is a paper that analyzes a text or a portion of a text. It considers both the form and content of the text. The specific format of your close reading essay will depend on your assignment guidelines.

Skimming and close reading are opposite approaches. Skimming involves scanning a text superficially in order to glean the most important points, while close reading means analyzing the details of a text’s language, style, and overall form.

You might begin a close reading by providing some context about the passage’s significance to the work as a whole. You could also briefly summarize the literal content of the section that you’re examining.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing.

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How to Do a Close Reading

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Close Reading Fundamentals

How to choose a passage to close-read, how to approach a close reading, how to annotate a passage, how to improve your close reading, how to practice close reading, how to incorporate close readings into an essay, how to teach close reading, additional resources for advanced students.

Close reading engages with the formal properties of a text—its literary devices, language, structure, and style. Popularized in the mid-twentieth century, this way of reading allows you to interpret a text without outside information such as historical context, author biography, philosophy, or political ideology. It also requires you to put aside your affective (that is, personal and emotional) response to the text, focusing instead on objective study. Why close-read a text? Doing so will increase your understanding of how a piece of writing works, as well as what it means. Perhaps most importantly, close reading can help you develop and support an essay argument. In this guide, you'll learn more about what close reading entails and find strategies for producing precise, creative close readings. We've included a section with resources for teachers, along with a final section with further reading for advanced students.

You might compare close reading to wringing out a wet towel, in which you twist the material repeatedly until you have extracted as much liquid as possible. When you close-read, you'll return to a short passage several times in order to note as many details about its form and content as possible. Use the links below to learn more about close reading's place in literary history and in the classroom.

"Close Reading" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's relatively short introduction to close reading contains sections on background, examples, and how to teach close reading. You can also click the links on this page to learn more about the literary critics who pioneered the method.

"Close Reading: A Brief Note" (Literariness.org)

This article provides a condensed discussion of what close reading is, how it works, and how it is different from other ways of reading a literary text.

"What Close Reading Actually Means" ( TeachThought )

In this article by an Ed.D., you'll learn what close reading "really means" in the classroom today—a meaning that has shifted significantly from its original place in 20th century literary criticism.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Washington)

This hand-out from a college writing course defines close reading, suggests  why  we close-read, and offers tips for close reading successfully, including focusing on language, audience, and scope.

"Glossary Entry on New Criticism" (Poetry Foundation)

If you'd like to read a short introduction to the school of thought that gave rise to close reading, this is the place to go. Poetry Foundation's entry on New Criticism is concise and accessible.

"New Criticism" (Washington State Univ.)

This webpage from a college writing course offers another brief explanation of close reading in relation to New Criticism. It provides some key questions to help you think like a New Critic.

When choosing a passage to close-read, you'll want to look for relatively short bits of text that are rich in detail. The resources below offer more tips and tricks for selecting passages, along with links to pre-selected passages you can print for use at home or in the classroom.

"How to Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading" ( We Are Teachers )

This post from a former special education teacher describes six characteristics you might look for when selecting a close reading passage from a novel: beginnings, pivotal plot points, character changes, high-density passages, "Q&A" passages, and "aesthetic" passages. 

"Close Reading Passages" (Reading Sage)

Reading Sage provides links to close reading passages you can use as is; alternatively, you could also use them as models for selecting your own passages. The page is divided into sections geared toward elementary, middle school, and early high school students.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Guelph)

The University of Guelph's guide to close reading contains a short section on how to "Select a Passage." The author suggests that you choose a brief passage. 

"Close Reading Advice" (Prezi)

This Prezi was created by an AP English teacher. The opening section on passage selection suggests choosing "thick paragraphs" filled with "figurative language and rich details or description."

Now that you know how to select a passage to analyze, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the textual qualities you should look for when reading. Whether you're approaching a poem, a novel, or a magazine article, details on the level of language (literary devices) and form (formal features) convey meaning. Understanding  how  a text communicates will help you understand  what  it is communicating. The links in this section will familiarize you with the tools you need to start a close reading.

Literary Devices

"Literary Devices and Terms" (LitCharts)

LitCharts' dedicated page covers 130+ literary devices. Also known as "rhetorical devices," "figures of speech," or "elements of style," these linguistic constructions are the building blocks of literature. Some of the most common include  simile , metaphor , alliteration , and onomatopoeia ; browse the links on LitCharts to learn about many more. 

"Rhetorical Device" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's page on rhetorical devices defines the term in relation to the ancient art of "rhetoric" or persuasive speaking. At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to several online handbooks and lists of rhetorical devices.

"15 Must Know Rhetorical Terms for AP English Literature" ( Albert )

The  Albert blog   offers this list of 15 rhetorical devices that high school English students should know how to define and spot in a literary text; though geared toward the Advanced Placement exam, its tips are widely applicable.

"The 55 AP Language and Composition Terms You Must Know" (PrepScholar)

This blog post lists 55 terms high school students should learn how to recognize and define for the Advanced Placement exam in English Literature.

Formal Features

In LitCharts' bank of literary devices and terms, you'll also find resources to describe a text's structure and overall character. Some of the most important of these are  rhyme , meter , and  tone ; browse the page to find more. 

"Rhythm" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

This encyclopedia entry on rhythm and meter offers an in-depth definition of the two most fundamental aspects of poetry.

"How to Analyze Syntax for AP English Literature" ( Albert)

The Albert blog will help you understand what "syntax" is, making a case for why you should pay attention to sentence structure when analyzing a literary text.

"Grammar Basics: Sentence Parts and Sentence Structures" ( ThoughtCo )

This article provides a meticulous overview of the components of a sentence. It's useful if you need to review your parts of speech or if you need to be able to identify things like prepositional phrases.

"Style, Diction, Tone, and Voice" (Wheaton College)

Wheaton College's Writing Center offers this clear, concise discussion of several important formal features. Although it's designed to help essay writers, it will also help you understand and spot these stylistic features in others' work. 

Now that you know what rhetorical devices, formal features, and other details to look for, you're ready to find them in a text. For this purpose, it is crucial to annotate (write notes) as you read and re-read. Each time you return to the text, you'll likely notice something new; these observations will form the basis of your close reading. The resources in this section offer some concrete strategies for annotating literary texts.

"How to Annotate a Text" (LitCharts)

Begin by consulting our  How to Annotate a Text  guide. This collection of links and resources is helpful for short passages (that is, those for close reading) as well as longer works, like whole novels or poems.

"Annotation Guide" (Covington Catholic High School)

This hand-out from a high school teacher will help you understand why we annotate, and how to annotate a text successfully. You might choose to incorporate some of the interpretive notes and symbols suggested here.

"Annotating Literature" (New Canaan Public Schools)

This one-page, introductory resource provides a list of 10 items you should look for when reading a text, including attitude and theme.

"Purposeful Annotation" (Dave Stuart Jr.)

This article from a high school teacher's blog describes the author's top close reading strategy: purposeful annotation. In fact, this teacher more or less equates close reading with annotation.

Looking for ways to improve your close reading? The articles, guides, and videos in this section will expose you to various methods of close reading, as well as practice exercises. No two people read exactly the same way. Whatever your level of expertise, it can be useful to broaden your skill set by testing the techniques suggested by the resources below.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, part of Harvard's comprehensive "Strategies for Essay Writing Guide," describes three steps to a successful close reading. You will want to return to this resource when incorporating your close reading into an essay.

"A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis" (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center)

Working through this guide from another college writing center will help you move through the process of close reading a text. You'll find a sample analysis of Robert Frost's "Design" at the end.

"How to Do a Close Reading of a Text" (YouTube)

This four-minute video from the "Literacy and Math Ideas" channel offers a number of helpful tips for reading a text closely in accordance with Common Core standards.

"Poetry: Close Reading" (Purdue OWL)

Short, dense poems are a natural fit for the close reading approach. This page from the Purdue Online Writing Lab takes you step-by-step through an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

"Steps for Close Reading or Explication de Texte" ( The Literary Link )

This page, which mentions close reading's close relationship to the French formalist method of  "explication de texte," shares "12 Steps to Literary Awareness."

You can practice your close reading skills by reading, re-reading and annotating any brief passage of text. The resources below will get you started by offering pre-selected passages and questions to guide your reading. You'll find links to resources that are designed for students of all levels, from elementary school through college.

"Notes on Close Reading" (MIT Open Courseware)

This resource describes steps you can work through when close reading, providing a passage from Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein  for you to test your skills.

"Close Reading Practice Worksheets" (Gillian Duff's English Resources)

Here, you'll find 10 close reading-centered worksheets you can download and print. The "higher-close-reading-formula" link at the bottom of the page provides a chart with even more steps and strategies for close reading.

"Close Reading Activities" (Education World)

The four activities described on this page are best suited to elementary and middle school students. Under each heading is a link to handouts or detailed descriptions of the activity.

"Close Reading Practice Passages: High School" (Varsity Tutors)

This webpage from Varsity Tutors contains over a dozen links to close reading passages and exercises, including several resources that focus on close-reading satire.

"Benjamin Franklin's Satire of Witch Hunting" (America in Class)

This page contains both a "teacher's guide" and "student version" to interpreting Benjamin Franklin's satire of a witch trial. The thirteen close reading questions on the right side of the page will help you analyze the text thoroughly.

Whether you're writing a research paper or an essay, close reading can help you build an argument. Careful analysis of your primary texts allows you to draw out meanings you want to emphasize, thereby supporting your central claim. The resources in this section introduce you to strategies suited to various common writing assignments.

"How to Write a Research Paper" (LitCharts)

The resources in this guide will help you learn to formulate a thesis, organize evidence, write an outline, and draft a research paper, one of the two most common assignments in which you might incorporate close reading.

"How to Write an Essay" (LitCharts)

In this guide, you'll learn how to plan, draft, and revise an essay, whether for the classroom or as a take-home assignment. Close reading goes hand in hand with the brainstorming and drafting processes for essay writing.

"Guide to the Close Reading Essay" (Univ. of Warwick)

This guide was designed for undergraduates, and assumes prior knowledge of formal features and rhetorical devices one might find in a poem. High schoolers will find it useful after addressing the "elements of a close reading" section above.

"Beginning the Academic Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Harvard's guide discusses the broader category of the "academic essay." Here, the author assumes that your essay's close readings will be accompanied by context and evidence from secondary sources. 

A Short Guide to Writing About Literature (Amazon)

Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain emphasize that writing is a process. In their book, you'll find definitions of important literary terms, examples of successful explications of literary texts, and checklists for essay writers.

Due in part to the Common Core's emphasis on close reading skills, resources for teaching students how to close-read abound. Here, you'll find a wealth of information on how and why we teach students to close-read texts. The first section includes links to activities, exercises, and complete lesson plans. The second section offers background material on the method, along with strategies for implementing close reading in the classroom.

Lesson Plans and Activities

"Four Lessons for Introducing the Fundamental Steps of Close Reading" (Corwin)

Here, Corwin has made the second chapter of Nancy Akhavan's  The Nonfiction Now Lesson Bank, Grades 4 – 8 available online. You'll find four sample lessons to use in the elementary or middle school classroom

"Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques Through Close Reading" ( ReadWriteThink )

This lesson plan for high school students includes material for five 50-minute sessions on sonic patterns (including consonance, assonance, and alliteration). The literary text at hand is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."

"Close Reading of a Short Text: Complete Lesson" (McGraw Hill via YouTube)

This eight-minute video describes a complete lesson in which a teacher models close reading of a short text and offers guiding questions.

"Close Reading Model Lessons" (Achieve the Core)

These three model lessons on close reading will help you determine what makes a text "appropriately complex" for the grade level you teach.

Close Reading Bundle (Teachers Pay Teachers)

This top-rated bundle of close reading resources was designed for the middle school classroom. It contains over 150 pages of worksheets, complete lesson plans, and literacy center ideas.

"10 Intriguing Photos to Teach Close Reading and Visual Thinking Skills" ( The New York Times )

The New York Times' s Learning Network has gathered 10 photos from the "What's Going on in This Picture" series that teachers can use to help students develop analytical and visual thinking skills.

"The Close Reading Essay" (Brandeis Univ.)

Brandeis University's writing program offers this detailed set of guidelines and goals you might use when assigning a close reading essay.

Close Reading Resources (Varsity Tutors)

Varsity Tutors has compiled a list of over twenty links to lesson plans, strategies, and activities for teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to close read.

Background Material and Teaching Strategies

Falling in Love with Close Reading (Amazon)

Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts aim to show how close reading can be "rigorous, meaningful, and joyous." It offers a three-step "close reading ritual" and engaging lesson plans.

Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading (Amazon)

Kylene Beers (a former Senior Reading Researcher at Yale) and Robert E. Probst (a Professor Emeritus of English Education) introduce six "signposts" readers can use to detect significant moments in a work of literature.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (YouTube)

TeachLikeThis offers this four-minute video on teaching students to close-read by looking at a text's language, narrative, syntax, and context.

"Strategy Guide: Close Reading of a Literary Text" ( ReadWriteThink )

This guide for middle school and high school teachers will help you choose texts that are appropriately complex for the grade level you teach, and offers strategies for planning engaging lessons.

"Close Reading Steps for Success" (Appletastic Learning)

Shelly Rees, a teacher with over 20 years of experience, introduces six helpful steps you can use to help your students engage with challenging reading passages. The article is geared toward elementary and middle school teachers.

"4 Steps to Boost Students' Close Reading Skills" ( Amplify )

Doug Fisher, a professor of educational leadership, suggests using these four steps to help students at any grade level learn how to close read. 

Like most tools of literary analysis, close reading has a complex history. It's not necessary to understand the theoretical underpinnings of close reading in order to use this tool. For advanced high school students and college students who ask "why close-read," though, the resources below will serve as useful starting points for discussion.

"Discipline and Parse: The Politics of Close Reading" ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

This book review by a well-known English professor at Columbia provides an engaging, anecdotal introduction to close reading's place in literary history. Robbins points to some of the method's shortcomings, but also elegantly defends it.

"Intentional Fallacy" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

The literary critics who developed close reading cautioned against judging a text based on the author's intention. This encyclopedia entry offers an expanded definition of this way of reading, called the "intentional fallacy."

"Seven Types of Ambiguity" (Wikipedia)

This Wikipedia article will introduce you to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity  (1930), one of the foundational texts of New Criticism, the school of thought that theorized close reading.

"What is Distant Reading" ( The New York Times)

This article makes it clear that "close reading" isn't the only way to analyze literary texts. It offers a brief introduction to the "distant reading" method of computational criticism pioneered by Franco Moretti in recent years.

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Elaine Showalter describes close reading as:

...slow reading, a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and form.

It is, in her words, ‘a form 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 experience to take over and carry us along, without stopping to ask how and why a particular passage, sentence, or word achieves its effects.

Close reading, then, is about 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 word can unlock.

It is possible to close read an extended passage, but for essays it is often a good technique to do the close reading first and then to use very short extracts or even single words to demonstrate your insights. So instead of doing a close reading of twenty lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream *in* your essay, you would do it independently, and then cite and explain three key phrases, relating them clearly 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 it was essential that students put aside their preconceptions and learn to appreciate the liveliness and multiplicity of language.

