close reading essays

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.

Academic and Professional Writing

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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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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 Write a Close Reading Essay: Full Guide with Examples

writing Close Reading Essay

There is no doubt that close-reading essays are on the rise these days. And for a good reason — it is a powerful technique that can help you make your mark as a student and showcase your understanding of the text.

In this type of writing, readers will read the literary text carefully and interpret it from various points of view. Read on.

Also Read: Does Turnitin Check Other Students’ Papers to Check Similarity

What is a Close Reading Essay?

A close-reading essay is an in-depth analysis of a literary work. It can be used to support a thesis statement or as a research paper.

A close-reading essay focuses on the tiny themes inherent in a literary passage, story, or poem.

The focus of this type of essay is on critical thinking and analysis. The author will look at the small details that make up the overall meaning of a text.

The author will also consider how these tiny themes relate to each other and how they are presented within the text.

The key areas where a close reading essay focuses include:

• Motivation and setting – This includes why the author wrote the piece and their purpose when they chose to write it. You can explore this through character analysis as well as themes that are common across multiple works.
• Characters:  While characters may or may not have any significance in an overall plot, they can make up many of the elements discussed in this essay. For example, if you were analyzing Hamlet, then you would want to look at how Hamlet’s character affects his motivation for suicide (which is directly related to his madness) and how it relates to his relationship with Ophelia.

Also Read: How to Answer “to what Extent” Question in Research & Examples

How to Write a Close Reading Essay -Step-By-Step Guide

1. read the selected text at least three additional times.

Analyze the text using your critical thinking skills. What are the author’s main points and purposes? How does the author develop these points? What evidence does he or she use to support these points? How do other writers in the field of the study compare with this author’s views?

Compare and contrast this author’s point of view with other writers in your field of study. What is their purpose in writing? What evidence do they use to support their positions?

How do they compare with this writer’s views?

2. Underline Portions of the Text that you Find Significant or Odd

The purpose of this section is to give the reader a sense of the author’s tone and approach to the subject.

A close-reading essay should be read at least twice, preferably three times. Underline or highlight any portions of the text that you find odd or significant.

Ask yourself: What does this mean? How does this affect my view of the work? What questions do I have now that I didn’t have before?

Take notes on what you think might be important. You may want to write down your questions and observations as they occur to you while reading your essay. Make sure they are hierarchical so they can easily guide your next step in writing about them.

3. State the Conclusions for the Paper

A close-reading essay analyzes a text and the author’s meaning. The key to this type of essay is the ability to conclude a text. It requires the student to think critically about what he/she has read and how it relates to other texts.

The most important aspect of writing a close-reading essay is being able to conclude after reading through a piece of work and analyzing it. The reader should always be able to answer questions like:

• What does this author mean?
• How can I apply this message to my life?
• Is this message relevant in today’s society?

4. Write your Introduction

The purpose of your paper is usually stated in the introduction somewhere (it might be buried in an abstract).

In other words, it’s not enough just to tell readers what they need to know; they also need some motivation to read further if they don’t know why they should read.

5. Write your Body Paragraphs.

A body paragraph is the bulk of your essay. It’s the place where you flesh out your ideas and connect them to the overall topic.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details when writing a close-reading essay, so it’s important to stay focused on the big picture of what you’re trying to say. Here are some tips for developing your body paragraphs:

• Start with a thesis statement: Make sure that each paragraph starts with an idea or question that relates to the main point of your thesis statement. For example, suppose you’re writing about how human beings have been impacted by technology in society; then, in your first paragraph. In that case, you might want to talk about how computers are changing our lives and what this means for us as individuals and as a culture.
• Link ideas together:  Be sure that each paragraph is directly related to the previous one (or else your readers will lose track). Use transition words like “however,” “however,” “in contrast,” and “on the other hand,” or even simply add supporting details from different sources throughout each paragraph.

6. Write your Conclusion

When writing conclusion to your close reading essay, you’ll make a few points about why you think the book is worth reading. You should focus on whether or not the author has succeeded in his or her main objective and whether or not it’s an interesting book.

You should also consider how the author has achieved these goals. Did they succeed because of their writing style? Or did they use an effective structure? Did they make some unique observations that you hadn’t thought of before?

Do you have any specific questions about what was done well in the book? If so, ask them now so that you don’t forget to ask them when it’s time for your argumentative essay!

Also Read: How to Write an Enduring Issues Essay: Guide with Topics and examples

7. Close Reading Essay Examples

Below are three close-reading essay examples on the topic of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first example is from a student named Brandon:

The main character, Jay Gatsby, is one of the most interesting characters in literature that I have ever read about.

He was a millionaire who married into a family of lower-class people and became friends with their daughter Daisy Buchanan, who had recently graduated from college and moved to New York City, where she met his son Nick Carraway.

Jay Gatsby was so fascinating to me because he had a lot of passion for life; he never gave up on what he wanted, even though he had nothing to back it up.

When I read this book, I learned that some people don’t care about what happens to them or what other people think about them; they just do their own thing and don’t let anything stand in their way of achieving their goals in life (Gatsby).

When I read this book, I also learned about love and hate because there were many different sides to each character’s personality throughout the book (Gatsby).

In conclusion, “The Great Gatsby” is an interesting book.

Example Two

The main character in the novel, Adam Bede, is a strong-willed country boy who looks down upon city folk. He has no interest in being educated and feels that he would rather work on a farm than attend school.

He does not seem to have any particular talent or skill that would make him stand out. However, it is not until he meets the wealthy Miss Lavendar that he can express his talents through writing poetry and music.

The first time Adam meets Miss Lavendar, she sits at a piano playing a piece by Mozart. Adam has never heard music like this before. It is so beautiful that he immediately falls in love with her. The two become friends and eventually marry each other.

However, when Adam becomes famous for his poems about Miss Lavendar, she begins to feel threatened by her new husband’s success. She leaves him for another man named Mr. Thornton. He has money and power but no talent for writing poetry or music like Adam.

 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

The play tells the story of a family during the Great Depression in Mississippi. Brick Pollitt has just returned home from World War I where he has been injured in battle and subsequently discharged with a disability pension.

His wife Maggie is expecting their first child, while his son Paul lives in New Orleans where he works as a pianist for a white man named Big Daddy Pollitt who owns a brothel in which Paul performs sexually explicit acts for the patrons at Big Daddy’s establishment called “The Brick House.”

With over 10 years in academia and academic assistance, Alicia Smart is the epitome of excellence in the writing industry. She is our chief editor and in charge of the writing department at Grade Bees.

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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 8,908 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/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/category/academic-essay/

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"What is Close Reading?" || Definition and Strategies

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

View the full series: The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms

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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!

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Close reading is an important tool for writing an essay and doesn't have to be as overwhelming as it sounds. Here are some tips to make it easy and effective.

When do I close read?

Obviously, it's impractical to close read an entire book. Unless your material is fairly short, close read the parts which address an aspect of your essay or assignment. Doing so will help you understand the subtleties in the passage that will help you add analysis to your paper. If you are reading through a book, article, etc. for the first time, you should take small notes as you read instead of a close analysis. This can include noting important passages, passages you don't understand, and passages which might be helpful for a future assignment. Some people like to summarize chapters or pages, so that they don't have to reread material later. This type of quick close reading helps you to understand the material better. It takes a lot less time than it sounds like it does!

How do I close read?

Once you have found a quote to close read, look for  what the author's message is , and  how she/he gets that message across to readers (you) . The first step is to make sure you understand what is going on: if you have questions, get them answered because the wrong idea here can alter your whole close reading. Next, find:

Themes : repeating ideas discussed in the passage, such as individuality, friendship, etc.

Symbols : one noun standing for another person, place, concept, etc.

Audience : who is the speaker addressing? It can be character(s) in the novel as well as a group of people whom the author wants to read her book.

Tone : the emotional perspective the speaker gives to the passage, always an adjective. Often, the diction and syntax can help you find the tone. Examples are confused, overwhelmed, formal, etc.

Syntax : the sentence structure. The length, level, etc. can change the tone and give you some important clues into the message of the quote.

Diction : the words the author chose. Different words have small differences in meaning, and can bring to mind different settings and atmospheres--this is called connotation.

Speaker : who is actually talking to you in this passage, the narrator. How does the speaker's position, background, etc. affect what she says?

All of these terms will not necessarily be in your quote. Also, they are by no means the only things you can look for while close reading, but they are a good start. These different devices are used by the author to address the two important aspects of close reading underlined above. Look for how a device is used and ask yourself why it is used this way and how it connects to the author's message or what it does for the quote as a whole.

"Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of the noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships. . . ."

--from  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , by Frederick Douglass, p.71. Downloaded August 18, 2011, from  Forgotten Books .

Questions for Close Reading

1. Again, summarize the speaker's literal meaning and any themes you see.

2. Imagery, pictures painted by the speaker's words, plays a big role in this passage. What aspects of the imagery are symbols, and what do they stand for? How do the symbols further the themes you found?

3. Who is the speaker, and who is the audience? Can you find different perspectives mentioned here? Why would the speaker include this? How do diction and syntax, or any other aspects of the excerpt that you notice, create the perspectives?

Grace Patil

Student Learning Center, University of California, Berkeley

©2007 UC Regents 

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

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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!

• Where to Begin and Strategies
• Tips and Tricks

How to Write a Close Reading Essay

How to Write a Good Critique Essay

A close reading essay is an in-depth paper that carefully studies a short work or a section of a longer one. Rather than treat the larger themes of the work alone, a close reading essay goes into details and substantiates observations with examples from the work being examined. Analyze the techniques that writers employ to convey their ideas and feelings and then explain the results of your analysis. You need to not only make observations about parts of the work that stand out, but back them up with examples from the text.

Carefully read the work or section of the work being studied several times. Make notes as you read; don't wait until you have finished with the belief that you will remember everything. This part of the process is about gathering information. Note anything that stands out, symbols that recur or turns of phrase that don't make sense. Oftentimes the things you do not follow can lead to an important observation, so trust your instincts.

Develop an outline of your essay based on your notes, putting together observations that seem related. Delve into details that puzzle you, such as why something is described oddly, or an action by a character that may not make sense. Assemble the observations into groups, and note details to cover in the essay under each group. Draw out some of the persistent themes or significant characteristics and think about how they add to the overall mood of the work. To identify themes, ask yourself what lesson the author of the work likely wanted readers to know. Look for words or phrases that repeat since these often indicate an important idea that may be related to the theme or some other significant characteristic of the work.

Write your essay from the outline fleshing out details, presenting your observations, drawing conclusions about what you feel the author is saying and backing up those conclusions with examples from the text. The more you can substantiate your observations with the author's own words the more convincing the essay will be. If the conclusions you have drawn can't be reasonably supported by the text, modify them until you have adequate text support to back them up.

Go back and read the work you are examining again, in light of what you have written, to see if anything further stands out, or even if you still agree with what you have written. You may find some surprising new things, or want to modify your thoughts a bit. Proofread carefully before turning in your essay.

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• Harvard: How to do a Close Reading
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Bill Brown has been a freelance writer for more than 14 years. Focusing on trade journals covering construction and home topics, his work appears in online and print publications. Brown holds a Master of Arts in liberal arts from St. John's University and is currently based in Houston.

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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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A Guide How To Write A Close Reading Essay

You may wonder what is meant by a close-reading essay. Consider an example of an individual going to a museum. He will stare at a picture until he finds out information he did not see initially. This is what is happening while writing a close-reading essay. While writing this kind of essay, you are expected to be flexible in your observation and be analytical in your interpretation of texts. When your tutor gives you this assignment, treat it as the best opportunity for you to show your teacher that apart from having the ability to identify minutes in a poem, passage or short storytelling, you can say something significant about your identification. Take it if you are looking for a hidden treasure. All the details you discover are your treasures, and at this moment you have all the freedom of deciding how to handle them.