With that in mind, he gave students poems without any information about 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 ambiguity 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.

Think of close reading as something that you do with a pencil and book in your hand. Mark up the pages; fill the margins.

“Annotate to appreciate; annotate to understand… It builds reading confidence; it helps us understand how literature is made—because it puts us there among the phrases.” Sometimes the Best Way to Read is to Mark up the Book - on the revelatory power of annotations

And then transcribe the poem, the passage, the quotation.

Accurate transcription of quotations is, for some, the first and last rule of close reading. If your passage isn’t transcribed meticulously, down to the last comma and (with poetry) spacing on the page, you can’t read it closely.

Careful transcription will also help you get inside 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 so, remember to think carefully about sound, not only when reading poetry but also 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 can often glide over aspects of a text that the ear is keen to pick up. Remember, too, that it’s important not only to detect certain features but also to consider their effects. If you need to pause to catch your breath in the middle of a sentence, ask yourself why. How are form and content working together?

Close, not closed readings

Close 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 about the purpose behind your close reading – we are looking for close readings, not closed readings. Essentially, the close reading is the starting point for your essay, letting you find what is interesting, intricate, and unexpected about a literary text.

In the essay itself, you need to stitch that revelation about the complexities and ambiguities of particular terms, phrases and passages into a larger argument or context – don’t simply list everything you have found; craft it into an argument, and be prepared to downplay or leave out some of the elements you have spotted if they don’t relate to the larger picture.

For this reason, you might want to follow the “Rule of 2”. Your analysis of your quotation should be twice as long as the quotation itself. It's a nice reminder that we always need to go back and explain the textual evidence that's being cited.

Each piece of textual evidence needs and deserves detailed analysis if it's being used to support the argument's claims. It also helps to remind us to vary the lengths of quoted textual evidence so that an essay doesn't end up with only very brief quotations or long block quotations, but includes a mixture of different lengths that will best suit the claim being developed at any given point in the argument.

Some questions you may like to ask

• Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? What is the reader assumed to know/not know? (University essays aren't written for an interested aunt or friend on a different course, but for an audience familiar with the themes and readings under discussion. Students are writing for an audience of engaged and interested peers. This means that the writer can assume that their reader knows the text and doesn't need extensive plot summary in the introduction or start 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 are an expert speaking to other experts.)
• What is the point of the details included in the passage (eg if mundane things are mentioned, why is that; if there are elements of description that don’t seem to contribute to the plot what do they do instead)? 
• What generic clues are here (what kinds of writing are hinted at)? 
• Are there words or phrases which are ambiguous (could mean more than one thing)? If so, are we directed to privilege one reading over the other or do we keep both in play? Does one meaning open up an alternative story/history/narrative? What are the connotations of the words that are chosen? Do any of them open up new or different contexts? 
• Are there patterns which emerge in the language (the repetition of words or of certain kinds of words? Repeated phrases? Rhymes or half-rhymes? Metrical patterns?). What effects do they create? 
• Is there any movement in the passage you are reading? Are there any shapes or dominant metaphors? 
• What kind of rhythm does the passage have? What is its cadence?
• Is there anything that troubles you about the passage or that you’re not sure you fully understand? 
• Have you been to the dictionary (remember the full Oxford English Dictionary is available online through the library)?

For more specific advice, you 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 remember you can close read secondary as well 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 Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1995). Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).

For more on Practical Criticism, with some useful online exercises, try the Virtual Classroom on Practical Criticism

There’s a neat example by Patricia Kain at Harvard College’s Writing Center .

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 as a PDF for use as a personal learning tool or for use in the classroom as a teaching resource.

Department of English and Related Literature University of York , York , YO10 5DD , UK Tel: work +44 (0) 1904 323366 | [email protected]

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Article contents

Close reading.

• Mark Byron Mark Byron University of Sydney
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1014
• Published online: 25 March 2021

Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts (principally from the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic traditions) as well as the philological strategies applied to classical works such as the Homeric epics in the Greco-Roman tradition, or the Chinese 詩經 ( Shijing ) or Classic of Poetry . Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman law and the canon law of the Christian Church, and they also find expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books. As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the center of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past one hundred years or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late 1960s. This article provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant nonanglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.

• distant reading
• surface reading
• postcritique
• hermeneutics
• algorithmic reading

What Is Close Reading?

Anyone seriously engaged with literature [. . .] practices close reading; it only becomes one “approach” among others when the attempt is made to abstract some principles from it that are held to rule out the legitimacy of other ways of thinking about one’s reading. (Stefan Collini, “The Close Reader” 1 )

How does close reading function, and what kinds of knowledge does it afford? To close read is to examine a literary work (or part of a work) with sustained attention to such matters as grammar, syntax, vocabulary, rhetorical tropes, prosody, as well as the presence of literary allusion and other forms of intertextuality. A close reading procedure may entail one or more, or all of these elements, depending upon the motivations for close reading in the first place, as well as the aptitudes of the reader, that is, the ability to detect often subtle features of language usage and the presence of specific patterns of usage. Close reading may focus on a single poem—Cleanth Brooks’s reading of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a particularly well-known example—or on short passages scattered across larger texts or corpora, or on longer works, although the general tendency is toward intensive reading of shorter texts. The kinds of information a close reading may yield vary between close readers, but can be usefully reduced into such typologies as: specific linguistic usage and patterns, including etymology; prosody and sound-related language effects; rhetorical tropes and procedures of argumentation; historical and literary references; and linguistic choices indicating sustained engagement with traditions of interpretation of literary or sacred texts. These forms of knowledge are often deployed in aid of such arguments as the literary and ideological influences upon an author, stylometric identification of authorship, evidentiary bases for textual interpretation, arguments for or against the legitimacy of external resources in the production of literary meaning, and ideological and aesthetic discourses within and between reading communities.

Close reading, then, is a method, or a loose collection of methods, aimed at evaluating how a text is assembled and discerning the implications of its linguistic choices. Close reading has a long history, embedded in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts, and hews closely to the history of philology, especially as that discipline sought to establish authoritative texts from among its various witnesses. Methods of close reading are also critical to the development of the law, where precise definition, clear language, and the unambiguous use of concepts have stimulated legislative reforms as well as the “plain language” movement. 2 As a basis for interpretation, close reading is not only a hermeneutic procedure but a performance of the reader’s inclinations and aptitudes. Alternative reading strategies such as postcritique, surface reading, and distant reading respond to perceived limitations of the “depth” model of close reading practices. They instead seek ways of understanding texts and their contexts of production and reception attendant to direct (rather than encoded) meaning as well as to quantitative research methods. These innovations challenge the dominant structure of literary value in texts deemed to be interpretively rich, locating value in more dispersed frameworks such as genre, publication records, readership communities, and digital reach. Close attention to manuscripts, variant editions, and other textual sources—especially as these are collated in digital archives and editions—has stimulated renewed focus on philological methods. This development of textuality in the digital age provides a platform in which close reading methodologies and alternative methods of distant reading, surface reading, and so on, can intersect, each bringing an essential dimension to textual understanding.

Close Reading Sacred Texts

The shift to literacy in ancient civilizations provided the physical means to interpret, paraphrase, and attach commentary to sacred texts. This process was gradual, and ancient religions retained strong oral residues into the late-classical era. The presence of the Tetragrammaton ( יהוה ‎) in Jewish practice and the various nomina sacra in the early Christian tradition signify in writing the weight placed upon verbal enunciation of alternatives to the name of God. Various rhetorical patterns in sacred texts—dense anaphora in the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12), for example—also signify oral performance. Eventually, complex systems of reading and interpretation grew alongside written religious texts. While this article will focus briefly on the texts of the Abrahamic traditions, the transition from oral commentary to written texts also applies to the Avesta , the central texts of Zoroastrianism emerging from earlier oral practices and entering the historical record in the 5th century bce , during the early Achaemenid Empire. The textual tradition collected under the Zoroastrian term “ Zend ” encompassed exegetical glosses, commentaries, and translations of the Avestan texts. 3 Equally, ancient Vedic texts also emerged from an older oral cultural formation, and gave rise to the complex interpretive traditions of Mīmāṃsā . These schools of textual analysis provided the basis for subsequent developments in philology, Sanskrit linguistics, and the philosophy of language. 4 Ancient Chinese texts attracted long traditions of commentary—best preserved in the Confucian canon of the Four Classics and Five Books. The evolution of literary commentaries that reflect processes of close reading—philological, linguistic, intertextual, and so on—bears its history in the exegetical tradition of the 詩經 ‎ ( Shijing ), known as the Classic of Poetry or Book of Odes . By historical convention the poems were collected from the Yellow River plains during the Western Zhou Dynasty ( 1046–771 bce ), from which 305 were selected and arranged by Confucius in the 6th century bce into the text that eventually became part of the traditional Confucian canon during the Han Dynasty. 5

The founding texts of Judaism, the “dual Torah,” exist as the Written Torah—the Pentateuch ( תורה שבכתב ‎) or Five Books of Moses received at Mount Sinai—and the Oral Torah ( תורה שבעל פה ‎)—the sum of rabbinic commentary and other sources of Jewish culture and practice such as the Talmud and Midrash, which are considered as written records of extensive oral transmission. The history of Jewish textual reception is thus one of close reading and close listening. The largest reservoir of evidence for textual reception is the rabbinic literature stemming from the lands of Israel and Babylon between the beginning of the Common Era and the 7th century ce : the Oral Torah collected in the written texts of the Mishnah ( מִשְׁנָה ‎), which were in turn given critical scrutiny in the texts of the Jerusalem Talmud; and the Babylonian Talmud of late antiquity, which collected the Mishnah as well as several hundred years of subsequent commentary or Gemara. The cumulative layers of commentary and interpretation in this tradition is transmitted through intensive study. The meaning of Torah is “teaching” and that of Mishnah “study by repetition,” signifying in the names of Judaism’s core documents the central importance of close reading from which understanding gains the best chance of flourishing. This structure is not only cumulative but reflexive. The canon of the Torah, the Prophets, and Writings in the TaNaKh (an acronym for the Hebrew Bible in its totality) is considered in midrashic interpretation to be intimately interlinked through etymology and other philological features, the divine word combining into a seamless unity where each part sheds light on all others. 6 Every word of the text forms an essential part of the interpretive process in commentaries, and in some commentary traditions this extends to each letter, with attention to their numerical significance becoming a way of reading the “code” embedded in language ( gematria and notaricon ). The customary belief that the TaNaKh precedes and serves as a divine blueprint for Creation—recorded in the late-classical midrashic text the Genesis Rabbah ( בְּרֵאשִׁית רַבָּה ‎)—is an early manifestation of the notion that “There is nothing outside the text.” 7

Christian Bible

The history of biblical interpretation includes the assimilation of texts into one or other biblical canons, the development of biblical hermeneutics from the earliest patristic works, the consequences of the historical-critical method of establishing textual stability, the establishment of apocrypha and the assimilation of newly discovered textual versions (such as those contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls), and modern revisions to earlier interpretive methods, such as reading the Old Testament as generally prophetic of the New Testament. 8 These textual methodologies often entailed the practices of close reading, where the stability of the biblical text was contingent upon its mode of production and transmission. This had particular resonance in terms of translation, where meaning was contingent not only on the movement between languages—Koine Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian, and the modern languages into which the bible has been translated—but also on the specific historical contexts in which texts were transmitted. Modern challenges to the historical-critical method have resulted in closer attention to the intellectual world in which patristic authors were operating: the so-called “philological turn.” This revised view of the early church gave greater recognition to the central function of liturgy and homiletics alongside the formation of the scriptural canon as guides to interpretation. 9

The two major schools of exegesis in the early church were the Antiochenes, foremost John Chrysostom, who largely dealt with historical or literal exegesis, and the Alexandrians, principally Origen, who relied on allegory in their scholia, homilies, and commentaries. Exegetes of the Roman Empire include Hippolytus, Ambrose, Jerome, and the most important of all, Augustine, whose exegetical homilies are collected in the monumental Enarrationes in Psalmos . The Great Schism of 1054 saw the Eastern Orthodox Churches break away from the Catholic Church and develop their own methods of exegesis and homiletics, developing the genre of the catena (from the Latin word for “chain”) which “builds a scriptural commentary by excerpting passages from earlier exegetes and linking them together—usually in the margin of the text to which they all refer, but sometimes in close proximity in other ways.” 10 In the Latin West, the Reformation of the 16th century gave rise to exegetical doctrines that placed the Word—written and preached—at the center of reformed practice, grounded in “a basic commitment to the authority, sufficiency, and perspicuity of scripture.” 11 The Roman Catholic Church underwent its own exegetical revolution in the Second Vatican Council, whereby the publication of Dei verbum in 1965 encouraged a fuller embrace of historical-critical methods drawn from scholarship on Hebrew and Christian scriptures from the early 19th century onward, placing emphasis on the historical contexts of the production of biblical documents as guides to understanding their meaning. 12

The Qur’ān as well as the core Islamic texts known as hadith— pronouncements and actions traditionally attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and gathered several generations after his lifetime—gave rise to the tradition of تفسير ‎ ( tafsīr ) or commentaries. The boundaries between these genres are not always obvious or easy to identify. Walid Saleh puts its succinctly: “There seems to be a solid consensus among scholars as to what the genre is not, but very little agreement about what it is.” 13 This commentary tradition is still in its infancy as far as recognition in the West is concerned, but many of its elements are familiar when considered from an exegetical viewpoint. The stability and identity of the core texts of study form the basis of the discipline, much as textual criticism has done for biblical and classical hermeneutics, but the exegetical dimension of tafsīr (from fassarah , “to interpret”) extends well beyond textual matters into the domain of theological argument. Yet from its origins in Muhammad’s lifetime and the early years following his death, tafsīr was an instrument by which to explicate the Qur’ānic corpus and provide insight and guidance to the ummah or wider Islamic community. A مُفسّر ‎ ( mufassir ) is someone who aims to explain and interpret verses of the Qur’ān or hadith , drawing on many disciplines including linguistics (the morphology of Classical Arabic is a crucial element), theology, and jurisprudence. Further, intensive study of sentence structure and syntax allows the mufassir to deploy rhetorical readings of the Qur’ān, illuminating both zoohor (literal meanings) and khafa (hidden meanings) in the text. Sunni, Shia, and Sufi schools gave rise to different traditions of tafsīr , all of which began as oral traditions before collation into scribal texts. The scholarly centers of Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad also produced different schools of tafsīr . Islam has generated a wide range of approaches to Qur’ānic interpretation and commentary; however, there is a unity of purpose in the intensive focus on individual words and phrases as a method for inducing meaning.

Secular Reading in History

The history of secular reading is as ancient as that of religious texts, yet it has not received the same kind of scholarly attention with the exception perhaps of law. Some of the earliest written secular texts include the various law codes of Mesopotamia, the most celebrated among them the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, dated to c . 1750 bce . Its cuneiform text in the Akkadian language is dedicated largely to contract law, but contains a partial constitution and the earliest known reference to the presumption of innocence. The discovery in 1901 of the diorite stele on which the text is inscribed produced a revolution in Babylonian scholarship but also transformed the general understanding of ancient Mesopotamian law codes. 14 As objects of close reading, law codes form a central thread in the history of textuality: the replacement of Athenian oral law and blood feud by the written constitution of Draco ( c . 620 bce ), followed by the constitution of Solon a century later; the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables ( c . 450 bce ), which consolidated earlier laws and customs and was subsequently elaborated into categories of ius civile (law of citizens), ius gentium (law of the people), and ius naturale (natural law); and the amalgamation of Greek and Roman law in the great law codes of Byzantium such as the Codex Theodosianus ( 438 ce ), the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian ( 529–534 ), the Ecloga of Leo III the Isaurian ( 726 ), and the Basilika of Leo VI the Wise ( 892 ). 15 Roman and Byzantine law were largely secular, but each system exerted influence on the direction of canon law through the middle ages to modernity. The profound influence of Roman law upon European cultures bears its traces from antiquity to the time of modernity:

German legal theorist Rudolf von Jhering famously remarked that ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws. He might have added: each time more thoroughly. 16

Modern techniques of critical reading develop the historical importance of the close reading of statutes and other legal documents. The capacity to parse complex sentences—including often labyrinthine clausal structures—remains an essential skill in legal practice. 17

One of the most celebrated—and notorious—examples of how close reading practices in law shape the relation of the individual to the state, and the very identity and purpose of the state itself, is the jurisprudence that has grown around the Constitution of the United States of America. The interpretive modes applied to the central document of the Constitution and its twenty-seven ratified amendments range from originalism (reading the Constitution as having a fixed meaning contemporaneous with its ratification), judicial restraint (the Supreme Court’s role is to apply rather than to create the law), purposivism (reading the Constitution in terms of what it was intended to achieve even when departing from a literal account), to various forms of instrumentalism (reading the Constitution as a living document adaptable to reflect social change). Each relies on exacting interpretations of the text of the Constitution, but are supported by differing principles of how meaning is produced from that foundational text.

The history of close reading practices is closely interweaved with that of philology and textual scholarship. 18 From the earliest systematic attempts to collect, curate, and reproduce the entirety of the classical textual tradition in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, the philologos or chief librarian oversaw techniques for accurately representing textual matter. These techniques were not primarily aimed at close reading for the purposes of interpretation, but rather to ensure textual accuracy in the processes of copying. Different traditions emerged in the Mediterranean: the Alexandrian technique of analogy sought authority in consistency between witness texts, while the library at Pergamum developed the theory of anomaly , in which inevitable error could serve as a guide to the most reliable witness text by a process of elimination, working back using the stemmatic relations between witnesses. Philological techniques were refined through the medieval and early modern period, resulting in systematic ways of approaching internal textual evidence (word patterns and repetition that could lead to a scribe omitting intervening text, for example) and external evidence (such as the date, source, and relationships between witness texts). These techniques spanned text-based inquiry—the Greek and Roman classics, biblical texts, history, vernacular literature, and so on—and formed the basis of the modern humanities. Philology slowly gave way to modern disciplinary methods, yet its apparition persisted in literary studies in the practices of close reading. Despite some resistance to historical context (in some varieties of New Criticism, for example), many schools of literary study retained a sense of the linguistic and etymological roots of modern texts. 19 Newer methods of scholarship—poststructuralist theory, New Historicism, digital methods, and so on—mark a return to the methods of philology retooled for contemporary contexts of literary production and reception. 20

From Explication de texte to S/Z

The technique of explication de texte dominated French schooling from the 18th century . It provided a stable approach to the understanding of a text, revealing its meaning in the forensic attention to textual detail. Based upon classical rhetorical models of praelectio (oration), it offered students of the baccalaureate a suite of references and quotations to embellish their speeches in subsequent public careers. 21 This institutional practice was a powerful regulative tool of state education: students would divide their analysis into the three parts of summary description, identification of textual structure and genre, and an account of the literary and rhetorical devices used in the text, following a process that would result in a singular accepted interpretation of the text. This method prevailed beyond the mid 20th century , although one of its most influential proponents in the first half of the 20th century , Gustave Lanson, expanded its scope by introducing broader historical and cultural contexts into its hermeneutic mechanism. 22

The emergence of structuralist methods of linguistic, literary, and cultural analysis—particularly Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, elaborated in his Cours de linguistique générale (first published in 1916 ), and its application by Claude Lévi-Strauss to anthropological notions of “savagery” and “civilization” in his Tristes Tropiques (published in 1955 )—established a basis for the methods of semiology to break open reading processes and modes of interpretation across the humanities. 23 As a general science of signs, semiology provided a theoretical basis from which to read various sign structures in cultural objects and fields such as photography, film, literature, advertising, and fashion. In its application to literature, semiology—and structuralism more broadly—represented a challenge to the entrenched practices of explication de texte and biographical criticism, vividly illustrated when semiology’s most prominent practitioner, Roland Barthes, was elected to the prestigious Collège de France by a single deciding vote in 1976 (Lévi-Strauss was a sitting member of the Collège at the time). 24 Taken as a whole, Barthes’s literary analysis seeks to empower readers to engage closely with texts in a process that produces meaning in the exchange that takes place. This notion is captured in the provocation that concludes the essay “Death of the Author”: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” 25

Barthes applies his approach in S/Z , an extended reading of Honoré de Balzac’s novella “Sarrasine” ( 1830 ), where the text is divided into 561 fragments or lexias of varying length and subjected to a variety of critical and analytic operations: the “five codes” Barthes gathers under the terms hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic, and cultural. 26 This extended commentary moves between description and critical interpretation, circling back on the structure of Balzac’s story to reveal further dimensions in etymology, onomastics (the middle S of Sarrasine countering the expectation of a Z , which is the “slash” of La Zambinella’s initial and of Sarrasine’s symbolic castration), and the interaction between plot and narrative. In 1973 , Barthes develops these reading methods in Le plaisir du texte ( The Pleasure of the Text ) , theorizing a division between lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) texts; the former arouses pleasure in the passive reader, whereas the latter produces jouissance— roughly “joy” or “ecstasy”—in the active effort of producing a textual meaning through reading. 27 These techniques of close reading register the traces of a wider practice among Barthes’s French post-structuralist contemporaries: the opening analysis of Diego Velásquez’s painting “Las Meniñas” in Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses ( The Order of Things ) , or Jacques Derrida’s extended critical reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay “Essai sur l’origine des langues” (“Essay on the Origin of Languages”) ( 1781 ) and Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 work La pensée sauvage ( The Savage Mind ) in De la grammatologie ( Of Grammatology ) , to take just two prominent examples. 28

New Criticism

In the field of literary studies the term “close reading” has, until recently, borne close associations with mid-century techniques of literary criticism. The umbrella term New Criticism is often invoked to describe two broad movements in the United Kingdom and the United States that spanned roughly 1930–1970 , becoming the dominant orthodoxy in English departments around the world during that time. The British movement centered on Cambridge University, the scholars I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson, and the literary journal Scrutiny ; the American movement centered on Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College, the scholars John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Burke, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley, and the journal The Kenyon Review . Despite the slightly earlier work of several British scholars having a direct influence on their American counterparts, the British movement was less unified in its sympathies and methods. Both movements were profoundly influenced by the literary essays of T. S. Eliot, whose influence on close reading practices was foundational, and whose influence on the entire modern discipline of literary criticism would be difficult to overstate.

English New Criticism

Eliot’s early essays provide the groundwork for his methods of close reading. Such essays as “Hamlet and His Problems” ( 1919 ) and “The Metaphysical Poets” ( 1921 ) were written when Eliot was working at Lloyds Bank in London, after he had left behind his academic career at Harvard, Oxford, and Birkbeck College. In other essays of the time Eliot proposed general principles of literary criticism and the uses of literary history—notably “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ( 1919 )—but in these two essays Eliot turns his attentions to the procedures of criticism specifically by means of close reading. In “Hamlet” he makes the distinction between the apprehension and critical evaluation of the play, and the temptation of conflating the critic’s (or the critic’s proxy’s) imagination with that of the title character, as he accuses both Goethe and Coleridge of doing. Eliot combines close attention to the form and structure of Shakespeare’s play and its varied quality in versification, with deductions concerning its position in a history of dramatic works to which it is more or less indebted—a process of argument similar to that used in textual criticism in which both internal and external evidence are weighed to determine the authority of a particular text. His verdict is that Hamlet is a failure, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature” in its imperfect overlaying of a mother’s guilt upon a variable structure of preceding playscripts, evident in the failure of an “objective correlative” to manifest itself as an expression of Hamlet’s conflicted emotions. In other words, by close reading, Eliot discovers what is not there in the text of Hamlet, unable to be recuperated even with the most assiduous historical and biographical research. “The Metaphysical Poets” conducts a series of close readings of lines and short passages in poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and others, weighing the techniques of extended metaphor (the metaphysical conceit) against the lesser efforts of later poets. This concentration on poetic technique is magnified further in the essays “Phillip Massinger” ( 1920 ) and “Andrew Marvell” ( 1921 ). 29

The foundation text of the Cambridge movement is I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism published in 1929 , a comprehensive report on the “experiments” he conducted over several years with his students. Richards distributed “printed sheets of poems [. . .] to audiences who were requested to comment freely in writing upon them.” 30 The results were tabulated and a series of observations drawn from them to produce a theory of literary meaning. The rough analogy to such scientific procedures as biomedical clinical trials—anonymity standing in for randomization, texts cleared of any historical or biographical context standing in for placebo groups—gave these experiments an aura of empirical legitimacy. That Richards’s book is divided into a three-part experimental report is testimony to the efforts of demonstrating literary criticism as a discipline with a rigorous and replicable methodology: the Introduction of Part 1 serving as the aim and hypothesis; the Documentation of Part 2 combining the method and results; and the Analysis of Part 3 comprising the discussion of results. He is careful to distinguish literary analysis from the hard sciences, situating his experiment within “the natural history of human opinions and feelings.” 31 The proximate aim of these experiments was to have students read literary texts without the contextual encumbrances of history and biography. The wider aim was to infer methods of reading and interpretation from the formal textual qualities perceived by the students. Richards’s experiment founded a mode of teaching literature that still bears the name of Practical Criticism at Cambridge, although it must be said it serves more as a formalist foundation from which to develop a critical reading. The focus on formal analysis established the role of prosody in modern criticism—akin to rhetorical analysis in classical philology—providing readers with tangible literary attributes as evidence for their interpretations. However, the radical separation from biographical and historical context has received pointed critique especially in light of materialist and sociological theories of literature. Lyric poetry affords a kind of material decontextualization not available to drama or novels due to matters of scale. It can be extracted onto an otherwise empty page. Additionally the poems selected for the experiment uniformly belong to the age of print, neatly side-stepping some of the material aspects of presentation in medieval texts such as paleography and orthography.

William Empson combined Richards’s close attention to formal aspects of poetry—Richards was his tutor at Magdalen College when he took a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Cambridge—with Eliot’s focus on Elizabethan poetry in his major early studies: Seven Types of Ambiguity , and Some Versions of Pastoral . In a series of close readings, Seven Types of Ambiguity demonstrated the grammatical, prosodic, and rhetorical flexibility of English poetry, yielding mutually exclusive or otherwise alternate interpretations. This text had a profound influence on New Criticism in the United States, setting an agenda that led to Empson teaching in the annual summer school of criticism at Kenyon College in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the company of Ransom, Tate, and Brooks. Empson turned his attention to modern authors in a series of essays during the early 1930s, including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Some Versions of Pastoral , while treating texts mostly from the early modern period, begins to argue for the role of authorial intention, historical and social contexts, and other extra-textual dimensions in the service of interpretation. This led to methodological differences with Richards and major disagreements with other critics such as F. R. Leavis. A vivid index of Empson’s versatility as a reader is his rediscovered manuscript (now edited and published) The Face of the Buddha . Empson’s appraisal of Buddhist sculpture in East and South-East Asia turns on his theory that some of the earliest and most important sculptures (mostly Korean and Japanese) divide the face of the Buddha into two expressions, where the left side presents an expression of passivity and meditation, and the right engages directly with the viewer. This capacity to “close read” sculptures belonging to a foreign tradition (or set of traditions) is a feature of Empson’s critical technique, where his attention to an author’s (or sculptor’s) historical and cultural context indicates a clear divergence from the Cambridge and Kenyon scholars with whom he is most commonly grouped.

The Cambridge movement’s most durable icon is F. R. Leavis. His name has functioned as a kind of metonym for criticism that attempts to become systematic in response to advances in the physical sciences—his notorious disagreement with C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument being a case in point, where Snow lamented the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, manifested in a general illiteracy concerning the momentous advancements of modern physics in particular. 32 The Leavis circle, which included Q. D. Leavis and the contributors to the journal Scrutiny , considered its analysis of a “shared moral economy” evident in literary expression as the basis for criticism. Leavis became a metonym against which historical criticism (Oxford) and theory-driven criticism (Yale, front running much of the academy) would define their primary tasks, invested in the historical and cultural contexts of literary production and reception. In his first major publication, in 1932 , New Bearings in English Poetry , Leavis produced a series of close readings of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, defining what was new and influential about their poetry. 33 Leavis’s analysis operated in the manner of Eliot’s criticism, setting out his arguments with the support of close textual examination. Yet his methods in this book—and more so in later publications such as The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit ––were grounded in the historical and social contexts that shaped literary production. In this sense Leavis shared an important feature with Empson (albeit from a narrower and eventually more irascible worldview), than with the approach of Richards or the New Critics of the United States—who treat literary texts as verbal icons separated from authorial and historical contexts—with which his criticism is commonly associated.