In most occasions, you will discover that you enjoy the process of writing a close-read essay. Because you will give meaning to every single word used in a text, you will find the process fascinating. Taking a more in-depth look at the discovered details will also help you find out a deeper and more detailed meaning of the text enlightening your experience of it. Before you make your conclusion to leave your assigned task on writing a close-reading text, give yourself a chance to see the beneficial side of it.

Definition of a Close Reading

As the name suggests, a close reading essay refers to an essay that is focused on the tiny themes within a literary story, passage, or poem. Most of the essays you might have come across or written were concerned on broader topics like justice, adulthood, loneliness, love, and jealousy. The mentioned issues are called broader themes because they deal with problems that are common in texts. They are not hard to find in any document. They are readily seen like traffic signs. Characteristics explained in the text would sometimes refer to them directly. At some point, these themes would be repeated in the text. They come in the mind of readers once they reference their work.

On the other side, close reading assignments seek to explain what would be disclosed if one decides to look at these broad themes deeply. It is like examining the bottom of the rock and describing your experience and discovery (“How to Write a Close Reading Essay,” 2019). In close reading essays, the writer is expected to explain in detail how smaller teams have been used creatively to connect to the larger theme. In such articles, you should be in a position to tell how the writer has used his language and what has been left out. This essay is like a deep scuba that dives to the bottom of the text, ocean to find out how the author’s choice of words, imagery, tonal variation, and other literary elements work together to bring out a unified theme in the text.

Though the close essay intends to look beyond the typical focus of the book, most aspects uncovered in the text acts as a road map towards the larger theme. Most items you identify in a close reading essay help you understand other issues of the essay. Also, they will give you a better understanding of both nuance and understanding. This refers to both big and smaller themes that are found within a text.

Despite the reader looking at hidden information within a text, you will be expected to gather a lot of information from any given portion of information. This essay requires you to interpret the text correctly and be in a position to apply it in the larger theme or the rest of the story. Your writing should have the ability to inspire readers to research and learn more about what you have discussed. Once you are through with this article, you will get a better insight into all that is needed from you as far as close-reading essays are concerned. You will be more than confident to handle one essay and get not just a passing grade but a grade you have ever yearned to get.

Steps of Writing a Close Reading Essay

The first thing to do after given a close reading assignment is to read it at least thrice. Your first reading is to equip yourself with the content. Then your second reading is to extract some finer details within the text. Your final reading is for you to understand the whole text and is achieved when you read slowly and keenly. As you read the text, you might have come across information that you find essential. Underline it for quick reference while writing. Necessary information can be repeated words, unusual syntax, provocative punctuation, or details you did notice during your first reading. You should invest your time in this stem by reading the text slowly. Remember discoveries are not made through a rush.

Note down all the information you have underlined in the text. Try to figure out what might be connecting them or even a portion of them. From your list, what can you conclude about the theme, the larger piece, and the author’s intention?

Then write down the conclusions you have made above in a piece of paper. Your most robust finding should be circled and redesigned into a thesis statement.

From your underlined evidence, circle the one that strongly conforms to your thesis statement. Then come up with a hook that will connect to your broader idea of your thesis statement. For instance, if your thesis statement was about being watched unaware shown in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, you may decide to start using a quote or interesting statistics on being watched unaware.

Then make sure you discuss the above concept in an additional three to four sentences but still in your introduction. At the end of your submission, state the thesis statement you had prepared. In the first paragraph of your essay body, discuss the primary textual evidence. It should be brief and direct to imagery, language, syntax, repetition and any other thing you had noticed while reading the text of. Explain why it is essential and how it supports your thesis statement.

Repeat step 8 with the other two body paragraphs in your essay.

In this step, you will have to summarize your argument using a new fashion of language. You should do this without the slightest kind of repetition. Try in your summary to remind your readers how the details will help them get an understanding of the text. To achieve this, you have to connect your thesis statement to the bigger picture of the era. If for instance, you are discussing uncanny found in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” you may have to link your thesis statement to the human lineage to make people understand afterlife.

The Format for a Close Reading

The format for writing this kind of essay is not different from other essays you have come across. First, you begin your essay with an introduction and insert a thesis statement at the end of your introduction. After the introduction, you will write three body paragraphs in support of your thesis. In these body paragraphs, you will use detailed textures that are shown as quotes. In your conclusion, you will restate your thesis statement but using a new fashion of language making reference to the content of your essay.

In case you are writing a close reading on a short story book or poem, then there is no need for you to specify the section your essay will deal with. But for longer pieces of writing or stories, you will have to specify using your introduction. For instance, you can decide to write something of this sought: “The paper will explore the author’s use of color in chapter one of The Red Badge, of Courage.” Also, you can state it this way: “The paper will examine repetition of the gerund in the Burial of the Dead in T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Waste Land.”

Close Reading Essay Topics

• Daisy’s voice and words in ‘The Great Gatsby’: Explain their indication on the author’s character.
• The Beverage used in ‘The Great Gatsby’: how they display both emotional and actual events.
• How does the phrase ‘old spot’ help in identifying the time when the novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ was created?
• What was the author trying to pass across by using Cigarettes and Smoking in the novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’?
• In the novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ pick one slung word used by Holden and argue on it.
• In ‘This is just to say,’ discuss the word choice, structure, syntax, and visual elements that William Carlos used.
• What makes inscrutability more mysterious in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’?
• Discuss how Biblical and religious symbols have been used to drive the narrative in “The Red Badge of Courage”?

An Example of A Close Reading Essay

The most known form of punishment associated with solitary confinement that lies in isolation is torture and its associated structures. It is manifested in the prevention of human association, stimulus, or exposure to the outside world. The above premise helps in shaping the renewed short story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Majority of scholars who have read the story interpret it as a tale by a woman who went mad because of stimulus, isolation and excessive bearing of men who were in her life. Though their interpretation seems legitimate and valid factors for the heroine, the author places a very deliberate hint in the story that proposes that sees the story as a ghost story and there is something hidden that was influencing the main character in this story.

It takes the author great pain to describe the grand empty house that was rented by the couple during summer. The house seemed to be having an exciting story of darkness. The house itself is in an environment that is isolated about three miles from the nearest town. These make me imagine English places I have read about. They have hedges, walls, and gates that are surrounded by other several little houses for workers. Even though the experience described in the story does not sound dark, the author aimed at provoking the subconscious mind of the readers. Coming across the word ‘English places’ will make readers think of dark, expansive, and gloomy places. The use of hedges, walls, locks, and gates helps in bringing the idea of captivity for those associated with such places. The author’s reference to several small houses surrounding the place shows that there are numerous places for individuals and bad things to hide in.

The concept of the dark history of the mentioned house is found in the following information. “There were greenhouses, too, but they were all broken now.” This is a provocative technique used by the author, and he deliberately avoided to mention that the houses were empty, or had rusted or needed some renovation. The only possible way of breaking a greenhouse – to break the glass used to construct it. This shows that there is an existence of some violence, provocation, or rioting that resulted in the described situation.

Further detail leaves the reader in anxiety. “There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for some years.” This technique is highly suggestive, and one would wonder the kind of trouble that would keep the place empty for that long duration. If there would be a suggestion, then it is like heirs are trying to vie to get to live in the place. This is if the situation is as described above. The situation suggests an ugly situation between family members or even chaotic in the country.

“Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.” The above statement shows that there was someone who was held captive early. In the story, we are told severally that in the windows, there were bars and “rings and things” were also found on the walls. The fact the author tells us of gouges and plasters that had been dug shows that someone was really trying to escape from this place. This further creates a picture in the readers that someone was trying to escape but might have died and the ghost would possibly be observing the heroin in another part.

To sum up, Gilman relied heavily on several details in his book, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ to bring out the aspect of the ghost story in the traditional setting. In this story, what drives the heroine insane is the existence of a supernatural being as well as forced seclusion. Information on the occult and uncanny is prevalent. It would be possible that the house was possibly a hidden place for murder. Because of torture and murder that took place in this house, it is full of marvelous energy and dark spirits and is waiting for any vulnerable individual like the main character in this case. Though the character goes mad, it would be even more challenging to start blaming all those surrounding her. The author intentionally suggests that there is something unusual with the room and the house in general and the history of this mysterious house would be sordid.

A close reading essay helps you to put in place your detective gears and examine a piece of writing more keenly. The intention of teachers giving out this kind of assignment is to test your ability to notice smaller details and relate them to the whole work. As a student, we would advise you to concentrate on the minor aspects of either poem or story provided. This is where most students and some scholars fail as they only focus on the major themes and forget about the smaller issues. After discovering them, then let the details you have found guide you throughout your discussion. This would be more fun as it gives you an opportunity to view the literary piece from another perspective.

As we always advise students, if you still think you have a challenge handling this kind of assignment contact us. Our writing team is well equipped and has enough experience on this assignment so you should not worry at all. It will take them the shortest time to help you get on track with your writing, or if you are going in circles, they will guide you refocus your work.

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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.

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• Apr 9, 2023

Close-Reading Strategies: The Ultimate Guide to Close Reading

Close reading helps you not only read a text, but analyze it. The process of close reading teaches you to approach a text actively, considering the text’s purpose, how the author chose to present it, and how these decisions impact the text.

The close reading strategy improves your reading comprehension, your analysis, and your writing. Close reading will help you write essays and perform well on standardized tests like the SAT Reading Section . Any age group can practice close reading, and it works with any text.

This article will outline everything you need to know about close reading, including what it is, why it's important, how to do a close reading, and 5 strategies to improve your close reading abilities.

What is close reading?

Close reading is a reading method that examines not only the text’s content but how the author’s rhetorical, literary, and structural decisions help develop it to achieve a purpose.

No matter the text genre–narrative, informational, argumentative, poetry, or editorial–the author uses language to achieve some purpose: to inform, convince, entertain the audience, or a combination. In every text, the author utilizes a variety of rhetorical and literary strategies, or devices, to achieve these effects on the audience.

Common literary strategies or devices that impact every text:

Diction: Word choice

Syntax: Sentence structure

Tone: Emotion of the words used

Conflict: Problems, issues, or disagreements within or related to the text

Structure: The order of the words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas

Point of view: The speaker’s perspective on the events or subject matter

Genre: The category or “type” of text–fiction, science-fiction, scientific article, etc.

Imagery: The sensory or visual language the author uses to describe the subject, characters, setting, etc.

Close reading observes how the author uses these strategies to develop the text, create an intended effect upon the reader, and build a central message or main idea.

Why is close reading important?

Close reading is important because it helps you comprehend the text, develop deeper ideas about its meaning, and write and talk about the text with more sophistication. When you consider not just what the text says, but how and why the author constructs it that way, you move beyond surface-level reading into analysis.

Close reading allows you to notice details, language, and connections that you may have previously overlooked. These observations create insights about the text, leading to richer class discussions, better essays, and more joy while reading. Observing an author’s strategies also improves your writing, as you gradually begin to emulate the strategies you notice.

How do you do a close reading?

Do a close reading by selecting a text passage, closely observing the writing style and structure while you read, noticing the author's language choices, underlining and annotating your observations, and asking questions about the text.

General Close-Reading Process:

Select a text passage: Pick a piece of text or passage that you want to analyze. The sweet spot usually lies between roughly one and three paragraphs. Songs and poems also work well for close reading.

Notice the writing style: As you read, ask yourself “What stands out to me about this author’s style? What patterns, words, and choices do I notice?” Pay attention to the emotions you feel as you read, identifying what in the text triggers that response.

Observe the structure: Notice how the author orders words, sentences, lines, and paragraphs. Consider how this order builds an image or idea about the text’s subject. Ask yourself, “How does this structure develop my understanding of the subject?”