American New Criticism

The critical practices of close reading that were to dominate higher education in the United States following the Second World War developed out of a reaction to philology and biographical criticism in the early 20th century . Attention to literary form, and its implications for interpretation, was a central theme of the criticism of Tate, Ransom, and Warren—who met at Vanderbilt University in Nashville between the World Wars and became known as the “Southern Fugitives.” Their arguments over the success or otherwise of Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land centered on its form, and more specifically its intelligibility when set against the demands of realism in literature. Tate saw its experimentation as a successful negotiation with the conditions of modernity where Ransom saw fragmentation and formal incoherence. The shared reaction to the emergence of the “New South” lent these critics a conservative or even reactionary aura, but at the same time demonstrated their commitment to criticism that took into account the economic impacts upon cultural formations—recognized in their collective identity as the “Agrarian” movement. Literature had an aesthetic autonomy from both scientific discourses and economics, was not reducible to mere utility, and deployed its texture (the material patterns of a text such as its sound) as a way to critique its structure (conceptual or “rational” content). 34 Thus, a tension existed within the text, a product of its historical-cultural context in play with its form—a tension that placed a premium on the evaluation of irony in literary expression and its resistance to paraphrase. 35 This embodied the moral dimension of literature in its presentation of paradox and contradiction in response to the modern condition: iconic in presenting its complexity in its form. 36

This phase of criticism centered at Vanderbilt University began to coalesce into a movement: Warren and Brooks became editors of the Southern Review in 1936 , and Ransom moved to Kenyon College in 1937 , becoming editor of The Kenyon Review . Ransom responded to the crisis in the teaching of English literature in universities in his essay of the same year, “Criticism, Inc.,” seeing opportunity in leading reform in the Modern Languages Association. 37 The publication of Warren and Brooks’s Understanding Poetry in 1938 went further, setting out the New Critical agenda for the undergraduate classroom. The massive expansion of higher education in response to the Great Depression and the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act or GI Bill following the Second World War placed new pressure on the practice of literary studies in the academy to justify itself beyond the technical grounds of philology from which it emerged in the late 19th century . The New Critical emphasis on the text as a verbal construction allied the dual aims of language-based research and interpretation, providing an argument for the wider social relevance for the study of literature. It also offered a powerful negation of the concept of authorial intention, given that literature, as a public verbal articulation, was subject to the social operations of language that exceeded a single subjectivity (including the reader, whose interpretation was also part of the social nexus of language). These developments had foundational effects upon canon formation in the American academy, favoring the Metaphysical poets and Modernists such as T. S. Eliot—just as F. R. Leavis and other critics in England had done—but also giving new attention to Romantic poetry. New Critical close attention to literary form and linguistic complexity aligned with the distribution of literary texts during and after the Second World War, that is, the Armed Services Editions of modern literature distributed to enlisted and drafted soldiers in training barracks who were awaiting deployment. This initiative was supported by William Warder Norton, president of the publishing house that bears his name, resulting in the free distribution of 122 million free books and 1,322 titles. 38 The mass production of cheap titles unencumbered by extensive scholarly apparatus—and the emerging market for anthologies on which the W. W. Norton publishing firm was to have such an impact—served the vastly expanded academy following wartime, and realized the purposes of New Critical reading techniques.

The processes of close reading in the New Critical program established a readily identifiable lexicon: verbal icon, paradox, ambiguity, conceit, irony, and so on. The methods of close reading were analytic rather than illustrative, that is, authority resided in the critic’s ability to parse (usually poetic) texts and reveal the tensions between form and subject matter. This focus on technique—both evident in the literary work and in the processes of interpretation—provided a repertoire that legitimated English Literature in the research university. To take one of the more prominent examples, Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry performs a series of poetic close readings from Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, to Pope, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, to Tennyson and Yeats. Similarly to I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism , Brooks acknowledges that his studies stem from the classroom, in this case not as written exercises of evaluation but class discussion of “celebrated English poems, taken in chronological order,” developing a general theory of poetic structure from concrete examples. 39 The book’s dedication reads: “To the members of English 300-K (Summer Session of 1942 , University of Michigan) who discussed the problems with me and helped me work out some of the analyses.” Brooks makes repeated reference to Richards in the essays “Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination” and “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes.” They share a method of close attention to poetic texts without concern for their historical contexts, although Brooks makes clear he sees value in such context and is seeking out whatever “residuum” remains after dealing with the poem’s cultural context. Brooks concentrates on the functions of paradox—the first chapter is titled “The Language of Paradox”—and does the most interesting work by extending its application from its native terrain of Metaphysical poetry to that of Romanticism.

The essay on Wordsworth puts aside biography (temporarily) to focus on paradox, irony, and, following Empson, the ambiguity inherent in Wordsworth’s choice of symbolism in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The method of analysis approximates line commentary, repeated in the essay on Keats but with less direct quotation from “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In that essay, Brooks attends to the rhetoric and logic of the poem, finding paradox in the way it sets out a portrait of an aesthetic object—the object of his book’s title, no less—but ends with a “sententious statement” equating truth and beauty and then asserting it to be “the whole of mortal knowledge,” which is for the poem “‘to mean’ with a vengeance.” 40 The essay examines whether the urn’s final “utterance” constitutes a break in the poem’s tone, or whether its thread of paradox—beginning with the urn’s “silence” obviated by its role as “historian,” and continuing with the immobile urn’s ecstatic scenes—accommodates its chiasmus of truth and beauty. That final expression by the urn of its own nature is thus, for Brooks, an utterance “in character,” supported by the preceding scenario of urn and mythic scenery painted upon it. Brooks’s argument rests upon taking the poem as a whole as an expression of its subject matter, possessing a view on the world (and its world) that defies paraphrase. He sees Keats’s poem as a performance akin to his own critical method of close reading. 41

This attention to complex verbal structures such as conceit and paradox, and such modes of expression such as irony, had the effect of installing certain kinds of literature at the center of the New Critical project at the expense of other kinds. The Metaphysical poets took precedence over Milton, and the Modernists over the Victorians and the Romantics—although some critics such as Brooks were far more even-handed in their appraisal than others such as T. S. Eliot. By attempting a definition of literature—the kinds of texts most amenable to these critical operations—New Criticism became associated with an ideology of aesthetic autonomy against which newly emergent fields such as cultural studies, semiotics, and poststructuralist theory would press. The long-standing hegemony of New Criticism in much of the anglophone scholarly world waned from the 1970s—prompting leading critics such as Helen Vendler to lament the eclipse of prosodic close reading practices 42 —but the methods of close reading took on new form in many of the emergent theoretical methodologies of the period.

Theory and Close Reading

One persistent legacy of New Criticism on both sides of the Atlantic is its perceived ownership of the method of close reading. Cognate with this notion is the sense that to read closely is to separate the text’s meaning from history, ideology, biography, and other discursive forces. Yet as French critical methods have shown, close reading has an extensive history as a central feature of interpretation. More generally, the emergence of modern literary studies from the long history of philology—of sacred and secular texts—means that exacting attention to minute textual detail has been a cornerstone of reading during the entire history of textual transmission and reception. In the anglophone context, and especially in the United States, the eclipse of New Criticism as the dominant paradigm was hastened by the introduction of French theory in the later 1960s. The legendary conference, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man held at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966 , is often taken as a symbolic point of transition. Talks by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Lucien Goldman, Georges Poulet, René Girard, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Hyppolite, and Roland Barthes introduced several ideas that were to become hegemonic in the adoption of structuralist and poststructuralist thought in the anglophone academy: that speech and writing are subjects of discourse rather than expressions of authorial autonomy; that systems of ideas drive the major actors in intellectual history rather than the other way around; and that the metaphysics of presence is undercut by the operations of the unconscious, the absence of the transcendental signifier, and so on. 43 Edward Said was profoundly influenced by his participation in the event, and its effect on scholarly discourse was significant.

What is germane here is that structuralism and post-structuralism introduced a range of tools by which to analyze literary texts in the context of language, ideology, culture, and so on, and their effectiveness partly hinged on the application of close reading techniques. Each of deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, semiology, French feminist theory, and New Historicism demand close attention to the way various codes are installed within literary language, requiring what has come to be known as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” or “paranoid reading” to reveal these dimensions of the text to the reader. 44 In his foundational work published in 1967 , De la grammatologie , Derrida performs a deconstructive reading of structuralist linguistics through a close reading of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale , and develops his theory of the supplement by way of an extremely detailed reading of Rousseau’s “Essai sur l’origine des langues.” Derrida’s extensive oeuvre demonstrates variety in its subject matter and approach, yet he deploys a consistent method to the analysis of concepts—presence, erasure, archive, and so on—by examining their origins and the conditions of their use, demonstrating that with sufficient pressure, a rift will open up to show that the discourse in questions contains the conditions of its own contradiction. This method bears echoes of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, yet its careful linguistic analysis always draws it back to the processes of close reading.

Derrida’s approach to textuality profoundly influenced North American literary scholarship, particularly the so-called “Yale School” of Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and, for a time, Harold Bloom. This influence extended to the techniques of reading and evaluating literature. Paul de Man noted the continuities between New Criticism and deconstructive literary theory in their shared close reading practices: “a straightforward report on the present state of literary theory in the United States would have to stress the emphasis on reading, a direction which is already present, moreover, in the New Critical traditions of the forties and fifties.” 45 The turn from matters of aesthetics to those of linguistics—bearing a connection with philology that deserves fuller examination—meant reading closely for ruptures in the logic and rhetoric of the text’s discourse in a deployment of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The Yale School had its greatest impact in the 1970s and 1980s, and unusually for theory-driven literary analysis, gave much of its focus to close readings of Romantic poetry. 46 Several of these have become classics of the genre, such as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host”—dealing with the various etymologies of “host,” chains of signification that defy singular meaning, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Triumph of Life”—and Geoffrey Hartman’s “The Interpreter’s Freud,” which applies Freud’s idea of free association in dreams to a reading of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” to reveal a rich polysemy beneath an otherwise integral text surface. 47

Critical approaches to literature in the age of theory tend to pair close reading techniques with interpretive methods driven by the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: reading against the grain of the text, observing “symptoms” of a submerged discourse that throws the text surface into relief, analyzing the rhetorical and conceptual structure of a text to find its blind spots and points of contradiction. This model, in which the text surface is layered upon its uncanny depths, adapts some of the key themes of psychoanalysis (for example, dreams, the unconscious, and linguistic slippage), and proves to be a fertile model for a wide range of discursive explorations. One of the more foundational texts in theory-driven literary analysis is Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious published in 1981 , in which the political perspective is not one method of reading literature among others, but “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” 48 Analysis thus centers upon the assemblage of specific codes or concepts that clarify where and how ideology operates within literary texts. More generally, the approach of symptomatic reading that was to become the dominant form in the 1980s proceeds by examining dialectical pairs of concepts such as presence/absence, surface/depth, and manifest/latent, where the role of interpreter is to foreground codes that were otherwise repressed or unspoken. Such procedures are prone to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms “paranoid readings,” in which interpretation is engaged in an inescapable process of doubling in a “drama of exposure.” Instead, an alternate interpretive strategy of reparative reading considers the text as a source for replenishment rather than an object of critique. 49

New Historicism represents another style of close reading in literary scholarship, in which texts (or textual fragments) are read as embedded in their material networks and cultural contexts. Drawing on intellectual history and cultural studies, such texts in the genre as Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions examines how travel narratives, judicial documents, and other source texts embody a sense of the “marvelous” in the service of colonial appropriation in the early modern period in the New World. Other texts in the genre, such as Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare , operate by a mode of “thick description,” in which literary production is shown to be deeply entrenched in prevailing social and economic conditions. Orgel places Shakespeare’s dramatic works in the historical context of a deeply collaborative theater in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages, replacing the image of the writer of genius with that of a well-trained and highly competent guild craftsman. 50 New Historicism represents a different kind of close reading in its focus on the constitutive elements of a written text within the wider contexts in which is it produced, thus “reading” social and economic formations with equal assiduity. A case could be made for numerous modes of theory-driven literary scholarship to be considered forms of close reading, such as postcolonial literary criticism, queer and feminist literary criticism, and cognitive literary criticism, among others. Close attention to the particularities of texts has driven literary analysis throughout history, but perhaps the distinction in the theory and post-theory landscapes since the 1960s is the attention given to other intellectual and social structures as means by which to generate meaning, or to show how meaning is networked between texts and their contexts.

The commonalities shared by theory-driven and empirically-based methods of close reading raise interesting questions concerning how discursive and ideological positions toward literary texts tend to rely on a stock of reading methods. In their aptly subtitled anthology Close Reading: The Reader , Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois divide their chosen excerpts into two groups, representing “formalist” and “non-formalist” or “political” modes of reading respectively, but which find common ground in their shared attention to the close examination of literary texture. 51 The first group, “Formalism (Plus),” contains some of the most influential American New Critical essays by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, and R. P. Blackmur, as well as close readings by a later generation of scholars not identified as New Critics but who engage closely with textual detail in the prosecution of their arguments, such as Helen Vendler and Stanley Fish. The second group, “After Formalism?” demonstrates the methodological suitability of close reading to the articulation of certain kinds of literary theory, with essays by Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Houston A. Baker Jr., and Homi Bhabha. This group also includes representative essays from the methodological viewpoints of New Historicism and Distant Reading. Although this volume almost exclusively comprises work by North American scholars, it demonstrates the portability and suppleness of close reading techniques.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith draws attention to the reading strategies common to much of Anglo-American literary analysis over the 20th century —from historical philology to New Criticism to deconstruction—where variations in target texts, the discourses motivating critical inquiry, and the dispositions of inquiry all tend to rest on close textual examination. 52 The calls to professionalize literary criticism by Ransom and others sought its systematization and accreditation in university academic programs, where it quickly became the core of humanistic study in the middle decades of the last century. From an identifiably narrow canon of texts—with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats, George Eliot, and T. S. Eliot at its center—the pressures of other methodological approaches on the canon pointed to matters of scale and the purposes of interpretation: “As literary studies have been pursued under the auspices of structuralism, semiotics, New Historicism, deconstruction, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial criticism, and queer theory, the types and cultural status of the texts examined by literary scholars and read closely in their classrooms have continuously expanded.” 53 How do professional readers of literature respond to these pressures? Do they persist with the methods of close reading, or do they seek out alternative ways of managing a vastly expanded corpus? The kinds of literary evidence at issue may be looked at from a different vantage, such as surface over depth, or the scale of “data” taken from a text or a corpus might be greatly expanded to establish the existence of patterns (word usage, grammatical features, punctuation) not readily apprehended from “analog” reading processes.

Beyond Close Reading

With the slow waning of theory’s hegemony and the rise of digital methods in literary studies, attention has shifted to the critique of close reading as a method that privileges certain kinds of literary evidence and epistemological modes. The reading strategies most closely associated with Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion” are taken to task for implicit assumptions of value and the role of “evidence” in literary understanding: namely, that the pursuit of underlying discourse by means of its “symptoms” or coded proxies at the text’s surface is to be prized above reading a text at face value, which as a consequence becomes a naïve undertaking. The roots of such a mode of reading are traced to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”—who each warn against surface meaning and seek out more difficult or unpalatable truths by reading against the grain of the text. 54 The challenge to the hermeneutics of suspicion takes a variety of forms, but might be conveniently classed under the rubric of postcritique. As a mode of reading postcritique seeks alternatives to interpretation as the primary goal of scholarly interaction with literary texts. This draws on a heritage that includes Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” which extols an erotics of art in place of hermeneutics, 55 as well as Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte of 1973 in its distinction between pleasure in readerly texts and jouissance in writerly texts—the former retaining a stable subject position and the latter fracturing or liberating it.