Notice language choices: The author selected particular words to build a tone, evoke images in the reader’s mind, create a nuanced argument, or have some other effect on the reader. Note powerful or significant diction–word choice–and consider the purpose it serves, or how it develops any of the devices listed above, such as tone or imagery.

Underline: Have a pencil while you read and–if you’re allowed to mark the paper–underline any observations you make. Underline any of the devices listed above, anything that has an effect on you, or anything you enjoy. There’s no right or wrong way to underline a text, so underline whatever catches your interest.

Annotate: Record your thoughts and observations as you read, by writing in the margins, on a separate sheet of paper, or using an assigned annotation format. Feel free to note questions, individual words, literary devices, or anything you notice.

Ask questions: Along with the annotation ideas listed above, formulate questions and write them down while you read. Generally, the best questions begin with how or why . For example, “Why did the author use this word?” or “How does this detail affect the reader?”

5 Close Reading Strategies to Improve Analysis and Comprehension

Here are my 5 favorite strategies to improve your close reading, analysis, and reading comprehension:

Generate a purpose question (PQ)

Annotate with your PQ in mind

Track the 5 Ws

Notice the conflict

Identify the tone

Generate a Purpose Question

A purpose question (PQ) is a question you pose before reading a text to help you read actively. You can create a PQ for a text of any genre or length–a novel, a short story, a poem, a passage, or an informational text–and there is no right or wrong way to create a PQ.

To create a purpose question, consider any pre-reading context you have:

Text images

School assignment guidelines

Any task you’re expected to complete when you finish reading

Examine the text’s title to guess what the text is about, then formulate an open-ended question that relates to the text, what it might say, and what might be important. As you read, seek and underline information that relates to your PQ and helps you answer it. By the time you finish reading, you should be able to answer your PQ.

Generally, the best open-ended questions begin with how or why .

Your PQ will sometimes simply repurpose the text’s title into a question, like these examples:

Text TitleExample PQ “A Good Man is Hard to Find?” (fiction)Why is a good man hard to find?“The Lady with the Dog” (fiction)What is so important about the lady and her dog?“The Fringe Benefits of Failure” (essay)How can failure be beneficial?“An Epidemic of Fear” (essay)What is causing the epidemic of fear?“New Therapies to Aid Muscle Regeneration” (article)How do these new therapies aid muscle regeneration?

Write down your PQ, either on the text itself or on a separate sheet of paper for note-taking. When you read with a purpose–like answering a question–it becomes easier to identify and annotate what’s important in the text.

Annotate with your PQ in Mind

It’s much easier to take good notes when you have a reading goal–something to answer or accomplish, such as a PQ.

As you read and annotate the text, refer to your purpose question. Search the text for details that relate to and help you answer your PQ. When you find relevant details, underline them and record how the detail relates to your PQ. If you can’t write on the text itself, record your thoughts on a separate paper or word document.

Here’s how and where I annotate a text, and what I usually write in my annotations.

Where and How to Annotate a TextWhat to Write Underline the text Questions –what did you ask or wonder while reading?Write in the margin Thoughts and connections –what did the text make you think about?Use a separate sheet of paper Comments –what made you underline that particular word or detail?On your phone or computer–use a notetaking app or a Google Doc Significance –why is that particular detail important?

As you read the text, constantly ask yourself, How does this information help me answer my PQ? When you’re finished with the text, you should be able to answer your purpose question–and the notes you’ve taken should help you do that.

To monitor your own comprehension while you read, remain aware of the text’s 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why.

After every sentence or section, reflect to verify the following information:

Who: Who is the text about? Who is narrating, or telling the story?

What: What is the text about?

Where: Where do the text’s events take place?

When: When did the text’s events occur?

Why: Why did this main event occur? Why did the storyteller write this text?

At any given point while you read, you should be able to identify this context. If you realize that you’re disoriented and have lost track of some key Ws, revisit the most recent sentences to see if you missed something critical. Then, continue on with the text, mindfully searching for the information you’re missing.

If you finish reading and still feel uncertain about this core information, revisit the first paragraph. A passage’s first paragraph usually provides fundamental details–such as the characters, setting, main event, and the story’s general context. Revisiting this paragraph sometimes alerts you to basic details you overlooked during your first readthrough.

The 5 Ws also work as an annotation strategy, where you underline all textual information related to the 5 Ws.

Notice the Conflict

Every story or passage centers around at least one conflict. A conflict is the characters’ primary struggle–the issue they’re faced with, the main challenge they try to overcome.

Keep in mind that a conflict can be external or internal. An external conflict takes place outside the character in the physical world–such as a fistfight, an argument with a friend, or committing a bank robbery. An internal conflict takes place inside the narrator–such as struggling to get over a girlfriend, becoming jealous of a friend, or worrying about how peers will perceive a behavior.

As you read, ask yourself “What is the character’s primary issue or challenge?” While there may be more than one, try to identify the most central, prominent conflict. By identifying a story’s conflict, you can observe and annotate how the author emphasizes it through storytelling elements–character development, tone, word choice, and structure. Underline these elements and write a few words describing how they build or relate to the central conflict.

Identify the Tone

A text’s tone is the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter–actions, characters, or events in the text. Every piece of writing has multiple tones, which develop and change throughout the text according to the writer’s word choice.

Describe the tone using adjectives :

To Kill a Mockingbird began with a lighthearted tone and progressed to a dark , tense tone as the plot continued.

The article about bees used an informative , professional tone.

My writing always has an informal tone, even when I want it to be academic .

Hermann Hesse ends Siddhartha with a serene and beautiful tone.

Each sentence carries a unique tone, causing a story’s tone to change subtly every few lines. As you read, notice how the tone develops as the story continues. Underline the words and phrases that most powerfully create the tone, describing the tone in the margin. If you notice a sudden shift in tone, underline the point where it changed and write a few words about how it changed.

Close Reading Strategies Make You a Better Reader

Close reading is more than just a classroom assignment–it’s a reading method that helps you analyze and comprehend all texts. It will help you in class, on your own, and on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT Reading Sections .

While you may initially practice close reading by underlining and writing notes in the margin, over time it will influence the way you approach all texts: You will find yourself prereading a text, considering the title, generating a purpose question, tracking the 5 Ws while you read, asking questions, observing the text’s conflict, and noticing the tone.

Close reading helps you comprehend difficult texts, and it helps you write essays for class. It’s an all-purpose writing strategy.

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Honors291g-cdg’s blog, how to write a close reading essay.

CLOSE READING The purpose of close reading is to suspend personal judgment and examine a text in order to uncover and discover as much information as we can from it. In close reading we ask not just “what does this passage say?” but also “how does it say it?” and even “what does it not say?” Close reading takes us deeper into the passage, below its surface to the deeper structures of its language, syntax and imagery, then out again to its connections with the whole text as well as other texts, events, and ideas. Desired Outcomes: • Identify and reflect on major themes in the book. • Analyze specific details, scenes, actions, and quotations in the text and discuss how they contribute to your interpretation of the meaning of the larger text. • Extract as much information from a chosen passage of writing as possible. • Listen to and understand others’ differing (perhaps) interpretations of the same text. • Generate questions and topics for further inquiry.

Assignment One: A Close Reading Instructions Now that you’ve finished the book, choose a passage from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and compose your own close reading of it. Apply the same techniques to this paper that were applied in in-class close readings and discussions, now taking into account the context of your chosen passage, additional selections from the text, as well as the book as a whole. Following MLA documentation style, correctly cite your chosen passage and any other quotations from the text that support your interpretations and claims. For help with MLA style, go to the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) and search for “MLA format.” Organizing your close-reading essay In writing your close-reading essay, you may wish to start by introducing the book and describing your chosen passage’s importance within it. You could then offer relevant details to support your thesis. Questions you raise may appear as part of your conclusion, suggesting avenues for further thought and study. Paper length Your paper should be 650-750 words long, maximum. Be detailed but concise. Edit out unnecessary words and redundancies. (Include your selected passage in your paper, but do not count it as part of the total length.) A sample close reading essay is available online. Search the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) for “close reading essay.” Questions to consider as you prepare to compose your close reading Examine the passage by itself • What does this passage explicitly say? • Is there a meaning beneath or beyond the explicit message? What is it? How is it communicated? • What might the passage suggest about the writer’s motivations? • How do the writer’s style, imagery and choice of language create a tone or intensify a meaning? • What specific examples in the passage (and additional passages) support these observations? Examine the passage in light of surrounding passages and the rest of the book • What themes running through the book are evoked explicitly and implicitly in this passage? • How does this passage fit—or not fit—into its immediate context as well as the book as a whole? What insights into the book does it reveal? • What questions does the passage raise about the story being told? • What conclusions can be drawn from this passage about the author and the text? A note about writing You should consider this paper a final version: pay attention to the quality of your writing and proofread your work. Strive to be concise and clear as well as correct. This means writing in a style that’s both academic and accessible. Always keep your audience in mind. You are writing for your interested peers. Grading This essay will be worth 15% of your final grade. Note: You will submit your paper at next week’s class. You will also be asked to summarize your paper and present its main points orally during class discussion. Therefore, you may want to jot down a few “talking points” in preparation.

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• Literary Analysis Essay - Close Reading
• The Writing Process
• Parts of an Academic Essay
• Rhetorical Modes as Types of Essays
• Stylistic Considerations
• Unity and Coherence in Essays
• Proving the Thesis/Critical Thinking
• Appropriate Language

The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to carefully examine and sometimes evaluate a work of literature or an aspect of a work of literature. Examining the different elements of a pieces of literature including plot, character, setting, point of view, irony, symbolism, and style to see how the author develops theme is not an end in itself but rather a process to help you better appreciate and understand the work of literature as a whole. The focus of a literary analysis essay is as expansive as the writers’ interests. For example, a short story analysis might include identifying a particular theme and then showing how the writer suggests that theme through the point of view of the story. It is important to remember that literary analysis does not merely demonstrate a particularly literary element. The focus is explaining how that element is meaningful or significant to the work as a whole. See Essay Organization. 

Close Reading

Close reading is deep analysis of how a literary text function; it is both a reading process and something you include in a literary analysis paper. When you read a text paying specific attention to certain literary elements, looking for particular patters, or following the development of a particular character, you are practicing close reading. Likewise, when you watch a film with particular emphasis on a certain element, you are doing a close reading. Of course, when one writes an essay that teases out a certain element, this is the beginning of a close reading. Like literary analysis more generally, close reading is not a means in and of itself. Close reading helps inform the larger meaning or import of a work.

Literary analysis involves examining the components of a literary text, which allows us to focus on small parts of the text, clues to help us understand the work as a whole. The process of close reading should produce questions. When you begin to answer these questions, you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper. Close reading is a process of finding as much information as you can in order form to as many questions as you can.

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English and Comparative Literary Studies

Example close reading.

Below is an example of a close reading written for the module by a now-graduated student. It demonstrates how to focus on the text and balance close reading with cultural context (although is slightly longer than the essays we now ask you to write).

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Mont Blanc' (ll. 1-48)

(Chloe Todd-Fordham)

In A Defence of Poetry , Shelley states: ‘[poetry] creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos […] it compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know’ (954). In 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley illustrates a vision of familiarity turned to chaos and creates a landscape of ‘dizzying wonder’ (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock) ‘an awful scene’ (l. 15) that terrifies with its immensity. Shelley’s subject is a vast, immeasurable, all-encompassing landscape; an ‘everlasting universe of things’ (1). In 'Mont Blanc,' the reader is, at first, confronted with ‘the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’ ( A Defence of Poetry 949) as Shelley confuses imagery of enormity and confine, interior and exterior, permanence and transience and separates the human mind from the natural world. To Shelley, the mind is no more than a constant creative channel through which nature flows and ‘rolls its rapid waves’ (l. 2). It is the poetic imagination that unites this limitless landscape with the miniature mind. In a ‘trance sublime and strange’ (l. 35), Shelley transforms perception into feeling and knowledge into poetry. The imagination turns ‘some unsculptured image’ confused by ‘many-voiced’ sounds, and ‘many-coloured’ images, into ‘one legion of wild thoughts;’ a unique sensibility exclusive to the individual. For Shelley, the mind and the natural world are organically connected, bound together by the imagination and expressed through the medium of poetry. In exploiting the natural world, Shelley exposes the individual poetic mind.