A primary aim of postcritique is to recuperate dimensions of the reading experience excluded or ignored by conventional critical exegesis and analysis. 56 The ubiquity of critique in literary studies must first be recognized—Rita Felski describes it as “a thought style that slices across differences of field and discipline” 57 —and its function as the dominant metalanguage in the discipline understood as potentially limiting. Felski sees the application of critique as a frequent mistaking of “a part of thought with the whole of thought, and that in doing so we are scanting a range of intellectual and expressive possibilities.” 58 The manner in which critique positions the reader in relation to a text is one of congenital skepticism, and even though its operations include modes of close reading, critique forces an ironic separation of reader and text—the cold, critical eye. By installing this kind of approach to the text, critique becomes a “regime of thought.” Postcritique instead centers its operations on the reading experience, whereby affect and somatic response play central parts in interpretation in place of a detached analytic rigor. Postcritique keeps open a depth model of reading—not relegated to the text’s surface but able to identify deeper patterns of imagery or theme—and is consistent with the practices of close reading. Felski’s model of postcritique draws on the work of Bruno Latour, particularly by reconfiguring hermeneutics not as a sign of human mastery over a world of objects, but rather as a mode of engagement in a network of actors. She also develops the thought of such French critics as Marielle Macé and Yves Citton, in which reading is not a separation from life but an “embodied mode of attentiveness,” and where interpretation is a process of textual reinvention that exercises analytic and affective processes of understanding the text’s details. 59

The depth model of knowledge implicit in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” has also been challenged by different strategies collected under the rubric of surface reading. 60 This term describes approaches to literary texts that draw on methods from anthropology, history, political science, and cognate disciplines, themselves drawing on methods of close reading brought about by the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s. 61 Broadly speaking, surface reading rejects the kinds of symptomatic reading that have dominated modern criticism, taking exception to Fredric Jameson’s view of ideology in his Political Unconscious : namely, that it relies on and is constituted by an essential lack of transparency. Surface reading aims to read texts on different terms than those of “suspicion” or an imperative to decode. Rather, it takes the text surface on its own terms. Close reading methods remain essential—a text’s meaning is revealed by close attention to its language and form. Surface reading is thus not a variety of close reading per se, but a collection of practices that each force an evaluation of what kinds of close reading are deployed and to what purposes. Surface reading tends to a position of anti-instrumentalism, but rather than an acquiescence into quietism, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus “want to reclaim from this tradition the accent on immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value), for we understand that attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom.” 62 This non-purposive aim of literary reading aligns with Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading in its foreclosure on paranoid or coded readings, but may concede too much ground in its avoidance of ideology critique and other modes of situating texts within larger linguistic and cultural contexts.

Close reading operates by circumscription (this text, not others) and dilation (intensive focus on language, imagery, historical reference, and so on). But how might literary studies attempt to understand literature as a social phenomenon, as something shared in various social networks, distributed across languages and geography, produced in a commodity economy of publishing, and as a factor in national economies and self-imaginings? Some of these questions are aided by developments in information storage and data manipulation, such as photographic or digital archives of popular fiction, newspapers, and magazines, and databases tracking the number and distribution of publications within and between nations. This incursion of big data into the fields of bibliography and book history has invoked different forms of reading. No longer primarily concentrated on linguistic and formal elements for the purposes of interpretation, distant reading investigates the composition of literary corpora (such as modes of narration and characterological features in novels, the relative distribution and frequency of poetic genres and of other literary or linguistic features), as well as larger movements in literary discourse such as the distribution over time and across geographic zones of literary modes (the novel, drama) and of proxies for reading such as sales figures and library circulation records.

The concept of distant reading is most closely associated with the work of Franco Moretti who outlined the problem of canon formation and the limits of reading in his essay “Conjectures on World Literature” in 2000 . 63 Those limits not only concern the sheer volume of literary publication—there is not time enough for adequate coverage of any literary genre—but also relate to method, where close reading performs a series of procedures evaluated for their insight and competency. Matthew Wilkens describes a problem in which literary studies has a “single working method [. . .] the need to perform always and only close reading as a means of cultural analysis.” 64 Rather than one paradigm dominating scholarly engagement with literary texts in this way, he advocates a valuation of literature “as indicators of larger cultural issues” where reading at scale rather than by a process of selectivity brings about a different kind of emphasis in reading literary texts. This view understates the variety and efficacy of critical approaches at the scale of individual works of literature, but its main aim is to advocate for such techniques as bibliometrics, data mining, quantitative analysis, geospatial analysis, economics of the book trade at national and global levels, and other measures of literary consumption at scales exceeding analog empirical research methods.

Moretti’s and Wilkens’s practices of distant reading entail the deployment of digital scholarly methods to evaluate aspects of literary history such as the frequency, distribution, and location of literary publishing (in general and by genre, gender, nationality, and other categories). Literary, periodical, and publishing databases have proven effective in widening and deepening the understanding of text production and circulation. One striking example is Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field , in which Katherine Bode mines the AustLit database to examine how the 19th-century Australian novel was transmitted internationally, often in periodical form prior to book publication. 65 In A World of Fiction , Bode provides a nuanced and comprehensive critique of Moretti’s use of big data in his formulations of literary history in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History and Distant Reading . The conflation of data with “fact” rather than as already interpreted information leads Moretti to “present literary data and digital collections as pre-critical, stable, and self-evident,” and betrays a tendency to gloss over methodological gaps, which blunts the effectiveness of his approach. 66 The role of data mining methods in literary studies has received mounting critical scrutiny in the 2010s—coinciding with a reassessment of the digital humanities job market in higher education—particularly the tendency to overlook assumptions of gender, race, disability, economic status, and other embodied ways that scholars approach the field. In these critical assessments, distant reading loses the hermeneutic nuance and contextual richness of close reading methods, but it also blunts many of the pressing issues of equity and access that impinge upon digitally mediated literary scholarship. 67

How Close Is Too Close?

The various methods of close reading seek to derive evidence from the text as a foundation for interpretive arguments. These arguments often extend well beyond the text material itself, taking in historical, linguistic, philosophical, political, and intertextual discourses. Yet at the center of these arguments can be found the vocabularies, image networks, rhetorical strategies, and other elements of the text’s language. Are there practical or formal limits to the degree of intensity of a close reading? At what point does a focus on the minutiae of a text distort the larger discourses and hermeneutic networks to which it belongs, or against which it chafes? Taking the example of poetry—language charged with meaning in highly concentrated form—close reading takes for its subject patterns of sound, imagery, metaphor, as well as word-choice, rhyme scheme, and larger patterns. A highly concentrated close reading might evaluate etymology, slippages between languages and dialects, punctuation, and intertextual echoes embedded in sound as well as direct allusion. Yet close reading might extend to matters of bibliography as much as to verbal material: illuminated capitals, paper quality (or parchment, or papyrus), types of binding, the form of the book (codex, scroll, loose leaves), methods of printing (hot metal, photographic offset), and other material aspects of the text that contribute directly to its meaning. 68 Such loving attention to detail is ripe for parody, most famously exploited in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire , in which John Shade’s 999-line poem of that name is overwhelmed by the antic commentary of his nemesis Charles Kinbote. While Kinbote’s obsessions continually lead away from his target text—comprising much of the comedy and pathos of the novel—the capacity for close reading to generate critical discourse is not in dispute, particularly when the attentions of critics to this novel are taken into account.

The English poet J. H. Prynne engages in what might be called extremely close reading in a series of poetic studies: They That Haue Powre to Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 ( 2001 ), Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and others ( 2007 ), George Herbert, Love III: A Discursive Commentary ( 2011 ), and Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 ( 2015 ). Each text takes one poem as its focus—Sonnet 94 is given 86 pages of commentary, “The Solitary Reaper” 135 pages, “Love III” 92 pages, and Sonnet 15 is given 74 pages—and engages in intensely close reading using the method of line commentary. 69 The etymology and intertextual references embedded in individual words are read within a discursive context of social, political, scientific, literary historical, and bibliographic information, and a variety of interpretive possibilities is negotiated as a consequence of this process. These exercises in commentary demonstrate the embeddedness of texts within linguistic and social discourses, showing how deeply enmeshed verbal images and individual words are within their histories. Rather than abutting the limits of close reading, Prynne’s commentaries illustrate what lies beyond the foothills of most conventional close readings.

Discussion of the Literature

The prehistory of modern literary close reading practices is wide-ranging, taking in scriptural exegesis of the world’s major religions, the interpretation of written legal documents—and between these two categories a large part of the history of textuality per se—as well as classical philology and historical criticism. The history of interpretation of Abrahamic sacred texts is given a systematic overview in Jacob Neusner’s Introduction to Rabbinic Literature , Walid A. Saleh’s The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qur’ān Commentary of al-Tha’labī (d. 427/1035) , and The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies , edited by Susan Ashbrook and David G. Hunter, as well as the three-volume History of Biblical Interpretation edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson. Renewed interest in the history and methods of classical philology is represented in the excellent study by James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities . For non-Western traditions of philology the collection of essays World Philology , edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin is an indispensable resource.

Techniques of close reading in modern literary studies arose in reaction to narrow historicist or biographical modes of literary interpretation. Roland Barthes’s S/Z captures the dexterity of semiological methods by breaking a literary text into small sections or lexias and reading them through various “codes.” The dominant modes of close reading in 20th-century university literature departments were associated with New Criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. The British manifestation was varied: I. A. Richards set out his classroom methods of analysis in Practical Criticism , his student William Empson set out a program of close reading that combined formal analysis with historical context in Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral , and F. R. Leavis turned his attention to matters of technique in New Bearings in English Poetry and to a formal-historical analysis of prose in The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit . Perhaps the central text of New Critical close reading, and even of modern literary criticism, is T. S. Eliot’s collection of essays The Scared Wood . New Criticism in the United States was shaped by two books co-authored by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction . Brooks’s essays on poetry, The Well Wrought Urn , also became a staple guide to literary analysis in a rapidly expanding academy following the Second World War.

Following a hegemonic generation (or two) of New Critical approaches to literature, the influence of French literary and critical theory upon reading methods became pronounced from the 1960s onward. Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie not only brought new methods to bear on literary analysis—writing under erasure, différance , the supplement—it also engaged with intensive modes of close reading, avowing its own intellectual origins in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale and bringing that text’s analysis of the linguistic sign into sharp focus. This intensive attention to the structure of language also opened the way for close reading that sought to reveal codes of meaning within texts that often ran against the grain of the surface narrative. These methods drew on psychoanalysis, feminist theory, queer theory, Marxist criticism, postcolonial theory, and other discourses to show how meaning operates in complex and often contradictory ways. The resonance with a New Critical emphasis on irony and paradox has become a topic of greater interest since the waning—or at least dispersion—of theory’s influence. This complicated history is examined in the essay collection Close Reading: The Reader , edited by Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois.

The impact of theory on close reading practices in anglophone higher education institutions is profound, particularly in the adoption of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” set out in De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud . Among the innumerable applications of this notion to literary interpretation, perhaps Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious has had the furthest reach, combining Ricoeur’s notion with the methods of Marxist critique. Reading against the grain of the text is especially suited to psychoanalytic close reading—beginning with Freud’s own case studies—as well as ideology critique, feminist and queer reading practices, and postcolonial criticism. New Historicism provides a sharp example of how close reading of historical documents can be turned to this effect, and such examples as Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions and Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare provide elegant case studies. The ubiquity of “suspicious” reading in literary studies and cognate disciplines led to a counter-movement in close reading practices in which the jouissance of a reading experience would take precedence, drawing on Barthes’s classic Le plaisir du texte as well as Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation.” This celebration of a textual “erotics” produced a queer mode of reparative reading, enunciated in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.”

From the beginning of the 21st century a number of alternative modes of reading have arisen in general dissatisfaction with close reading as the prime mode of textual engagement in literary studies. Rita Felski’s Limits of Critique has established a provocative agenda for post-critical accounts of reading in which somatic and affective resources count as much as cognitive and analytic modes of textual apprehension. In their Introduction to a 2009 special issue of Representations , Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus set out a case for surface reading, in which a non-purposive reading mode attends to textual detail, but not in service of any discursive agenda. Other ways of reading sought distance form the matter of literary texts in favor of larger systems of publication, distribution, and circulation made quantifiable and thus put into the service of data analysis. The methods of distant reading have computational analysis of “big data” at their center, most prominently captured in Franco Moretti’s work, including in particular Graphs, Maps, Trees and Distant Reading . This quantified approach to literary analysis has drawn widespread criticism from scholars operating within the digital humanities as well as those in the business of a more typical literary interpretation—demonstrating rather efficiently that close reading describes any sustained engagement with a literary text, attentive to its technical and affective structures, and without which one cannot be said to have read literature in any meaningful sense.

Links to Digital Materials

Not surprisingly the application of digital methods in distant reading is well represented in digital resources, as are the various critiques of distant reading as it has been practiced. The following is a brief list of essential starting points in this ongoing and complicated discourse:

• The Stanford Literary Lab .
• Tanya Clement , “ The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining ” (2016).
• Laura Mandell , “ Gender and Big Data: Finding or Making Stereotypes? ” (2016).
• Bethany Nowviskie , “ What Do Girls Dig? ” (2011).
• Lisa Marie Rhody , “ Why I Dig: Feminist Approaches to Text Analysis ” (2016).

Further Reading

• Anker, Elizabeth S. , and Rita Felski . “Introduction.” In Critique and Postcritique . Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski , 1–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Barthes, Roland . S/Z: An Essay . Translated by Richard Miller . New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.
• Barthes, Roland . The Pleasure of the Text . Translated by Richard Miller . New York: Hill & Wang, 1975.
• Best, Stephen , and Sharon Marcus . “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–2.
• Bode, Katherine . Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field . London: Anthem, 2014.
• Brooks, Cleanth . The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry . New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
• de Man, Paul . “The Resistance to Theory.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 3–20.
• Derrida, Jacques . Of Grammatology . Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Eliot, Thomas Stearns . The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism . London: Methuen, 1920.
• Empson, William . Seven Types of Ambiguity . London: Chatto & Windus, 1930.
• Empson, William . Some Versions of Pastoral . London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
• Empson, William . The Face of the Buddha . Edited by Rupert Richard Arrowsmith . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Felski, Rita . The Limits of Critique . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Foucault, Michel . The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . New York: Pantheon, 1971.
• Goodrich, Peter . Reading the Law: A Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques . London: Blackwell, 1986.
• Gorke, Andreas , and Johanna Pink , eds. Tafsīr and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Greenblatt, Stephen . Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Hartman, Geoffrey . “The Interpreter’s Freud.” In Easy Pieces , 137–154. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
• Hauser, Alan J. , and Duane F. Watson , eds. The History of Biblical Interpretation . 3 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008, 2018, and 2017.
• Herrnstein Smith, Barbara . “What Was ‘Close Reading’?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies.” Minnesota Review 87 (2016): 57–75.
• Jameson, Fredric . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . New Bearings in English Poetry . London: Chatto & Windus, 1932.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad . London: Chatto & Windus, 1948.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . The Common Pursuit . London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.
• Lentricchia, Frank , and Andrew Dubois , eds. Close Reading: The Reader . Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
• Litz, A. Walton , Louis Menand , and Lawrence Rainey , eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Lönnroth, Harry , ed. Philology Matters! Essays on the Art of Reading Slowly . Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017.
• Marx, William . The Hatred of Literature . Translated by Nicholas Elliott . Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2018.
• Miller, J. Hillis . “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447.
• Moretti, Franco . “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.
• Moretti, Franco . Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History . London: Verso, 2005.
• Moretti, Franco . Distant Reading . London: Verso, 2013.
• Neusner, Jacob . Introduction to Rabbinic Literature . New York, NY: Random House, 1994.
• Norman, Buford . “Explication de texte.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics . Edited by Stephen Cushman , 472–473. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Orgel, Stephen . The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage . New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002.
• Pollock, Sheldon , Benjamin A. Elman , and Ku-ming Kevin Chang , eds. World Philology . Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Ransom, John Crowe . The World’s Body . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.
• Ransom, John Crowe . The New Criticism . New York: New Directions, 1941.
• Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment . New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1929.
• Ricoeur, Paul . Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation . Translated by Denis Savage . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
• Schleiermacher, Friedrich . Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings . Edited and translated by Andrew Bowie . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky . “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction . Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
• Sontag, Susan . “Against Interpretation.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays , 13–23. New York: Dell, 1966.
• Striphas, Ted . The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Tate, Allen . Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.
• Turner, James . Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
• Vendler, Helen . The Breaking of Style . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
• Warren, Robert Penn , and Cleanth Brooks . Understanding Poetry . New York: Henry Holt, 1938.
• Warren, Robert Penn , and Cleanth Brooks . Understanding Fiction . New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943.
• Wimsatt, William K. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954.