'Mont Blanc' is a conclusive poem. Certainly it is primarily descriptive but as the poem unfolds and the reader is exposed to more of Mont Blanc, an educative narrative appears which culminates in Shelley’s reasoned assertion in the final three lines of the poem. 'Mont Blanc,' in its entirety, traces the transformation of the naïve and vulnerable poet into the controlled, rational rhetorician and this progression is also apparent in the first two stanzas of 'Mont Blanc.' The first image of the poem is not supported by the comfortable invocation of the subjective ‘I’ as in Clare’s 'I am,' or Keats’ 'Ode to a Nightingale'; instead the speaker of the poem is belittled by a vast landscape, diminished by a terrifying permanence and lost in ‘the everlasting universe of things’ (1). The casual yet precise use of the word ‘things’ in the opening line suggests that Shelley’s natural world is neither specifically located nor easily contained; instead, it is ubiquitous, sweeping and all-inclusive. In comparison, the individual is tiny and alone. The speaker in 'Mont Blanc' is an absent presence. His physicality is swallowed by the aggressive surroundings so that only the restless voice of an overwhelmed mind remains in the poetry.

A clutter of inconsistent images characterises the poetic voice, reducing it to a mere ‘sound but half its own’ (l. 6). In the first two lines alone, Shelley moves from the colossal to the miniature, the exterior to the interior, and the panoramic to the personal. In a tight, controlled, eleven line pentameter verse, the reader is exposed to a slideshow of images which come into focus briefly and then dissolve each into each. Permanent vocabulary – ‘ceaselessly’, ‘forever’, ‘everlasting’ – follows sporadic, fleeting, kinetic verbs; ‘bursts’, ‘raves’, ‘leaps’, passive mountains and constant rocks are attacked by ‘vast rivers,’ while darkness is usurped by light within a single line. The rhythm and movement of lines such as: ‘Now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom Now lending splendour…’ (ll. 3-4) imitate the constant fading and illumination of images. With the incessant repetition of ‘now’, the line seemingly blinks between dark and light, and the concept of time is lost to the imminent urgency of the word ‘now’. Until line 34, Shelley’s landscape is not exclusively his own; instead it is a collective experience, ‘many-coloured’ and ‘many-voiced’. The vision of 'Mont Blanc' is ‘a dizzying wonder […] not unallied to madness’ (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock 844). Thoughts are likened to ‘chainless winds’, the senses are confused and mingled in lines such as ‘to drink their odours’ (l. 23), dark transforms abruptly into light in the line; ‘…caverns sail / Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams’ (ll. 14-15), and the landscape is filled with this ‘old solemn harmony’ (l. 24), ‘a loud lone sound no other sound can tame’ (l. 31). Nature is both assuredly permanent and restlessly ephemeral. Shelley vividly describes ‘an awful scene’ (15); frightening, savage, destructive and devoid of human contact. With these images, Shelley seeks to overwhelm his reader. Both the reader and the poet are vulnerable and impressionable, their minds exposed to the terrifying force of the natural world.

Paradoxically, fear and irrationality are conveyed in a rigid, formal structure. The iambic pentameter becomes the heartbeat of the poem, driving it forward to a conclusion. Like Mont Blanc, the regular pulse of the metre and the delicately placed rhymes and half-rhymes make the poem an organic construct. Ironically, 'Mont Blanc' is not ‘some unsculptured image’ but is a carefully chiselled poem, from start to finish. Shelley’s oscillating images are seemingly ‘spontaneous overflows’, ("Preface" to The Lyrical Ballads ) ‘wild thoughts’ that ‘burst and rave’ but the elevated blank verse suggests that, while Shelley seems forever searching for his own voice in the ‘many-voiced vale’, it is, in fact, there from the beginning. The exclamatory climax to Part II, ‘thou art there!’ is forty-eight lines too late.

When the iambic pentameter does fall apart it is calculated. As ‘the voices in the desert fail’, Shelley is subjected to a dialogue implicit in nature. Both the speaker and the reader are made dizzy by a sickening of the senses and the continual oscillation of imagery. In the following quotation, Shelley employs anaphora, caesura and repetition to create an accumulation of replicated words, an intense build-up of enduring imagery and a didactic, pulsating rhythm which climaxes with the exclamation. ‘Dizzy ravine!’: ‘A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame: Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound…’ (ll. 31-3) With the expletive ‘Dizzy Ravine!’ there is sudden release and the overwhelmed mind of both the poet and the reader is soothed by the comforting evocation of the subjective ‘I’. Shelley has experienced – in his own words – ‘the sublime’. ‘Dizzy ravine!’ is an ‘awful’ expression of fear, a temporary paralysis of language, a sudden gasp which disrupts the natural rhythm of blank verse; indeed, the shape, movement and pace of the poem in these lines imitates the sensation of the sublime.

With the introduction of the first-person, Shelley claims the language as his own and asserts control. At last, specificity invades the terrifying collage of contradictions cocooned within the mind of the poet, and trapped in the pentameter of Part I; Shelley sees Mont Blanc with a cleansed perspective. As rationalist, Shelley takes possession of the language, vocabulary and metre of the poem; ‘the voices of the desert’ meld into one unique voice and the oxymoronic images of dark and light, sleep and unrest, interior and exterior are arrested in ‘one legion of wild thoughts’ by a formal, empirical - almost scientific and political - language: ‘My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange…’ (ll. 38-40) Nature and the poetic mind become one and the same thing at this point in the poem. The human mind is a microcosm of the natural world; it is both untamed and tranquil. Just as ‘the woods and winds contend[ing]’ in part I allegorise the divided conscience and the ‘secret springs’ act as a metaphor for the private, unfathomed wealth of the imagination, the mingling of ‘thou’ with the pronoun ‘I’ in lines 34-35 confuses the subjectivity of the poem so that the natural world and the human mind are bound together by the imagination. The human mind is constant and fixed - as is Mont Blanc – while nature is constantly changing and moving – as is Mont Blanc’s verdant decoration; ‘the vast rivers’ and ‘the wild woods’. As Shelley states in a Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock, nature and the mind inseparable: ‘…one would think that Mont Blanc was a living being, and that the frozen blood forever circulated through his stony veins’ (844) Unlike the passive human mind, the imagination is active; it ‘seeks among the shadows’, processes knowledge into art, sorts through the ‘many coloured’ perspectives of a terrifying world and arrives at one single unifying vision, unique to the individual. The imagination is real, unlike the images it creates. Like the material delusion that is poetry, like the artificial literary construct of ‘the gothic’ that Shelley alludes to in the following lines: ‘Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image…’ (ll. 46-47) poetry, to Shelley, cannot be wholly authentic. Shelley cannot replicate reality as Wordsworth sought to do in The Lyrical Ballads ; instead, Mont Blanc is ‘a faint image’ of the natural world. Indeed, in 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley’s vulnerable, frightened speaker arrives at the conclusion that poetry is ‘a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts’. ( A Defence of Poetry 947) The imagination is a means to control ‘the everlasting universe of things’, to process thoughts and prompt the ‘secret springs’ of poetic expression; it ‘compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know’ (954).

It is ‘in the still cave of the witch Poesy’, ‘among the shadows’, where the imagination marries nature to the human mind. Here, the ‘universe of things’ is no longer alarmingly permanent, idealistic and ‘everlasting’; instead, it is definitive, exact, ‘clear.’ In contrast to the destructive, ‘Power’ that bursts ‘through these dark mountains like the flame’ (l. 19), the final image of Part II is one of softness and tranquillity:

‘Now float above thy darkness, and now rest […] In the still cave of the witch Poesy.’ (ll. 42-44) With the affirmative exclamation ‘thou art there!’ Shelley’s desperate search for external stimuli has led him, not into the wilderness of the natural world, but inside himself, into ‘the still cave of the witch poesy’, to the reality of his own poetic imagination.

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Close Reading Strategies: A Step-by-Step Teaching Guide

Slow down, think, annotate, and reflect.

In the age of ChatGPT and other AI , using close reading strategies doesn’t come naturally to students. When students get a new assignment, their first instinct may be to race to the finish line rather than engage with text. This means students will miss a lot of nuance and meaning as they move through school.

On the other hand, a close reading of text requires students to slow down, think, annotate, and reflect. The ultimate idea? We get more information and enjoyment from reading and working with the text when we use close reading strategies.

What is close reading?

Close reading is a way to read and work with text that moves beyond comprehension into interpretation and analysis. Put another way, close reading helps readers get from literal to inferential understanding of text.

After a close reading, students should understand what the text says and understand ideas embedded in the text, like a cultural perspective or religious opinion. They’ll also have an idea of what the text means to them, and what their opinion about it is based on more than just an offhand feeling. In class, close reading may take multiple class periods to complete and should have a goal at the end—a discussion or essay or some way for students to share what they’ve learned.

Read more: What is close reading anyway?

Here is our step-by-step  guide with strategies for teaching close reading:

1. choose the perfect passage.

Image: Jennifer Findley

As you’re planning texts for a lesson or unit, start with what you want students to get out of what they’re reading. So, if you’re studying text structure, choose books or articles with interesting text structures. If you’re studying character development, find a passage that shows how a character changes or evolves. The point: There has to be something to find in text so that students aren’t grasping at straws.

Read more: How To Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading

Tip: Texts should be at or just above students’ grade and reading level, but they don’t have to be dense with text. Here’s how to use picture books in close reading lessons .

2. Prepare students by teaching annotation

Source: The English Classroom

Close reading will require some prep work. Students have to know how to annotate effectively, pulling out and making notes on the most important parts, i.e., not highlighting everything. Spend some time at the start of the year or unit teaching students how to identify and mark the most important parts of a text (new or key words, main ideas, pivotal plot points).

3. Students read the text for literal comprehension

First, have students read the entire text. The text should take less than one class period to read through once, so a chapter or article or even a few paragraphs could be enough. The first time students read, they’re reading for a general understanding and the main idea. They can think through:

• What is this story about?
• What information does this article contain?
• What is literally happening?
• What is the message or purpose?

4. Check in

After the first reading, check in with students to make sure they have a clear, literal understanding of the text. If they don’t, clear up misconceptions. If they do, move on to the second reading.

5. Chunk text in preparation for read 2

Image: iTeach. iCoach. iBlog.

Before the second reading, have students separate the text into paragraphs or chunks. Number each chunk. This way, when students review the text, they can easily refer back to paragraph 1 or chunk 2 and all be on the same page.

6. Work with text-dependent questions

Image: Instructional Coach

Now that students have a clear understanding of what the text is about, introduce the text-dependent questions that students will be working with in their close reading. Text-dependent questions are those that can only be answered using the text. For example, a question like “Why did Jeremiah eat a bullfrog?” rather than “Why is it not a good idea to eat a bullfrog?”

Questions that you work with should also range in their complexity. If the passage is more complex in terms of structure, content, or vocabulary, the questions may be less complex. But if a passage is easier for students to work with, the questions can be more advanced.

7. Set the end goal

Students shouldn’t be reading just to read. Explain the end goal—a Socratic seminar discussion, a partner discussion, an essay, a project. Once students know how they are going to respond to the questions, they’re better able to think through how they’re going to show what they know.

Here are creative ways to use close reading .