1. Stefan Collini, “ The Close Reader ,” The Nation (February 1, 2007).

2. “Plain English” was formally instituted as a movement in US legal circles by David Mellinkoff in The Language of the Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).

3. See Mary Boyce, Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

4. See Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles E. Moore, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

5. For a brief overview of the history of Shijing scholarship and its modern manifestations, see Yong Ren, “Traditional Chinese Critics’ Response to the Confucian Exegesis of the Classic of Poetry : A Counter Tradition,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 40–53. On the relation of the written texts of the Shijing to oral performance and musicality, see Achim Mittag, “Change in Shijing Exegesis: Some Notes on the Rediscovery of the Musical Aspect of the ‘Odes’ in the Song Period,” T’oung Pao 79, no. 4–5 (1993): 197–224.

6. For further explication and analysis of these processes of reading and understanding, see the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory article “ Midrash ” by Carol Bakhos. This structure of prolepsis and confirmation anticipates Dante’s system of allegory in his Letter to Can Grande ( c . 1314–1316). See Zygmunt G. Barański, “The Epistle to Can Grande,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , vol. 2, The Middle Ages , ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 583–589. See also the Oxford Classical Dictionary article “ Midrash ” by Martin Goodman.

7. For a comprehensive overview of the canon of rabbinic texts, see Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Random House, 1994) .

8. For an overview of scriptural interpretation and the history of its methods, see Frances M. Young, “Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies , ed. Susan Ashbrook and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 845–863.

9. Young, “Interpretation of Scripture,” 850. For a comprehensive account of the reception and interpretation of the Bible in the early church and the development of patristic exegesis, see Charles Kannengiesser, ed., Handbook of Patristic Exegesis , 2 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004).

10. Tia M. Kolbaba, “Byzantine Orthodox Exegesis,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible , vol. 2, From 600 to 1450 , ed. Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 485–504 [485].

11. Carl R. Trueman, “Scripture and Exegesis in Early Modern Reformed Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800 , ed. Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, and A. G. Roeber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 179–194 [179].

12. For an overview of these developments, see Joseph G. Prior, The Historical Critical Method in Catholic Exegesis (Rome, Italy: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1999).

13. Walid A. Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qur’ān Commentary of al-Tha’labī (d. 427/1035) (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 16.

14. See Martha T. Roth, trans., Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Williston, VT: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997). The Code of Hammurabi may be the most celebrated, but older codes exist, such as the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu ( c . 2050 bce ) and the Code of Lipit-Ištar ( c . 1870 bce ), and the Akkadian Laws of Eshunna ( c . 1930 bce ).

15. See Michael Gagarin and David Cohen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Laius Tuori, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Bernard Stolte, “Byzantine Law: The Law of the New Rome,” in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History , ed. Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 229–248.

16. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 91–92.

17. There is a substantial literature on the topic of legal critical reading. Peter Goodrich sets out the case for reading law as a specialized secular practice derived from priestly interpretation of sacred texts in Reading the Law: A Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques (London: Blackwell, 1986); and Jane Bloom Grisé sets out a range of techniques for reading case content, evaluating and synthesizing cases, and dealing with unclear legal text in Critical Reading for Success in Law School and Beyond (Eagan, MN: West Academic, 2017).

18. This treatment of philology is necessarily brief, serving to demonstrate historical continuities of close reading methods. Its focus on Western philological methods bypasses discussion of extensive philological traditions in non-Western contexts, such as the Chinese and Sanskrit traditions. For an overview of the global range of philological practices, see World Philology , ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) .

19. For an excellent account of this history, see James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) .

20. The application of philological methods to scholarly inquiry in the 21st century is explored in the essay collection Philology Matters! Essays on the Art of Reading Slowly , ed. Henry Lönnroth (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017) .

21. See Buford Norman, “Explication de texte,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , ed. Stephen Cushman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 472–473 .

22. For a contemporary account of Lanson’s profound influence upon French literary scholarship, see Jean-Albert Bédé, “Gustave Lanson,” The American Scholar 4, no. 3 (1935): 286–291. For a defense of Lanson’s methods against claims of narrow positivism—claims leveled by Roland Barthes among others—see Nabil Araújo de Souza, “Revisão do Lansonismo: O Cientificismo Brando de Gustave Lanson e a Perpetuação Acadêmica da História Literária,” [Review of Lansonism: Gustave Lanson’s Scientificism and the Academic Perpetuation of Literary History] Revista de Letras 52, no. 2 (2012): 95–112.

23. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics , trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). The standard French text is Cours de linguistique générale , ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (Paris: Payot, 1971). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1961). This was originally published as Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955).

24. See Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).

25. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text , trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142–148 [148].

26. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18–20. This was originally published as S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970).

27. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text , trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1975) . This was originally published as Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971) . This was originally published as Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). This was originally published as De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967).

29. “Hamlet and His Problems” and “Phillip Massinger” were collected in T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920) . “Andrew Marvell” was first published in the Times Literary Supplement , March 31, 1921, followed by “The Metaphysical Poets” in the issue of October 20, 1921.

30. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1929), 3 .

31. Richards, Practical Criticism , 6.

32. Snow first presented the thesis of the “two cultures” in the 1959 Sir Robert Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Leavis’s rebuttal appeared in an essay of March 9, 1962, in the Spectator , and was published in The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). The controversy attracted an enormous amount of critical response then and subsequently. For a useful overview of this history, see Guy Ortolano, “Two Cultures, One University: The Institutional Origins of the ‘Two Cultures’ Controversy,” Albion 34, no. 4 (2002): 606–624.

33. In New Bearings , Leavis conducts a dismantling of Ezra Pound’s Cantos , arguing instead that Mauberley is his great poem. Pound had already published “How To Read”—his own manifesto on the merits of close reading—in the New York Herald Tribune in 1929, glossing a curriculum of literature (poetry, drama, prose) ancient and modern, including the complete works of Confucius. Leavis took issue with Pound’s approach—using literary examples as illustrative rather than evidentiary, and prioritizing technique over sensibility—in How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound (Cambridge, UK: Minority Press, 1932). Pound expanded his material in ABC of Reading (London: Routledge, 1934), which functioned as a primer for students, extolling direct engagement with the literary text rather than relying upon criticism, but also the development of a historical and cultural awareness of each text’s significance. This text also adverted to Pound’s theory of language and meaning: phanopoeia (images stimulating the visual imagination), melopoeia (sound), and logopoeia (“the dance of the intellect among words”). Pound thus occupied a sui generis critical position, but one that overlapped with each of Eliot, Richards, Leavis, and Empson. For further consideration of Pound’s critical pedagogy, see Elizabeth Pender, “Exemplarity and Quotation: Ezra Pound’s How to Read , Modernist Criticism, and the Limits of Close Reading,” Critical Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2019): 67–81.

34. Mark Jancovich, “The Southern New Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , vol. 7, Modernism and the New Criticism , ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 200–218 [205].

35. See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 176–196.

36. This word enters into the New Critical vocabulary by way of William K. Wimsatt’s coinage in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954) .

37. John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” Virginia Quarterly Review 13 (1937): 586–602.

38. Much of this history was captured soon after the program ended, in John Alden Jamieson, Books for the Army: The Army Library Service in the Second World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). Beth Luey places the Army Library Service in a wider context of publishing in the United States in “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America , ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 29–54.

39. Brooks, “Preface,” in The Well Wrought Urn , n.p.

40. Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” in The Well Wrought Urn , 139.

41. Murray Krieger provides an inflection to Brooks’s claim, stating the Keats’s poem is metapoetic, bringing into existence a poetics in its ekphrastic play between space (the urn and its pictorial depictions) and time (poetic utterance). See Murray Krieger, “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited,” in Close Reading: The Reader , ed. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 88–110.

42. See Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6 .

43. The talks were collected, translated, and published in The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man , ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). The volume also contains essays by Gilles Deleuze, Gérard Genette, and Roman Jakobson, who were unable to attend the conference.

44. Paul Ricoeur dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as founders of the “school of suspicion” ( école du soupçon ) in his De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud [Interpretation. Essay on Sigmund Freud] (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the cognate term “paranoid reading” to describe reading “against the grain” of a text to reveal hidden patterns of meaning. See Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction , ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37 .

45. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 3–20 [18] .

46. For a fuller account of the Yale School and its methodologies, see Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

47. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447 ; and Geoffrey Hartman, “The Interpreter’s Freud,” in Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 137–154.

48. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 17 .

49. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 1–37.

50. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) ; and Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002) .

51. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, eds., Close Reading: The Reader (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003) . The rationale is set out in the unpaginated Preface.

52. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “What Was ‘Close Reading’?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies,” Minnesota Review 87 (2016): 57–75 .

53. Smith, “What Was ‘Close Reading’?”: 65.

54. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation , trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32 ; translation of De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965).

55. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 13–23 . Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

56. For a comprehensive overview of the limits of critique and the ways postcritique seeks to remedy them, see Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Critique and Postcritique , ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–28.

57. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2 .

58. Felski, The Limits of Critique , 5.

59. Felski, The Limits of Critique , 175–178.

60. See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21 . This journal special issue comprises the central statement of surface reading’s aims and practices, as well as demonstrating the variety of approaches gathered under its name.

61. See Judith Serkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 700–722.

62. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction”: 16.

63. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68 .

64. See Matthew Wilkens, “Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities , ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 249–258 [251].

65. Katherine Bode, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem, 2012).

66. Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 20–21.

67. For a survey of these discussions and critiques, see Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities , ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

68. For a virtuoso example of this method of close reading, see Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

69. Prynne’s commentaries demonstrate how the forms of close reading are as important as the material they yield: line commentary, which has a deep philological history stemming from the scholia of classical antiquity (themselves preceded by Mesopotamian commentaries of the first millennium bce ), and the line-by-line procedure adapted in the 9th century by John Scottus Eriugena to his reading of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [ The Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury ], one of the most influential texts of the entire Middle Ages. Eriugena’s method became a standard scholarly procedure in the Middle Ages. It informed later scholiasts in the early modern period, as well as modern scholars such as William Empson, whose commentary on Sonnet 94 in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) serves as a major framing reference for Prynne’s treatment of the same poem. For Eriugena’s line commentary see Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–45.

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Distant Reading

About distant reading.

"Distant reading" has a specific meaning (coined by Franco Moretti), but can also generally refer to the use of computational methods to analyze literary texts. To learn more, start with Debates in the Digital Humanities , or explore this HOLLIS search for scholarly guides to the Digital Humanities and this MLA search for "distant reading" and related terms .

Ngram Viewers: Chart word usage over time

Beware: ngram counts are only as relevant or interesting as the corpus of texts they're measuring. Is the spike or drop you're observing attributable to a change in how language is used, or just material circumstances that make something likely to be included or excluded from your corpus? Think about the long-term durability of various kinds of paper, library collection policies, wartime effects on publishing, etc.

• Google Ngram: choose a sample of the Google Books corpus, including the "Google million." Search up to 5 consecutive words. Visit About Google Ngram for details and advanced features.
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Close reading is an activity that keeps you focused on and within a text—appraising individual words, shapes of thought, rhetorical devices, patterns of description and characterization, and so forth, in order to understand the text's artistic achievement. For more on the history and practice, see the JHU Guide's article on Practical Criticism or this HOLLIS search for "close reading" and literary criticism .

Trace Word Meanings over Time

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Trace Occurrences of a Word across Texts

• Concordances : These are published, alphabetized lists of individual words used in a single text (e.g.Thoreau's  Walden  ) or larger oeuvre (e.g.  Ezra Pound's  Cantos  or  Milton's English prose ). In HOLLIS, add "concordances" to the author's name, e.g. concordances AND "Keats, John" . Many concordances are now published online instead: examples include the  Victorian  Literary Studies Archive Hyper-Concordance , the  Open Source Shakespeare Concordance ,  and the  Online Concordance to  Wallace Stevens' Poetry .
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• Variorum editions : Some texts exist in multiple versions. The differences between these versions, from the removal or addition of whole passages to subtle changes in punctuation, can make enormous differences in interpretation. A variorum edition collates textual variants and attempts to account for them, in some cases, by including the critical conversations they have engendered. A HOLLIS search for an author's name plus "variorum" or "variants" ( "Shakespeare, William" AND (variorum OR variants) will bring up variorum editions as well as literary criticism that focuses specifically on textual variants. 

Understand Literary and Rhetorical Terms

These special terms provide literary scholars with a shorthand for describing the formal properties of language, but they can also give you new lenses with which to view texts. The word "chiasmus" is shorter than "repetition of ideas in reverse order"; the concept of chiasmus might make you more alert to the order in which ideas are repeated within a sentence or a paragraph.

• The Reference Works collection in Literature Online is an excellent selection of searchable guides specific to literary studies. Pro tip : you can use the general search box and then filter your results to "Reference."
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"What is Close Reading?" || Definition and Strategies

"what is close reading": a literary guide for english students and teachers.

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What is Close Reading? Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video, Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)

By Clare Braun , Oregon State University Senior Lecturer in English

24 October 2022

You may have encountered the term “close reading” in high school or university settings. It’s been thrown around a lot in recent years thanks to its inclusion in the Common Core Standards for K12 education in the United States.  But the practice of close reading has been around a lot longer than the Common Core, and at this point the term has been used in so many different contexts that its meaning has gotten a little muddled.

So how does the Common Core’s use of “close reading” compare to a literary scholar’s use of the term?

The Common Core Standard mentions citing “specific textual evidence” to “support conclusions drawn from the text,” and this could function as a very basic definition of “close reading” in the way that scholars conceive of the term.

close_reading_common_core.jpg

For scholars, “close reading” is a mode of analysis—one of many possible modes, many of which can be used in conjunction with one another—that moves a reader beyond comprehension of the text to interpretation of the text.

A lot of the time we use close reading to uncover and explore a text’s underlying ideologies—or the ideas embedded in the text’s point of view, ideas that aren’t givens (like the laws of physics) but that are culturally or socially constructed, and usually ideas that aren’t universal even within a given culture or society.