8. Time for reads 2 and 3

Image: Reading Ladies

Now that students have the question, the text, and the end goal, they’re ready to reread. The second time students read the text, they’re reading it to annotate for their own understanding. This is also the point where you’ll want to break students into groups—which students can work independently and which need some, or a lot of, support to complete the read?

Some texts will require a third reading for students to fully prepare, or students may need to reread chunks or paragraphs even more to get what they need. The important part is that students understand that rereading is an important part of close reading.

9. Respond to the text

This is it! The final close reading discussion. In this response, students will:

• Summarize what they read.
• Answer the text-dependent questions.
• Include evidence to support their ideas.
• Draw conclusions about the meaning of the text.

Have some way for students to plan out what they are going to say or write, and have them turn in their annotated reading so you can refer back to it if you’re confused about how they got from point A to Z.

10. Reflect

Every so often, reflect on how close reading is changing what students are taking away from what they read. Close reading should shape their reading skills and how they approach text beyond your class, but students may need support seeing the connection.

11. Level up

As students get more comfortable with close reading, you can level up their discussions by:

• Having students develop their own questions after they read a text or as you progress through a longer text.
• Using texts that are more complex in terms of content or structure.
• Challenging students to do a close reading of a picture book or graphic novel, rather than full-on text.

What strategies do you use to teach close reading in your classroom? Share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group  on Facebook.

Read why close reading can be the most fun lesson in your week ..

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Poetry: Close Reading

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Introduction

Once somewhat ignored in scholarly circles, close reading of poetry is making something of a comeback. By learning how to close read a poem you can significantly increase both your understanding and enjoyment of the poem. You may also increase your ability to write convincingly about the poem.

The following exercise uses one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets (#116) as an example. This close read process can also be used on many different verse forms. This resource first presents the entire sonnet and then presents a close reading of the poem below. Read the sonnet a few times to get a feel for it and then move down to the close reading.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Performing the close read

The number indicates the sonnet’s place in a cycle or sequence of sonnets. Although you may examine the poem on its own terms, realize that it is connected to the other poems in the cycle.

Admit impediments.

Form is one of the first things you should note about a poem. Here it is easy to see that the poem is fourteen lines long and follows some sort of rhyme scheme (which you can see by looking at how the final words in each line). The rhyme of words makes a connection between them. Our first rhyme combination is “minds/finds.” What do you make of this pairing of words?

The first phrase (in this case a full sentence) of the poem flows into the next line of the poem. This is called enjambment, and though it is often made necessary by the form of the verse, it also serves to break up the reader’s expectations. In this case, the word “impediments” is placed directly before the bleak and confusing phrase “love is not love,” itself an enjambment. How does this disconnection between phrase and line affect the reader? How does it emphasize or change the lines around it?

Love is not love

O r bends with the remover to remove:

Notice all of the repetition or use of similar words in the last two and a half lines. When close reading a poem, especially a fixed verse form like the sonnet, remember the economy of the poem: there’s only so much space at the poet’s disposal. This makes repetition very important, because it places even more emphasis on the repeated word than does prose. What does the repetition in these lines suggest? Also, note that we’ve come to the end of our first quatrain (four-line stanza): usually the first stanza of a sonnet proposes the problem for the poem. What is this problem?

Our next quatrain gives a pair of metaphors ( click here to read about metaphors, or click here ) for the “thesis” argued in the first stanza. Look carefully at these images as they relate to the subject of the poem. What actual objects do they describe? Do they bear any similarity to each other? Is there a connection between the use of “ever-“ in line 5 and “every” in line seven?

The image in lines 5-6 is especially complex: What is the “mark” Shakespeare is talking about and how does it “look?” Answers to some of these questions may require some research into older definitions of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Our third and final quatrain uses all of its four lines to expand a single metaphor. Consider how this metaphor relates to the previous ones, and why so much space in the poem is devoted to it, especially as it relates to the poem’s argument. Also, look at similarity of phrasing between line 9’s “rosy lips and cheeks” and line 11’s “brief hours and weeks.” They certainly rhyme, but how does the similar construction affect the reading?

This is our closing couplet (two-line stanza), meant to “resolve” the problem addressed in the poem. Look carefully at the way the couplet starts. Does it provide resolution or not? Note that the first person (“me/I”) has returned (last seen in the first line of the poem). Consider also the negations in the final statement. Have we seen something similar in the poem before? Where and why are the connections made?

From reading to writing

The observations and questions in the close reading notes are by no means complete, but a look over them suggests several possibilities for a paper. Among these possibilities are:

• The repetition of similar words and phrases in the poem
• The use and relationship of the three main metaphors in the poem
• The ambiguity, which begins (“let” suggests that something may or may not be allowed to happen) and ends (the weighty word “if”) the poem
• The connection between the physical and the spiritual.

These ideas need not be exclusive, either. The observations gained from the close reading should provide you with examples and insight for anyone of the proposed essays listed above.

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

• Aphorisms on Close Reading

Close Reading as the Route to Originality : Close reading is the foundation of academic writing because the purpose of academic writing is to make an original contribution to a field of knowledge. Close reading is the way in which something new is discovered about a text.

Process and Product : When we use the term “close reading” – as in, “Do a close reading of Hamlet ” – we usually mean it in two different but related senses: (1) the act (a process) of carefully analyzing a text, and (2) an argumentative paper (a product) based on that careful analysis.

Close Reading and Textuality : As a product, a close reading is a relatively short paper that advances an argument about a relatively small aspect of a text. That “small aspect” could be a brief passage or a specific theme or a certain pattern, but it is not the entire text. It would be impossible to do a close reading of, say, Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Abraham Lincoln’s assassination or police brutality or post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of those topics is much too big for a short close reading, the aim of which is detailed analysis and a tight argument about a specific aspect of a text, event, idea, or phenomenon. The only way in which to accomplish those goals is to scale back the amount of the text that you’re attempting to interpret. Promise less and deliver more.

Beyond Common Sense : As a process, a “close reading” isn’t just a “reading” – i.e., an interpretation of a text. A close reading is an interpretation that focuses on what is not obvious, on what requires “close” as opposed to “surface” attention. A close reading – especially a close reading of a well-known text – requires you to deal imaginatively, even playfully with the text in search of a quirk, detail, or line of questioning that can generate some new insight on the text.

Specificity in Close Reading : This reading is “close” because it revels in details, in the small quirks and oddities of a text as opposed to its major themes. A paper about love in Romeo and Juliet or ambition in Macbeth is not a close reading. A paper about Shakespeare’s decision to write the first fourteen lines of dialog between Romeo and Juliet in the form of a sonnet and the way that this invocation of the sonnet tradition foreshadows the tragic end of this young love – now that’s a close reading.

The Part for the Whole : A close reading does not forget about or ignore the major themes of a text. The very best close readings draw our attention to and interpret some detail or idiosyncrasy as a way to reframe or reinterpret the major themes and conventional readings of a text. In other words, a close reading has an argument that is about a relatively small aspect of a text, but what’s at stake in that argument extends the idea into the more central concerns and features of that text and/or the tradition to which that text belongs. Thus, a close reading looks at something small in a text as a way to say something new about something big in or around that text. 

Defining a Text in Close Reading : For example, in a close reading your “text” (the thing you’re interpreting) wouldn’t be “Shakespeare’s Hamlet .” Your text would be some aspect, issue, problem, theme, etc. in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Your consideration of this aspect of the text would be grounded in a close reading of one key line, passage, or scene, but your close reading would extend out from that passage to consider some bigger implications.

Close Reading Beyond Literary Studies : Close reading is a practice usually associated with literary studies, but the methods and concerns of literary studies can be mobilized for the interpretation of things that aren’t literature. You can do close readings of historical events and social phenomena. You can even do close readings of quantitative data. For example, let’s say you have some data showing that arrests in New York City have steadily decreased over the past three months. A surface reading might assume that crime has gone down, but a close reading could reveal that police have not been making arrests as a way to protest the mayor’s lack of support for the police; crime has not gone down, only arrests, which – if that fact is know by criminals – might mean that crime has gone up even as, and specifically because, arrests have gone down. 

Evidence and Analysis in Close Reading : As in this last example, close reading is all about the way that evidence doesn’t interpret itself. Evidence needs analysis. And evidence can sometimes seem to support one position while the careful analysis of that evidence reveals a different position to be true. In other words, close reading is all about the potential difference between facts and truth, between information and knowledge.

No Outside Sources* : When doing a close reading, outside sources should not be consulted. In contrast to a research paper, which can be filled with dozens of sources, there is a virtue in not using sources in a close reading, especially internet sources such as Sparknotes and Wikipedia . On the one hand, it is important to understand that these sources do not give the interpretation of a text but an interpretation and sometimes a bad interpretation. On the other hand, relying upon these sources is inimical to academic writing, the point of which is to say something new – not to be “right” when your ideas are compared with your professor’s ideas or published scholarship, but to add something new to an ongoing academic conversation. If you rely too heavily on outside sources, whether from the internet or the library, your writing will be derivative. You will find yourself reduced to agreeing and disagreeing with the ideas of others as opposed to generating an original idea of your own.

No Criticism : Just as you should avoid “lowest common denominator” ideas available on the internet, don’t start with (or refer to) “scholars” in a close reading. In a close reading, it is absurd to say something like, “Most scholar’s believe that Hamlet’s fatal flaw is indecision,” because such a statement makes a claim to have read all of the scholarship on Hamlet and to have deciphered the dominant critical paradigm, which is probably not something you have done in your lifetime and which is, in any case, the kind of claim that belongs in a research paper, not in a close reading.

Common Knowledge : While a close reading shouldn’t involve research on the internet or in the library, it can make reference to “common knowledge.” While the definition of “common knowledge” will vary from discipline to discipline and even professor to professor, you can sometimes think of “common knowledge” as the things you learned in high school. Common knowledge is information that is generally known to an educated person.

Questions that the Text Can Answer : Thus, for a close reading, restrict yourself to your text. Don’t search for answers in criticism. Don’t search for answers in history. Certainly don’t search for answers on the internet. Ask questions that can be answered with reference to the text itself, and refer only to the text when responding to those questions and problems.

Here are some possible approaches or strategies for close readings:

• Contrast or complicate a “surface reading” with a “close reading.” 
• Select a key passage that isn’t obvious, one that isn’t famous – e.g., not Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, but the completely bizarre and boring exchange between Polonius and Reynaldo in Act II, Scene i of Hamlet – and show how it works within or comments upon or changes our understanding of the larger text.
• Alternately, select a passage that is famous and produce a reading that isn’t obvious, a reading which has the potential to change a surface understanding of that passage and that text. 
• In any event, be unusual. Give your reader a new way of looking at something he or she thought he or she was familiar with.
• Offer a close reading that is only available due to your own situation and experiences in the world. This is not to say that you should write a “personal essay” that shows how we might learn some “life lesson” from a text. Instead, write an analytical essay that interprets the meaning of the text using your own experiences, identities, attitudes, and beliefs as a prompt for insight. 
• Offer an outsider’s perspective. Don’t worry about or hide the fact that you may be a newcomer to a text, an author, or a tradition. Instead, think of this unfamiliarity as an opportunity. Someone who is previously acquainted with a text, author, or tradition is likely to reiterate the conventional questions and arguments about, say, a text like Hamlet . Someone who has never read or studied Hamlet , however, has no assumptions about what the text is “supposed” to mean, no assumptions about what he or she is “supposed” to be looking for. In other words, someone unfamiliar with a text has an opportunity to interpret it from the ground up, while someone familiar with that text might be restricted, whether consciously or not, to the standard and conventional concerns with that text. The very purpose of a close reading is to offer a non-standard or unconventional perspective, so embrace your outsider’s perspective and generate a reading that makes sense of a text on its own terms, not in the ways that have been sanctioned by previous critics or teachers. 
• Generate a theory. Looking at one specific example (e.g. a poem or a historical event), and your analysis of it, propose (and provide a name for) an abstract theory that might explain other similar phenomena.

Here’s what not to do in a close reading:

• Summarize a plot. You should assume your reader has read and is familiar with your text, whether that text is a book, event, or idea. You don’t need to include large chunks of plot summary. Instead, you should include small bits of orientation that remind your reader what happens in a text and helps that reader locate him or herself in it. In other words, you can assume that your reader has read your text, but not recently.
• Reiterate a point that you or your teacher made about a text in high school, not only because this is an unoriginal idea (which it is), but also because that kind of point is likely to be just the kind of “surface reading” that you’re meant to deepen or complicate in a “close reading.” This is not to say that you should ignore or avoid previous knowledge about a text (something which, in any event, it would be impossible to do). But you should use that previous knowledge as the basis for a new question, not as the basis for an argument that you want to make. 
• Aphorisms on Academic Writing
• Aphorisms on Rhetoric
• Aphorisms on Perspective
• Aphorisms on the Close Reading Process
• Aphorisms on Evidence
• Aphorisms on Analysis
• Aphorisms on Logic
• Aphorisms on Research
• Aphorisms on the Research Process
• Aphorisms on Reference Works
• Aphorisms on Finding Scholarship
• Aphorisms on Annotations
• Aphorisms on Book Reviews
• Aphorisms on Mobile Composing
• Aphorisms on Revision
• Aphorisms on Commenting
• Aphorisms on the Elements of Academic Argument
• Aphorisms on Structure
• Aphorisms on Prose
• Aphorisms on Literature
• Aphorisms for the Social Sciences
• Aphorisms on Higher Education
• Other Handouts and Aids
• Sample Papers

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Inside the rise and fall of one of the world’s most powerful writing groups

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In its bankruptcy filing, the Romance Writers of America blamed “disputes concerning diversity, equity and inclusion” for its membership declining by an astounding 80%. Read from CU expert Christine Larson on The Conversation.

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Los Angeles Dodgers | Alexander: A perfectly eloquent appreciation of…

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Los angeles dodgers | alexander: a perfectly eloquent appreciation of vin scully, the collection of essays edited by former daily news media columnist tom hoffarth is a tribute to baseball's greatest storyteller.

“And he’d always give a different reason” for not wanting to do a book project, recalled Tom Hoffarth, a former sports media columnist for the Daily News and the guy who recently filled that vacuum with “Perfect Eloquence: An Appreciation of Vin Scully,”  a collection of essays about the late Scully, the 67-year voice of the Dodgers.

“I really think, (a), he didn’t want to put the time into it because it would take away from his family, and (b), I don’t think he was interested in feeding his own ego that way,” Hoffarth said in a recent phone conversation. “And then – the reaction he gave to me was that he just didn’t want to favor one writer over another, which was kind of a nice way to say it.”

Consider Hoffarth, then, the unofficial archivist of all things Scully. That was the genesis of the book that was released May 1, a collection of – in a freakish coincidence – 67 essays from people with their own memories of Scully, be it hiding the transistor radio under the pillow at night or having a personal interaction with Vin.

Hoffarth had a lot to work with. Like most of us who occasionally or frequently showed up in the Dodger Stadium press box, he had plenty of conversations with Scully, some informal, some in passing, some when Vin would stop at one of the writers’ tables in the press dining room to chat and kibitz and swap jokes. And occasionally we’d set up formal interviews, chances for Vin to pull up a chair and spend some time with us.

Or vice versa. I’d say that whenever that happened, I got way more out of it than he did. For instance, in 2015 I was working on a retrospective of the 50th anniversary of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, and it was a given that I’d want to talk to Scully, whose ninth-inning play-by-play – ad-libbed but a near-perfect narrative in its own right – was every bit as memorable as Sandy’s pitching.

And at the end of our conversation, he told me: “I didn’t do much for you. I’m sure you’ll do a heck of a lot better with it.”

Hoffarth said he had “30 years’ worth of material, interviews and things that maybe 10 percent gets in your column and 90 percent is just kind of sitting there. Great stuff. You can’t use it anywhere. So I just kind of knew I had all this material. And I think when he died, in August of 2022, I was thinking, ‘I wonder how many people are going to be able to give him a eulogy.’ And then I wondered how many people really wanted to give him a eulogy. I’m sure the numbers that wanted to far outreached the numbers that did, and I think it’s because the funeral was such a private affair.”

This book was their platform, because those essays are the guts of it. Hoffarth wrote the text that bridged the individual remembrances, incorporating some of the material he’d picked up through the years.

It is, appropriately, divided into nine chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of Scully’s life and work, with such subtitles as “Family and Faith,” or “The Voice of a Storyteller,” or “Humility and Sincerity.”

Among those who contributed were:

Baseball people (Peter O’Malley, Bud Selig, Bruce Froemming, Orel Hershiser, Eric Karros, Steve Garvey, Ned Colletti).

Broadcasters (Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Joe Buck, Bob Miller, Jim Hill, John Ireland, Jill Painter Lopez, colleagues Ross Porter and Jaime Jarrín and current Dodger broadcasters Joe Davis and Jessica Mendoza, who were in the booth in San Francisco the night Vin passed away Aug. 2, 2022).

Those of us in the print media (including the late T.J. Simers, Bill Dwyre, Steve Dilbeck, Brian Golden and Lisa Nehus Saxon, as well as current Daily News columnist Dennis McCarthy).

There were others you might not expect, like author/historian David Halberstam, women’s basketball legend Ann Meyers Drysdale, the widow of pitcher and later Dodger broadcast colleague Don Drysdale, and actors Bryan Cranston and Harry Shearer. And Doug Mann, who handled statistics for most of this region’s broadcast crews at one time or another. Mann, like Simers, recently passed away, but each got to see the finished product.

While he didn’t get her to write an essay, Hoffarth did get a promotional blurb from Annette Bening (thanks to L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison, who was a contributor). Also providing blurbs: Political columnist George Will and Ron Shelton, the director of the movie “Bull Durham.”

And Koufax, who simply wrote: “Vin was more than a broadcaster, he was my friend.”

The title of the book, Hoffarth said, came from a May, 2016 Sports Illustrated story by Tom Verducci , early in Scully’s final season as a broadcaster, that detailed a seminar class he had taken as a freshman at Fordham. The title, in Latin: “ Eloquentia Perfecta.”

It was “basically about how to be a good orator, and how you’re not the story,” Hoffarth said. “You’re the conveyor of this, and you do this with humility. (That’s) the perfect way to explain what Vin did.”

Vin was a storyteller at heart, and I’ve always said that he could tell the same story multiple times and it would sound fresh each time. Similarly, a good number of the essays in this book repeated anecdotes or stories, each through an individual’s perception, and … yes, they were fresh. Put together, and grouped as the essays were into different facets of Scully’s life, the book flows seamlessly.

“Vin had so many stories about different things that I forgot about, and it was nice to go and find those things again, whether it was about patriotism, or little things (like) all those note cards that I got over the years (from him) thanking me for a column I wrote or something,” Hoffarth said.

“And the great thing was, it was a common thing so I could get reinforcement from all those other essayists, like, ‘Oh, yeah, he did this for me,’ (or) ‘He made a call to a person that was sick and just gave them a nice feeling that day.’”

And that brings us to the other facet of Vin Scully. As accomplished as he was at his job, he was equally humble and unaffected and willing to engage with the public.

“It’s just a great life lesson on how to be a humble, graceful person, and not think that you have to feed your ego by saying or doing certain things,” Hoffarth said. “You can really have an impact on people just by being nice and kind to them.

“To me, it’s just a great reminder every day, how to try to be a better person. And everything he did was modeling that.”

This is not the last word, either. Hoffarth said his plan is to create a website, the “Vin Scully Appreciation Book,” for others to submit stories and create a living tribute. The initial motivation is to create a giant thank you card for the family by the time the 100th anniversary of Scully’s birth rolls around in 2027.

And maybe, just maybe, even as society and its media evolve, the fundamentals of storytelling will remain consistent, and the art’s greatest practitioner will still have an influence.

“This was a guy who held your attention, and he did it for these reasons and these reasons still stick with people,” Hoffarth said. “It sticks with us when we’re trying to tell stories. We know there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end, and there has to be a purpose to it. And Vin, you know, had the basics of storytelling down. And now we take that into different places in our life.

“Whether we have to write a term paper or a column, we’re all following Vin’s lead.”

Then again – as you might tell from the length of this column – we don’t all have to wrap up our stories before the third out.

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What are AI writing tools and how can they help with making presentations? 

Get your team on prezi – watch this on demand video.

Anete Ezera May 24, 2024

We all like the idea of a tool that can make our lives easier. This is why AI writing tools are considered a revolution across many areas of writing, including presentation content. For businesses, having the ability to use an AI writing tool to refine content, articles, and contracts is an advantage that can boost productivity. 

For students, AI writing tools can be used to fine-tune a finished assignment to the best standard. And, for those who rely on presentations, having a platform with AI text editing tools, like Prezi , can make the whole process much easier. Let’s dive into what AI writing tools are and how they can change the way you work. 

AI writing tools explained

An AI writing tool is a type of software that incorporates artificial intelligence to assist with writing activities. It is built using advanced algorithms and trained on large sets of data to grasp and generate language similar to human writing. You simply input a question or a prompt, and the AI produces text based on patterns it has previously learned.

For example, if you’re having trouble beginning an article, you can input your theme into the AI tool, and it will promptly generate an opening paragraph. Or, if you’re working on a technical document and want to make sure your wording is correct, the AI can analyze your text and propose edits. This technology speeds up the writing process and enhances efficiency, helping to craft everything from detailed reports to imaginative stories and professional articles.

Who might find AI writing tools useful?

AI writing tools are changing the way we approach writing and editing, offering key benefits in various fields. These tools boost productivity, spark creativity, and ensure precision, appealing to a diverse range of users:

• Students and educators: These tools help with composing essays, reports, and academic papers. They streamline research, ensure accurate citations, and improve grammar and style.
• Content creators and bloggers: AI content writing tools are Ideal for generating fresh ideas, drafting articles quickly, and optimizing content for better online engagement.
• Business professionals: Useful for creating clear, professional business communications, including emails and detailed reports.
• Marketers: Helpful in crafting compelling advertisements and social media content that resonates with specific audiences.
• Authors and writers: Assists with developing plots, character building, and meticulous editing, freeing up more time for creative writing.
• Legal professionals: Ensures precision and adherence to legal standards when drafting and reviewing documents.
• Presentation creators: Platforms like Prezi include built-in AI writing tools that simplify creating persuasive and well-structured presentations tailored to audience needs.

For anyone looking to enhance their writing while saving time, AI writing tools are an invaluable resource.

The benefits of using AI writing tools

Whatever you need to write, using an AI writing tool can really boost your content and make the process much easier. Let’s look at some of the key benefits: 

Increase your productivity

AI writing tools help you get more done faster by taking care of drafting, editing, and formatting. This leaves you more time to focus on creative thinking and other important tasks. For teams, using an AI writing tool can alleviate a lot of stress from writers. As a result, team members can focus on more high-level tasks at hand.

Reduce cognitive load

AI writing tools can take over routine and repetitive tasks. This frees up your mental energy for more important aspects of writing like critical thinking and strategic planning. Also, writers can concentrate on building stronger arguments and more engaging narratives without the burden of keeping track of numerous grammar and style rules.

Meet strict deadlines

If you’re behind on an assignment or need to whip up a presentation for tomorrow’s meeting , AI writing tools can make this happen. All you need to do is input your prompt and AI writing tools can deliver your content immediately. 