We use close reading to make new knowledge out of our interactions with a text, which is why your instructors in high school and college might ask you to use close reading to write an essay, since the United States higher education system values the production of new knowledge.

So what does it look like to “do” close reading?

When you close read a text, you’re looking at both what the text says (its content), and how the text says what it says—through imagery , figurative language , motif , and so on.  You might have noticed that the Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms includes videos on imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on—most of the videos in this series employ close reading!

close_reading_literary_device_examples.jpg

But how do you look at what the text says and how it says what it says?

I like to think of close reading as a process with two major steps, plus a bonus step if you’re using the process to write a paper.

The first step is to read and observe.  These observations would include the “specific textual evidence” the Common Core Standards mention—concrete things you can point to in the text.  Direct observations are pretty much the defining element that makes close reading close reading.

Usually, you read the text multiple times to make note of as many observations as possible.  And speaking of making notes, close reading usually involves some form of notetaking, which might be annotating in the margins or collecting observations in a notebook or computer file.

close_reading_annotation_example.jpg

The second step is to interpret what you notice.  Look for patterns in your observations, and look for places where those patterns break.  Look for places in the text that snagged your attention, even if at first you don’t know why.  What implicit ideas are embedded in these patterns and anomalies?  What is significant about your observations, and what conclusions can you draw from them?

These questions are pretty broad, but you can ask yourself more specific questions based on the particular text you’re analyzing and on the general direction of your observations.

One thing I want to clarify is that steps one and two of this process aren’t necessarily sequential, as in, “I have completed my observations and I will now interpret them.”  It’s more likely that you’ll interpret as you observe, and continue to observe as you interpret.

close_reading_strategy_example.jpg

If you’re using close reading to write a paper, the third bonus step is to corral your observations and interpretations into a cohesive argument.  This may involve cutting out the observations and interpretations that aren’t relevant, and going back to the text for additional observations you can interpret for the argument you’re developing.

So, what isn’t close reading?  It’s not focused just on what happened in the text—the content; that’s summary.  It doesn’t speculate on the effect of the text on the reader, which is not something you can directly observe in the text.  It typically doesn’t require secondary sources, though you can use close reading with other forms of analysis that do rely on secondary sources.  It’s not the discovery of the one “right” answer of what a text means, because there are many ways to observe and interpret a text.  But it's also not a free-for-all where any reading of a text is correct because everything is interpretation anyway.   

Close reading isn’t the only way to usefully and productively engage with a text.  But it is often a useful mode of analysis because it is so grounded in the text, digging deeply into its layers of meaning.

Want to cite this?

MLA Citation: Braun, Clare. "What is Close Reading?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 24 Oct. 2022, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-close-reading-definition-and-strategies. Accessed [insert date].

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Close Reading

Scholars in the humanities approach texts using various methodologies and techniques, but the process of close reading is their basic analytic tool. While scientists conduct experiments and engineers build prototypes, humanities scholars write close readings showing how the details of a text create meanings for the work as a whole. Close reading, then, is the first step in writing a paper in the humanities. 

“Close reading” is a funny phrase, though, because it’s both a verb and a noun, a process and a product. You do “close reading,” paying careful attention to the details of a text, and then you produce—and your instructors might ask you to write—“a close reading”: an argument about how those details work, what they say, and what they show about the text. To add to the confusion, the term close reading is sometimes used to refer to a whole essay: sometimes an entire essay can consist of just one close reading: a careful exploration, say, of the way that color works in a single painting. But other times, a close reading is just one part of a larger paper: an essay about the representation of women in a novel, for example, might use multiple close readings, each one addressing a different moment in the text, in the course of its argument. 

  The ambiguous status of close reading—as a verb and a noun, a process and a product, a whole and a part—results from the way that close reading, much like the writing process as a whole, is iterative and recursive. This means that close reading proceeds through multiple, repeated phases of rethinking and revision. As you close read a text, you’ll notice more and more details that seem significant, and seem to work together to create meaning. Then, since your understanding of the text’s meaning has deepened, more and more details will in turn seem meaningful.

  A word of advice: because the term close reading can be used to describe so many different things, and often more than one thing at a time, it’s important to ask your instructor what they means by close reading, especially when it comes to writing your essays. 

In your classes in the humanities, you will be asked to read and write about cultural objects, or texts, of various kinds. We tend to think of “text” as a term for written documents only, but anything you can analyze can be considered a text, including TV shows and film, music and dance performances, archaeological relics and billboard advertisements. Of course, the formal features you find in a text will depend on what type of text you are analyzing: you may make observations about the camera angles in a film, about the color palette of a painting, or about the rhythm or rhyme scheme of a poem.

Even historical events and cultural practices, and sometimes even scholarly works, may themselves be interpreted as primary texts, though they are more often considered as critical contexts for reading primary texts. (F or more on using such texts as secondary sources, see What is Reading Critically ? in the section on Doing Research.)  But whatever type of text you are studying, the practice of close reading assumes that there is a relationship between content (what the text says) and form (how it says it). The practice of close reading also assumes that attending to the interplay between these realms can help you to understand both.

Knowing the date and author of a text is always helpful when you are reading, but there are other contexts to consider before and during your reading. Beyond knowing who created a text and when, you might ask: Where was this work created? What kind of cultural context was it produced in? What material or other conditions influenced its making? Where has it been read before, and what have previous readers said about it? You can even think about context in relation to when a work was created relative to its author’s full body of work (their “oeuvre”), or where a passage or episode occurs within a narrative, or where a poem appears in a book of poetry.

In addition to the historical and material contexts in which a text appears, another relevant context for your reading is the college course in which this particular text was assigned. Do you know why your instructor selected this text? Where does it fall in the syllabus? What are you expected to do with it? Is it a primary object of textual analysis or is it a secondary source that you will consider in relation to a primary text? Is writing about this particular text optional or required? Asking yourself and/or your instructor these kinds of questions will help you to read strategically and productively.

Every text has unique formal elements, which means that one task for your close reading will be to decide which elements to focus on. To do this, you might begin with the text’s genre or media, since these categories can provide helpful contexts for selecting and understanding formal elements. Novels, poems, films, plays, dances, paintings, photographs, and other types of cultural objects all depend upon different formal conventions influenced by the cultural contexts in which they developed. Considering how a given text conforms to or departs from these conventions is a good place to start your close reading. 

When you read a novel, for instance, you might want to consider some of the most commonly recognized features of the novel as a genre: omniscient versus non-omniscient narration; first-person versus third-person narration; character and setting; a happy versus an unhappy ending. For poems, you might observe the use of such devices as rhyme scheme, rhythm, or meter, as well as a host of other sonic effects and literary devices such as figures of speech and diction. For paintings and photography, things like surface texture, composition, and subject matter are key formal elements. Remember: many texts have elements that reflect their relation to more than one precursor or genre—a novel might draw on both the epic and romantic traditions, or on both realist and fantasy genres. And some texts—such as a collage or an animated film—can be considered multimedia. 

When you are in the process of reading a text closely, you may want to begin by compiling a list of the formal elements you notice. But when you write an essay, it’s never sufficient merely to list these observations . In order to produce a compelling, thesis-driven essay based on close reading , you need to make the move from observation to evidence. That is to say, you need to move from merely noticing what’s there to selecting the most important details and speculating about their potential meanings , and then to developing an interpretation of how these meanings contribute to the meaning of the text as a whole. 

In order to take this next step, you might start by noting any formal elements that seem odd, weird, or puzzling. This might be something that stops you, or at least slows you down in your reading, and makes you say “hmm…” or “huh?” It might be an unexpected departure from character, a shift in narrative tone, or an unexpected plot twist in a novel. In a poem, it might be a change in rhythm or rhyme scheme, a strange image or word choice, or a striking figure of speech or rhetorical device. A painting might depict a machine where you would expect it to show a person, a splotch where you might expect fine detail, or other oddities of design affecting composition (arrangement of parts of or in the work), color, scale, proportion, or balance. Even the use of repetition in a text—something predictable or rhythmic rather than unexpected or jarring—might be worth noting and speculating about. 

You can also think about significant textual elements and their potential significance in terms of the gaps, ambiguities, or contradictions in form or in the meanings that they create. If you don’t understand what’s going on in a text at a certain point, or if you read something that challenges your sense of the text’s surface or deeper meaning, don’t assume you’ve missed something: those moments may be ripe for readerly observation, interpretation, and argument. Your job as a reader is not to smooth over (or ignore!) these kinds of confusing or contradictory elements in a text; rather, your job is to identify these sites of tension or complexity in order to develop an argument about their significance.

Here are a few practical guides to help you get started with close reading: Three Close Reading Methods 12 Steps to Literary Awareness Close Reading Literature Literary Terms for Close Reading There are many more close reading handouts and exercises at Teaching Close Reading (in the For Instructors section of this website.) 

Poetry and fiction are the most common forms that you will encounter in literature-focused classes. Before you begin your close reading, it may be helpful to familiarize yourself with some of the literary terms used to describe the fundamental elements of prose fiction and the figurative devices that constitute the basic elements of poetry .

The principle of close reading has its origins in the study of literature, particularly poetry, which is one reason that there are many more literature-specific guides to close reading than there are guides of this sort for other disciplines. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that since different humanities disciplines explore texts from different historical periods, geographic locations, languages, and media, they tend to close read their texts in somewhat different ways, by asking different questions and using different terminologies and methodologies. As such, the particular discipline within which you encounter a text—possibly related to the course and department in which you are studying that text—might well be considered as an important context for your close reading of it.

As we develop the “Writing Across the Humanities” website, we will include more resources for close reading non-written and non-literary texts. In the meantime, Montclair State University Center For Writing Excellence provides an excellent annotated compendium of resources that can help you to begin close reading texts in various humanities genres, media, and disciplines. Your instructor and your librarian can suggest many more resources providing information about discipline-specific reading practices.

For additional materials, go to Teaching Close Reading in the For Instructors section of this website.

Write a Close Reading

Choose a passage, step 1: read the passage, step 2: analyze the passage, step 3: develop a descriptive thesis, step 4: construct an argument about the passage., step 5: develop an outline based on your thesis.

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If you have not been assigned a passage or poem, then you must select a text and a specific passage.

Limit your selection to a paragraph or two at the most. In some cases, a sentence or two (or a few lines, if you are dealing with a poem) will be sufficient. Keep in mind that literature (and especially poetry) can be very dense. You will be surprised at how much you can glean from a short section – and how easily you can be overwhelmed by selecting a section that is too long.

Look for unusual or repetitive images or themes and passages with rich imagery or language.

Also pay particular attention to passages that relate to central characters or definitions of keywords; you may decide to focus on one section and how it helps you understand a character, relationship, issue, or idea.

Take notes as you read. Mark anything that seems relevant or interesting to you – even if you are unsure why a particular section of the text stands out.

Ask yourself: How is language and/or argument being used? Take notes about your observations of the passage, even if these observations seem simplistic or self-evident. Also pay attention to how language use changes over the course of your passage. For example, if the same word appears at the beginning and end, does it mean different things in both places? Does the author's tone or attitude change?

After you have read the entire text, you can return to these sections to look for repeated patterns, themes, or words. Often, a close reading will focus on one example of a theme or pattern to study the significance of this theme or pattern more in depth.

Begin by writing answers to some of the following questions, focusing on the kinds of rhetorical and literary devices you see in the passage.

• What words are being used here? 
• Are any words repeated in this passage? 
• What adjectives are used? What nouns do they describe?  How do they alter your understanding of these nouns? 
• Are any two (or more) words used in this passage connected in some way?

If any words are unfamiliar, look them up. If you are analyzing an older text, keep in mind that words may mean different things at different points in history—so be sure to look up any words that may be familiar but used in an unfamiliar way. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will provide you with definitions as well as histories of word use.

Whether you are looking at an historical or contemporary text, remember that words can be used in different ways. Ask yourself: Are any words being used in unusual ways? Are any words referring to something more than what is simply stated? Are any two (or more) words in the passage connected in some way?

Narrative Voice

• Who is speaking in this passage?
• What narrative perspective is being used in this passage?
• What does the narrative voice tell you?
• What characters does it give you access to?
• Is the speaker being straightforward, factual, open?
• Is the speaker being direct or ambiguous with their message?
• Does the voice carry any emotion? Or is it detached from its subject?
• Do you hear irony (what is said is different from what is meant)? If so, where?

Rhetorical and Literary devices:

• Do you notice any figurative language, such as metaphors and similes?
• Do you observe any imagery?
• Is the sound of the language and sentences important (e.g., rhyme, repetition, choppy or long sentences)?
• What is the effect of these devices and techniques? (e.g., do they add emphasis or connect key ideas?)

Once you have finished looking at the language in detail, you can use your observations to construct a descriptive thesis. For example, you could argue that a passage is using short, simple sentences, or that it is using irony or a combination of these things. Your descriptive thesis should attempt to summarize the observations you have made about HOW language is being used in your passage.

Remember, this is not your final thesis statement. It's just your first step to arriving at an analytical thesis.

Now that you have some idea of HOW language is being used in your passage, you need to connect this to the larger themes of the text. In other words, you now need to address WHY language is being used in the way (or ways) you have observed.

This step is essential to a successful close reading.  It is not enough to simply make observations about language use – you must take these observations and use them to construct an argument about the passage.

Transform your descriptive thesis into an argument by asking yourself WHY language is used in this way:

• What kinds of words are used (intellectual, elaborate, plain, or vulgar)?  Why are words being used in this way?
• Why are sentences long or short?  Why might the author be using complicated or simple sentences?  What might this type of sentence structure suggest about what the passage is trying to convey?
• Who is the narrator? What is the narrative voice providing these particular descriptions? Why are we given access to the consciousness of these particular characters?  Why not others?
• What images do you see in the passage? What might they represent? Is there a common theme?
• Why might the tone of the passage be emotional (or detached)?
• To what purpose might the text employ irony?
• What effect/impact is the author trying to create?

After you have established your thesis, you’ll need to write an essay that supports this argument with examples and analysis.

For example, you might argue that in the novel Jane Eyre , Jane’s friend Helen Burns uses language and imagery to describe God in a very different way from characters who represent religious authority. To prove your argument, you must organize your essay to show examples of how Helen Burns describes God and interpret her description. You must also analyze how her description differs from the status quo in the novel and tell readers why this difference matters to our understanding of the novel.

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Quotes About Close Reading

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• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
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Close reading is a thoughtful, disciplined reading of a text . Also called close analysis and explication de texte.

Though close reading is commonly associated with New Criticism (a movement that dominated literary studies in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s), the method is ancient. It was advocated by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria (c. 95 AD).

Close reading remains a fundamental critical method practiced in diverse ways by a wide range of readers in different disciplines. (As discussed below, close reading is a skill that's encouraged by the new Common Core State Standards Initiative in the U.S.) One form of close reading is rhetorical analysis .

Observations

"'English studies' is founded on the notion of close reading, and while there was a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when this idea was frequently disparaged, it is undoubtedly true that nothing of any interest can happen in this subject without close reading." (Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory , 2nd ed. Manchester University Press, 2002)

Francine Prose on Close Reading

"We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening , is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting, because it is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.

"The more we read, the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning. The more we read, the more we comprehend, the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a particular book." (Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them . HarperCollins, 2006)

The New Criticism and Close Reading

In its analyses, new criticism . . . focuses on phenomena such as multiple meaning, paradox, irony, word play, puns, or rhetorical figures, which--as the smallest distinguishable elements of a literary work--form interdependent links with the overall context . A central term often used synonymously with new criticism is close reading. It denotes the meticulous analysis of these elementary features, which mirror larger structures of a text." (Mario Klarer, An Introduction to Literary Studies , 2nd ed. Routledge, 2004)

The Aims of Close Reading

"[A] rhetorical text appears to hide--to draw attention away from--its constitutive strategies and tactics. Consequently, close readers have to employ some mechanism for piercing the veil that covers the text so as to see how it works. . . .

"The principal object of close reading is to unpack the text. Close readers linger over words, verbal images, elements of style, sentences, argument patterns, and entire paragraphs and larger discursive units within the text to explore their significance on multiple levels." (James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies . Sage, 2001)

"[I]n the traditional view, close reading does not aim to produce the meaning of the text, but rather to unearth all possible types of ambiguities and ironies ." (Jan van Looy and Jan Baetens, "Introduction: Close Reading Electronic Literature." Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature . Leuven University Press, 2003)

"What, really, does a critical close reader do that the average person on the street does not do? I argue that the close-reading critic reveals meanings that are shared but not universally and also meanings that are known but not articulated . The benefit of revealing such meanings is to teach or enlighten those who hear or read the critique. . . .

"The critic's job is to uncover these meanings in such a way that people have an 'aha!' moment in which they suddenly agree to the reading, the meanings the critic suggests suddenly come into focus. The standard of success for the close reader who is also a critic is therefore the enlightenment, insights, and agreement of those who hear or read what he or she has to say." (Barry Brummett, Techniques of Close Reading . Sage, 2010)

Close Reading and the Common Core

"Chez Robinson, eighth-grade Language Arts teacher and part of the leadership team at Pomolita Middle School, says, 'It's a process; educators are still learning about it. . . .'

"Close reading is one strategy being implemented for teaching students higher level thinking skills, focusing on depth rather than breadth.

"'You take a piece of text, fiction or non-fiction, and you and your students examine it closely,' she says.

"In the classroom, Robinson introduces the overall purpose of the reading assignment and then has students work independently and in partners and groups to share what they have learned. They circle words that are confusing or unknown, write out questions, use exclamation marks for ideas that surprise, underline key points. . . .

"Robinson uses examples from Langston Hughes ' work, especially rich in figurative language , and refers specifically to his poem, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers.' Together, she and her students investigate each line, each stanza, piece by piece, leading to deeper levels of understanding. She plays an interview with him, assigns a five-paragraph essay on the Harlem Renaissance.

"'It's not that this hasn't been done before,' she says, 'but Common Core is bringing a new focus to the strategies.'" (Karen Rifkin, "Common Core: New Ideas for Teaching--and for Learning." The Ukiah Daily Journal , May 10, 2014)

The Fallacy in Close Reading

"There is a small but immitigable fallacy in the theory of close reading, . . . and it applies to political journalism as well as to the reading of poetry. The text doesn’t reveal its secrets just by being stared at. It reveals its secrets to those who already pretty much know what secrets they expect to find. Texts are always packed, by the reader’s prior knowledge and expectations, before they are unpacked. The teacher has already inserted into the hat the rabbit whose production in the classroom awes the undergraduates." (Louis Menand, "Out of Bethlehem." The New Yorker , August 24, 2015)

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Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls

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Also see the OWL handout on Writing about Literature and the OWL handout on Literary Terms .

Writing about a story or novel can be difficult because fiction is generally very complex and usually includes several points or themes. To discover these interwoven meanings, you must read the work closely. Below are three techniques for reading fiction actively and critically. Close reading takes more time than quick, superficial reading, but doing a close reading will save you from a lot of frustration and anxiety when you begin to develop your thesis.

Close Reading a Text

Use these "tracking" methods to yield a richer understanding of the text and lay a solid ground work for your thesis.

Pitfalls: Highlighting too much Highlighting without notes in the margins

These should be questions, comments, dialogue with the text itself.

A paragraph from Doris Lessing's short story "A Woman on a Roof" serves as an example:

The second paragraph could have a note from the reader like this:

Write quickly after your reading: ask questions, attempt answers and make comments about whatever catches your attention. A good question to begin with when writing response entries is "What point does the author seem to be making?"

After close reading and annotating, can you now make a statement about the story's meaning? Is the author commenting on a certain type of person or situation? What is that comment?

Avoiding Pitfalls

These four common assumptions about writing about fiction interfere with rather than help the writer. Learn to avoid them.

Assumes that the main task is simply recalling what happened in detail. Plot summary is just one of the requirements of writing about fiction, not the intended goal.

Assumes that writing about fiction is a "no win" game in which the student writer is forced to try to guess the RIGHT ANSWER that only the professor knows.

Assumes that ANY interpretation of any literary piece is purely whimsy or personal taste. It ignores the necessity of testing each part of an interpretation against the whole text, as well as the need to validate each idea by reference to specifics from the text or quotations and discussion from the text.

Assumes that writing the paper is only a way of stating the answer rather than an opportunity to explore an idea or explain what your own ideas are and why you have them. This sometimes leads to "padding," repeating the same idea in different words or worse, indiscriminate "expert" quoting: using too many quotes or quotes that are too long with little or no discussion.

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Close Reading

Close reading as analysis.

Close reading is the technique of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to the larger work. A close reading delves into what a passage means beyond a superficial level, then links what that passage suggests outward to its broader context. One goal of close reading is to help readers to see facets of the text that they may not have noticed before. To this end, close reading entails “reading out of” a text rather than “reading into” it. Let the text lead, and listen to it.

The goal of close reading is to notice, describe, and interpret details of the text that are already there, rather than to impose your own point of view. As a general rule of thumb, every claim you make should be directly supported by evidence in the text. As the name suggests this technique is best applied to a specific passage or passages rather than a longer piece, almost like a case study.

Use close reading to learn:  

• what the passage says
• what the passage implies
• how the passage connects to its context

Why Close Reading?

Close reading is a fundamental skill for the analysis of any sort of text or discourse, whether it is literary, political, or commercial. It enables you to analyze how a text functions, and it helps you to understand a text’s explicit and implicit goals. The structure, vocabulary, language, imagery, and metaphors used in a text are all crucial to the way it achieves its purpose, and they are therefore all targets for close reading. Practicing close reading will train you to be an intelligent and critical reader of all kinds of writing, from political speeches to television advertisements and from popular novels to classic works of literature.

Wondering how to do a close reading? Click on our Where to Begin section to find out more!

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How to Write a Close Reading Essay

Last Updated: May 2, 2023 References

This article was co-authored by Bryce Warwick, JD . Bryce Warwick is currently the President of Warwick Strategies, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area offering premium, personalized private tutoring for the GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Bryce has a JD from the George Washington University Law School. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 8,851 times.

With a close-reading essay, you get to take a deep dive into a short passage from a larger text to study how the language, themes, and style create meaning. Writing one of these essays requires you to read the text slowly multiple times while paying attention to both what is being said and how the author is saying it. It’s a great way to hone your reading and analytical skills, and you’ll be surprised at how it can deepen your understanding of a particular book or text.

Reading and Analyzing the Passage

• Think of “close reading" as an opportunity to look underneath the surface. While you may understand a text’s main themes from a single read-through, any given text usually contains multiple complexities in language, character development, and hidden themes that only become clear through close observation.

Tip: Look up words that you aren’t familiar with. Sometimes you might figure out what something means by using context clues, but when in doubt, look it up.

• Alliteration
• Personification
• Onomatopoeia

• What themes are present in the text? Is the passage about, for example, love, or the triumph of good over evil, a character's coming-of-age, or a commentary on social issues?
• What imagery is being used? Which of the 5 senses does the passage involve?
• What is the author’s writing style? Is it descriptive, persuasive, or technical?
• What is the tone of the passage? What emotions do you feel as you read?
• What is the author trying to say? Are they successful?

Tip: Try reading the text out loud. Sometimes hearing the words rather than just seeing them can make a difference in how you understand the language.

• Word choice
• Punctuation

Drafting a Thesis and Outline

• Close-reading essays can get very detailed, and it often is helpful to come back to the “main thing.” This summary can help you focus your thesis in one direction so your essay doesn’t become too broad.

• For example, you could write something like, “The author uses repetition and word choice to create an emotional connection between the reader and the protagonist. This sample from the book exemplifies how the author uses vivid language and atypical syntax throughout the entire text to help put the reader inside of the protagonist’s mind.”

• For example, you may quote a sentence from the passage that uses atypical punctuation to emphasize how the author’s writing style creates a certain cadence.
• Or you may use the repetition of a color or word or theme to explain how the author continually reinforces the overall message.

• There are a lot of different ways to outline an essay. You could use a bullet-pointed list to organize the things you want to write about, or you could plan out, paragraph by paragraph, what you want to say.
• Many people cannot write fast because they do not spend enough time planning what they want to state.
• When you take a couple of extra minutes to plan an essay, it's a lot easier to write because you know how the points should flow together.
• It is also obvious to a reader whether you plan and write the essay or make it up as you write it.

Writing the Essay

• The last thing you want is to write an essay and later on realize that you were required to include an outside source or that your paper was 5 pages longer than it needed to be.

• Some people find it easier to write their introduction once the body of the essay is done.
• The introduction can be a good place to give historical, social, or geographical context.

• Make sure to reference why the proof you’re giving is relevant. It should directly tie back to the main theme of your essay.
• Evidence can be a direct quote from the passage, a summary of that information, or a reference from a secondary source.

• The conclusion isn’t the place to add in new evidence or arguments. Those should all be in the actual body of the essay.

• An impactful close-reading essay will weave together examples, interpretation, and commentary.

• Try reading your essay out loud. You may notice awkward phrases, incorrect grammar, or stilted language that you didn’t before.

Expert Q&A

• Sites like Typely, Grammarly, and ProofreadingTool offer free feedback and edits. Keep in mind that you’ll need to review proposed changes because they may not all be correct for your particular essay. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

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Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about completing school assignments, check out our in-depth interview with Bryce Warwick, JD .

• ↑ https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/c.php?g=130967&p=4938496
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading#
• ↑ https://blogs.umass.edu/honors291g-cdg/how-to-write-a-close-reading-essay/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/introduction/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/paragraph-structure/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/
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Close reading assignments.

"A close reading (or Explication de texte) operates on the premise that any artistic creation will be more fully understood and appreciated to the extent that the nature and interrelations of its parts are perceived, and that that understanding will take the form of insight into the theme of the work in question. This kind of work must be done before you can begin to appropriate any theoretical or specific approach." 1

To explicate comes from the Latin explicare, to unfold, to fold out, or to make clear the meaning of. When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text. Your aim is to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references or allusions. A close reading should be more than a list of devices, though. The essay should move from observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. What do these data add up to mean? 2

Close reading has three primary objectives.

It encourages you to be a better and more careful reader.

It asks you to employ the tools you heard used in lecture and probably have employed yourself in conference: analysis of speaker, diction, figurative language, sound, and genre to name a few.

• It engages you in the act of synthesis. Even as you divide the passage or object poem into its composite elements, you will want to discuss how those elements come together to form a whole.

Requirements: What does a Close Reading Essay Usually Have?

A thesis that is an assertion about the meaning and function of the text . It must be something you can argue for and prove in your essay.

Evidence from the text . What specific words or phrases led you to have the ideas you express? Quote them.

Analysis of that evidence . If the work were self-evident you could just turn in the book or image as your proof. Literally thousands of people have had thousands of different ideas about the words or details you mention. Explain how you arrived at your ideas.

Need More Help?

See the following pages:

• How to Annotate
• Close Readings of Passages
• Close Readings of Visual Artifacts

1 The Literary Link. Ed. Janice E. Patten. June 2, 1998. San Jose State University Web Site. 17 Sept. 2003. . 2 Patricia Kain, "How to Do a Close Reading," 1998. Harvard University Writing Center Web Site . 17 Sept. 2003. 3 Diane Hacker. The Bedford Handbook for Writers, 3rd. ed. Boson: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1991. 91.

• Writing Worksheets and Other Writing Resources
• Thesis, Analysis, & Structure

Close Reading and Analysis

About the slc.

• Our Mission and Core Values

This worksheet treats Upper Sproul as a text for students to read and form arguments about. It is intended to provide a clear example of how one effectively uses observations to support analysis.

Part one: observations.

Please describe Upper Sproul on a busy day (e.g. a weekday at 12:00pm). These observations could include (but are not limited to) type of people, building, plants, and activities. In other words, who is there and what is happening?

_________________________________       _________________________________

Part Two: Analysis

The Prompt: Imagine that I am a potential Cal student. I just got my acceptance letter, but I am not sure whether or not I want to attend. Should I visit Upper Sproul on a busy day to get a feel for the school?

Please argue both sides of the question:

Yes, you should visit because… [list three observations from part one]

No, you should not visit because… [list three observations from part one]

Part Three: The Argument

If the some of the observations that you used in Part Two overlap, that’s fine (and even likely). For example, you might say that people should not visit because there are a lot of students handing out fliers, but you might also say that people should visit for this very reason.

The difference, of course, lies not in the observation but in your argument. Thus, if you say that a potential student should not visit Upper Sproul because of the fliers, then you need to answer the question why not? (Similarly, if you think that a potential student should visit Upper Sproul, then you need to answer the question why?)

So, the next step is to provide the why or why not to your answers in part two. Use a descriptive word or phrase that captures the effect of the three observations you chose. Why do these observations lead you to tell a potential student to visit (or not to visit) Upper Sproul when its busy?

Now, form your argument (you can just pick your favorite—yes or no):

Yes, a potential student should visit Upper Sproul because it _____________________

(descriptive word or phrase). The observations that support this are:

1. ________________________ 2. ________________________ and

3. ________________________.

No, a potential student should not visit Upper Sproul when it is busy because it

__________________________ (descriptive word or phrase). The observations that

support this are: 1. ________________________ 2. ________________________ and

Part Four: Using Evidence in a Paragraph

Your argument could easily be made into a paragraph about Upper Sproul (or even a whole essay). So far you’ve thought about the overall effect of your three observations and made an argument about them (e.g. they make Sproul seem fun; they make Sproul seem crowded). What is the specific effect of each observation? Using your argument as a topic sentence, try to write one or two sentences about each observation afterward.

______________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

2. ______________________________________________________________

3. ______________________________________________________________

 ________________________________________________________________


Part Five: Reflection and Questions

Do you have a stronger understanding of close reading and analysis? Why or why not?

What are some of the differences between “reading” Sproul and reading a piece of literature?

How can these tools of close reading, analysis and argumentation be extended to a literary text? When reading a literary text, what sorts of observations can you make about the text? What sorts of details can you observe?

Hana Metzger
Student Learning Center, University of California, Berkeley
©2009 UC Regents

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.