Spark new ideas

If you’re not the most imaginative person, these tools can suggest fresh ideas and perspectives, helping you explore creative paths you haven’t considered yet. This can make your writing more engaging and enjoyable for your readers.

Improve accuracy

AI writing tools are great for catching mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They also help maintain a consistent style and tone, which is especially useful for lengthy or team projects. Additionally, these tools can offer suggestions for improving sentence structure and word choice, which enhance readability and impact. By streamlining the editing process, they allow writers and teams to focus more on content development and less on the time-consuming task of proofreading.

Simplify research

Not all AI writing tools focus solely on creating content. Some AI tools can gather facts and data relevant to your writing, so you don’t have to worry about research. This saves you time and strengthens your work with reliable and current information. 

Make writing more accessible

AI writing tools are also useful for people with disabilities or those who aren’t native language speakers. Features like text-to-speech and language translation make writing and editing more straightforward for everyone.

Multilingual support

Many AI writing tools support multiple languages, which is invaluable in a globally connected world. They help translate content quickly and accurately, enabling effective communication across different linguistic and cultural barriers. This not only expands your audience but also ensures that your message remains clear and accurate in any language.

Improve communication

AI writing tools can enhance how quickly and effectively you produce emails, reports, and other communications. They’re particularly valuable in business contexts where clear, prompt communication is essential to keep operations smooth and responsive.

Customize content for your audience

With AI tools, you have the flexibility to shape the tone and style of your writing to suit different audiences. Whether it’s crafting a detailed report for executives, injecting some fun into a blog post, or breaking down complex information for experts, these tools help ensure your content hits the right note every time.

Better creative collaboration

AI writing tools can enhance collaboration among creative teams by providing a platform where multiple users can contribute and refine content simultaneously. This benefit is particularly useful in environments where brainstorming and collective input are vital for the creative process.

The tools can suggest edits, align writing styles, and ensure coherence across multiple sections of a document, helping teams merge their ideas seamlessly. This collaborative aspect not only speeds up the creation process but also enriches the quality of the final output by incorporating diverse perspectives efficiently.

Adapt and improve over time

AI writing tools get smarter with use. They refine their understanding of your preferences and style through continuous interaction and feedback. This ongoing improvement means that the more you use the tools, the more closely aligned the output will be with your unique voice and needs.

Each of these benefits shows just how AI writing tools can not only heighten the quality of your work but also transform the writing process into a more efficient and enjoyable experience.

10 popular AI writing tools to explore

You may or may not have come across some type of AI writing tool already due to their growth in popularity. But, they come in various forms and each one can be used for different reasons. Let’s look at some of the best AI writing tools and how their users are benefiting from them. 

Grammarly appeals to everyone – from students and academics to professionals and bloggers who aim to refine their writing. It offers automatic suggestions for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style, helping users craft clear and effective messages. This tool can simplify the proofreading process, save time, and boost writer confidence by focusing on content clarity.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT

ChatGPT is favored by content creators, marketers, and developers for its capability to produce detailed responses and texts quickly. It streamlines the creation of articles, blog posts, and even coding solutions, reducing the time spent on research and drafting. This efficiency makes ChatGPT a great tool for keeping pace with the high demands of various content-driven fields.

Scrivener specializes in supporting writers who manage complex documents, including novels, research papers, and scripts. Its comprehensive suite of tools helps organize thoughts and narrative elements effectively, making it easier to handle large projects. Features that let users rearrange text easily and keep track of multiple storylines or research points transform the overwhelming task of managing extensive writing into a more manageable one.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid excels in providing comprehensive feedback on style, word choice, and sentence structure, making it an excellent tool for authors and editors focused on enhancing the readability and flow of their work. More than just a spell-checker, it acts like a virtual coach that offers detailed reports, identifying and helping to improve stylistic weaknesses, thus elevating the quality of the writing.

AI21 Labs’ Jurassic-1

Jurassic-1 by AI21 Labs offers advanced AI text generation capabilities, making it a go-to for developers and researchers who require robust language understanding and content creation tools. It enables the development of new applications and the enhancement of existing ones with AI-driven functionalities, saving time and adding complexity that would be difficult to achieve manually.

Writesonic is perfect for marketers and advertisers looking to quickly generate content that drives engagement and sales. It helps create ads, product descriptions, and emails efficiently. This tool is especially useful for business owners and digital marketers who need compelling content to attract and retain customers. Writesonic offers templates and automated text creation, making the marketing content process straightforward and effective.

Jasper supports content creators in developing SEO-friendly content to enhance online visibility. It’s an excellent resource for content marketers, bloggers, and SEO specialists focused on maintaining a consistent flow of quality content. Jasper provides help with topic selection and outlines for posts, integrating seamlessly with Surfer SEO for further content optimization. This helps ensure the content not only reads well but also performs well in search engine rankings.

Zoho Writer

Zoho Writer is a sophisticated online word processor equipped with AI capabilities that streamline the creation of business documents, from in-depth analytical reports to concise official correspondence. This tool enhances your writing by offering grammar checks and style refinements, ensuring documents are precise and engaging. Zoho Writer is great for professionals and organizations that require consistently polished and effective communication, making it easier to maintain a high standard of professionalism in every piece of writing.

Sapling AI is an AI-driven tool designed to assist customer support and sales teams. It integrates with various CRM and customer service platforms, automating and aiding in crafting responses to customer inquiries. Sapling AI is adept at understanding customer interaction contexts, offering relevant suggestions that help speed up response times. This tool is great for improving workflow efficiency and ensuring communications are not only quick but also accurately tailored to enhance customer satisfaction.

Rytr is an ideal tool for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and freelancers because of its ability to create content such as blogs, marketing materials, emails, and social media posts. This AI writing tool is particularly useful for producing good quality content quickly. Rytr employs models tailored to different industries, ensuring the material is interesting and appropriate for specific audiences, which is really beneficial for busy professionals. 

Free AI writing tools

For individuals and small organizations managing tight budgets, free AI writing tools are essential. These tools offer strong features that stand up well against paid versions, providing everyone access to quality writing help.

Grammarly free version

The free version of Grammarly checks for critical grammar and spelling errors, essential for anyone needing to polish their text. It also makes basic suggestions to enhance sentence clarity, making it a staple for everyday writing tasks.

Slick Write

Slick Write offers a detailed analysis of your writing, checking for grammatical mistakes and offering insights into your stylistic choices. It also evaluates sentence structure and vocabulary diversity, assisting writers in refining their style without any cost.

After the Deadline

After the Deadlin e is another free AI writing tool that’s excellent for anyone needing to check spelling, style, and grammar in their text. Great for bloggers, students, and professionals, it not only corrects errors but also explains them, helping you learn and improve your writing skills. Additionally, it offers style suggestions to polish and enhance your writing. This makes After the Deadline a good tool for those looking to boost the quality of their work without stretching their budget.

These writing tools are a reminder that although more advanced features may require a subscription, you can still access sophisticated text assistants even on a tight budget. 

AI writing perks for presentation makers

It’s not just traditional writing tasks that AI can assist with. Presentation creators can benefit too. Prezi has integrated an AI text editing tool that makes adding text to your slides, finding the best layout, and refining your words easier than ever before. 

How Prezi AI benefits you 

At Prezi, we believe that crafting the perfect presentation isn’t just about the end result; it’s about a stress-free and simple creation process too. This is why we’re always coming up with new ideas to improve the experience of our users. With this in mind, we introduced Prezi AI along with an AI text-editing tool that makes producing your presentation content much easier. Let’s look at the benefits you can take from using the Prezi AI writing tool for presentations. 

Effortless content creation

Prezi’s new enhancement, the “Ask AI” button, transforms how presentations are crafted, making it an essential tool for anyone juggling tight schedules. This AI-powered feature speeds up the creation process by providing instant suggestions for text, allowing users to swiftly compile and refine their slides. There’s no longer a need to labor over each sentence—just click “Ask AI,” and you’ll get helpful recommendations to enhance your presentation’s content efficiently. This not only saves valuable time but also streamlines your workflow, making it easier than ever to meet deadlines without compromising quality.

Easy adaptations

Picture the convenience of seamlessly adjusting the style, tone, and length of your writing to match different requirements, whether for a class project, a professional presentation, or routine communications. This capability allows for quick customization of your content to suit many different contexts. As a result, you boost your efficiency, freeing up more time to practice your presentation skills or perfect your visual design. 

Reduced stress

The Prezi AI text editing tool is great for reducing stress when preparing presentations. Automating the refinement of text and offering instant suggestions, eliminates the common pressure of crafting perfect slides. This means less time worrying about wording and more time ensuring your message resonates with the audience. 

Whether you’re tweaking a last-minute pitch or preparing a major presentation, the Prezi AI tool helps maintain your focus on the big picture, easing the burden of presentation prep and minimizing anxiety. This allows presenters to approach their sessions with confidence and calm, knowing their content is both polished and effective. 

Keep your message clear and concise

Prezi’s AI tool fine-tunes your presentation’s text and improves readability. This feature makes the editing process smoother, allowing you to communicate your ideas more effectively. By automatically adjusting your content to be more direct and easier to understand, the tool helps you deliver your points powerfully and precisely. Whether you’re aiming to inform, persuade, or entertain, Prezi AI ensures that your message remains impactful and free of distractions. 

Improve visual content matching

Prezi’s AI text editing tool helps match your words with the right visuals to strengthen your presentation. This feature simplifies the process of selecting visuals that complement your message, saving you time and enhancing audience engagement. With this support, your presentations not only convey your message through words but also through compelling visuals, ensuring a cohesive and engaging experience for your audience.

Tailored writing styles

When creating a presentation using Prezi AI, you can tailor your writing style to fit the specific context of your topic. By simply informing the AI about your audience or the purpose of your presentation, it can adjust the style and complexity of the text. So no matter the audience you’re addressing, the language will resonate appropriately with your listeners. The AI’s ability to seamlessly adapt helps maintain the relevance and effectiveness of your message. This makes your presentations more impactful for your specific audience.

Simple revision and edits

Most of us need to practice our presentations several times to make sure they’re just right, and it’s not uncommon to spot areas for improvement or additional points we want to include during these run-throughs. With the Prezi AI text editing tool, making these adjustments is straightforward and efficient. The AI offers intelligent suggestions for improvements and allows for quick modifications, ensuring that your presentation remains dynamic and can be fine-tuned effortlessly. This feature is especially valuable when you’re polishing your final draft, as it helps you quickly incorporate last-minute changes without disrupting the flow of your work.

Guaranteed polished delivery

The Prezi AI writing tool plays a crucial role in ensuring that your presentations are polished and professional. With Prezi AI at your disposal, you can stand confidently in front of any audience, knowing that every detail of your presentation is concise and clear. The AI features refine your wording, ensuring that your language effectively conveys your message in the best possible way. This precision allows you to focus on the delivery of your presentation, secure in the knowledge that the text on your slides complements your spoken words perfectly, leaving a lasting impression on your audience.

A quick breakdown: Capabilities of Prezi AI text editing tool

• Grammar and spelling corrections: Automatically detects and corrects grammatical and spelling errors, enhancing the professionalism of your presentation.
• Content conciseness: Helps streamline content by removing redundancies and unnecessary words, making your points clearer and more direct.
• Customization suggestions: Offers tailored advice based on the type of presentation (e.g., sales pitch, educational lecture, business report) to optimize impact.
• Visual optimization: Provides recommendations on how to enrich the overall design of slides to ensure that they are not only informative but also visually compelling.
• Layout suggestions: The AI can also suggest optimal text placement and formatting to improve the visual appeal and readability of your presentation. It might recommend adjustments in text alignment and size to make the information more engaging.

What might a future with AI writing tools look like?

The future of AI writing tools promises unprecedented advancements in how we manage and produce written content. Considering how much has changed in such a short time—from basic spell checks to sophisticated content generation—imagining the future possibilities becomes both exciting and almost limitless.

A wider range of applications

AI writing tools are set to expand beyond their current uses. We might see them assisting in scriptwriting for virtual reality environments or providing dynamic content adjustments based on reader feedback in real-time for digital publications. These tools could become integral in creating immersive storytelling experiences that adapt to audience reactions.

Deeper integration with other technologies

Future AI writing tools could seamlessly integrate with IoT devices and smart home systems to provide more interactive and responsive environments. Imagine a scenario where your AI writing assistant helps you draft messages or create content simply by conversing with your home assistant device.

Predictive writing enhancements

As machine learning models become more refined, AI writing tools might predict what users intend to write in professional documents or creative pieces by analyzing their past writing patterns and current trends. This could drastically reduce the time spent on content creation, giving professionals and creatives more time to refine their ideas.

Customization and personalization

AI tools will likely offer more personalized writing suggestions, adapting not just to the style or tone needed for different documents but also incorporating the user’s personal flair or organizational branding automatically. This customization would ensure that every piece of content is not only effective but also uniquely tailored.

Transformations in presentation-making

When it comes to presentations, AI’s role is set to grow significantly. Imagine AI writing tools that not only help design and text but also suggest the most effective ways to visually represent data based on the audience’s profile or previous feedback. Such tools could dynamically adjust presentations in real-time during a session based on audience engagement metrics, enhancing interaction and retention of information.

Scenario planning and simulations

Future AI could also offer scenario planning tools that simulate audience reactions to different versions of the same presentation, helping presenters choose the most effective one before the actual event. This could transform presentation preparation from a sometimes-guesswork process into a data-informed strategy.

Emerging AI writing tools

The trend of AI writing tools is growing towards creating more context-aware, adaptable, and unobtrusively helpful AI. Developers are working on AI that can understand more nuanced human instructions and generate content that reflects complex emotional tones or specialized industry knowledge.

Although these are just predictions for the future, the direction of AI writing tools suggests they’ll become increasingly integral to our daily personal and professional activities. These technologies aim to better the process of creating and customizing content, making it quicker and more efficient. Given the swift progress, the potential developments in AI writing tools are as wide-ranging as they are intriguing.

Lighten your load by using the Prezi AI text editing tool for your next presentation

There are many perks of using Prezi . With those in mind, make sure to give the Prezi AI writing tool a try for your next presentation. The opportunity to improve productivity, save time, and enhance your writing so effortlessly is crucial for presentation makers. For those who struggle with ideas or lack creative flair, Prezi AI can help spark inspiration, making your presentation unique and stand out from the crowd. 

Also, Prezi can make you feel more confident by knowing your presentation is engaging, visually appealing, and interactive. So, you can spend less time worrying about presentation mishaps, and deliver your message with boldness. 

Finally, Prezi’s user-friendly platform makes it easy for everyone to have the opportunity to design and create show-stopping presentations. Ultimately, users of all skill levels can effectively harness the power of AI tools for writing to produce compelling content.

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A Modi Win Will Only Mean More Trouble for Indian Muslims

M ore than two years have passed since a picture of me, picked up from my personal social media handles, was put up with a price tag for auction on the internet. It was part of a website called Bulli Bai , a religious slur used for Muslim women in India. 

Why was I targeted? Likely because of my reporting. The perpetrators wanted to shame and humiliate a journalist who was determined to expose the failures of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s gender, caste, and religion-based violence. But more importantly, they wanted to shut up a Muslim woman who had dared to be vocal in Modi’s India.

When the photo was posted, I wondered how the main perpetrator , a 21-year-old student from Assam, who created Bulli Bai could be so consumed by his hatred that he felt compelled to auction Muslim women online for their outspoken criticism of the BJP—journalists, social workers, actors, and politicians. A recent meeting with my lawyer about my case against the Bulli Bai creators, who are still being investigated by the Delhi police, was a painful reminder of the targeted harassment faced by outspoken Muslim voices critical of the ruling BJP. 

As the ongoing election in India is set to finish on June 1, it has once again offered deeper insight into how political dialogue is fueling this culture of hate. 

Particularly, the political campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP has leaned into anti-Muslim sentiment, progressively making Islamophobia one of the defining features of this election.

It was most prominently on display when Modi, in a thinly veiled reference to Muslims, referred to the 200 million Indian Muslim population as “infiltrators” at a BJP campaign rally while addressing voters in the Western state of Rajasthan on April 21. The Prime Minister also accused the opposition Congress party of planning to distribute the country’s wealth to Muslims.

Modi, in his speech, asked, “Earlier, when his [ former Prime Minister and Congress Party member Manmohan Singh’s] government was in power , he had said that Muslims have the first right on the country’s property, which means who they will collect this property and distribute it to—those who have more children, will distribute it to the infiltrators. Will the money of your hard work be given to the infiltrators? Do you approve of this?”

Read More: How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims

This 2006 statement by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasizing that minorities, particularly Muslims , should have the first claim on resources to help uplift their socio-economic status, has been often quoted out of context in political rhetoric, distorting its original intent to uplift marginalized communities.

The reemergence of conspiracy theories like “Love Jihad,” alleging a covert agenda by Muslim men to ensnare and convert Hindu women, by Modi, has surged back into public attention, prominently surfacing at an election rally on May 28, days before the seventh and last phase of the ongoing elections, in the Eastern state of Jharkhand . 

The alarming rhetoric about Muslim population growth too have dominated the election discourse, fueled by the BJP's top leader, Modi, who has been criticized for his Islamophobic remarks, evoking memories of Gujarat's 2002 riots. While he later denied singling out Muslims in an interview with an Indian news channel, his history of linking them to population growth fuels a Hindu-majoritarian conspiracy theory.

Following the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat during his tenure as chief minister, Modi faced scrutiny regarding his administration's lack of assistance to relief camps, predominantly established by non-profit organizations and Muslim communities. During a campaign rally, Modi then insinuated that these camps might transform into "baby factories," implying that Muslims could potentially have families as large as 25 children.

In his Jharkhand rally in May of this year, Modi spoke of "unseen enemies" working to divide society and claimed that the opposition parties were playing into the hands of “infiltrators”. He warned against "Zalim (cruel) love," alluding to Love Jihad. 

As the elections progressed, Modi’s speeches transformed slowly from issues such as “development” to anti-Muslim rhetoric. Unlike previous elections, Modi's campaign strategy this time has shifted towards overt Hindu-Muslim politics, drawing attention to his past record and raising concerns among Indian Muslims, as evidenced by the Election Commission's intervention in a campaign video by the BJP inciting hatred against Muslims. 

The video, shared by BJP Karnataka wing with a cautionary message in Kannada, depicted a cartoon version of Congress’s Rahul Gandhi placing an egg marked "Muslims" into a nest alongside smaller eggs labeled with categories such as "Scheduled Castes," "Scheduled Tribes," and "Other Backward Castes.” The narrative unfolds as the "Muslim" hatchling is shown being nourished with financial resources, eventually growing larger and displacing the other hatchlings from the nest—implying that a Congress government will give away all resources to Muslims. 

This came days after another animated video shared by the BJP’s official Instagram handle was removed on May 1 after a large number of users of the platform reported the video for “false information” and “hate speech.” The video repeats the BJP’s rhetoric on the Congress party, who they allege are“empowering people who belong to the very same community [of] invaders, terrorists, robbers and thieves [who] used to loot all our treasures” while the voice-over says, “If Congress comes to power, it will snatch all the money and wealth from non-Muslims and distribute them among Muslims, their favorite community.” 

Despite its controversial content, the video amassed over 100 thousand likes before being removed.

Both videos come after claims by Modi during his campaign speeches that Congress was planning to “steal” reservations in educational institutes and government jobs among other benefits from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Castes and redistribute them to Muslims.

Modi may be the foremost leader, but he's not alone in setting the tone; other top-tier BJP leaders are also walking in his footsteps. Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah's remarks linking voting for the Congress party to "jihad" in the South Indian state of Telangana have also stirred controversy.

Read More: The Modi-fication of India Is Almost Complete

The India Hate Lab, a Washington D.C.-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, in its report of 2023 paints a grim picture of rising hate speech incidents against Muslims, totaling 668 documented cases. 

These incidents, often featuring calls for violence and spreading divisive theories, were predominantly concentrated in regions governed by the BJP, particularly during key election periods like in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh. Additionally, the report highlighted stark differences in hate speech content between BJP and non-BJP-governed areas, with BJP leaders more frequently involved in non-BJP territories as they strive to expand political footholds.

When leaders resort to fear-mongering, it legitimizes the dehumanization of minorities, creating a fertile ground for extremists. This often isn’t just about one app or incident. It’s about the pervasive atmosphere of intolerance that such rhetoric by the BJP leaders breeds. And those who oppose this type of hate speech want to ensure that no one—regardless of their faith, gender, or caste—has to live in fear of being targeted for who they are. 

Modi’s statement received widespread criticism from the opposition, the intelligentsia community including authors, writers, scholars, academics, and the minority Muslim population of India. The Congress party even filed a complaint with the Election Commission, alleging that Modi's remarks violate electoral laws that prohibit appeals to religious sentiments. Despite public outcry and demands from activists and citizens for action, the Election Commission has so far taken no appropriate action. 

Modi's Islamophobic statements, which have fueled fears over and over again among India's Muslim population, must be viewed within the broader context of his party's strategies—which often invoke religious and communal sentiments to galvanize their voter base. And this time, the aim is to break all previous records by securing 400 plus seats in the 543 seat parliament.

If the BJP is able to secure such a huge majority in the parliament, Hindu majoritarianism will remain unchecked. The hostility towards the minorities could escalate even more, and opposition parties may bear the brunt of state agencies and crackdowns if they ask questions. 

During Modi’s previous terms, Muslims have seen an increased marginalization and discrimination fueled by Hindu nationalist agendas—ranging from difficulty in securing a rented accommodation in urban cities, erasure of Muslim names from roads, cities and railway stations, to the underrepresentation in government jobs and discrimination and vandalism of shops of small Muslim vendors. 

Today, India, a country which once took pride in its ganga-jamuni tehzeeb —a term used to refer to the fusion of Hindu-Muslim cultures—has become a global epicenter of divisive politics. While elections will come and go, the impact of the irresponsible words of Modi and the BJP will stay with the 200 million plus Muslims in the country.

These words have real and dangerous implications for the safety and security of India's Muslim population. Muslims in India currently face increased social ostracism, economic boycotts, and even physical violence. And another victory with an overwhelming majority will only mean more trouble.

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Aaron Bushnell’s Act of Political Despair

By Masha Gessen

On Sunday afternoon, Aaron Bushnell, wearing a mustard-colored sweater under his combat fatigues, walked up to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. As he approached the building, he filmed himself saying, “I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He set his phone down, propping it up to continue filming, poured a flammable liquid from a water bottle over his head, then put on his camouflage hat and used a lighter to set himself on fire. He died in the hospital from his injuries later that day. He was twenty-five years old.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org .

Self-immolation is not a new form of political protest, but it is by no means a common one. Dozens of Buddhist monks have committed self-immolation, to protest the suppression of Buddhist leaders in Vietnam in the middle of the last century and, more recently, to draw attention to Chinese rule over Tibet, and the exile of the Dalai Lama . In the nineteen-sixties, dozens of people in the United States and Asia died after setting themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. Then the practice spread to the Soviet bloc. It began when hope died. In 1968, students in Warsaw and Prague protested, much like students elsewhere in the West that year. In Czechoslovakia, the leadership of the Communist Party instituted liberal reforms, relaxing censorship and promising to build a “socialism with a human face.” It was known as the Prague Spring. But, in August, Warsaw Pact troops, commanded by Moscow, entered Czechoslovakia. The country’s leadership was placed under arrest and airlifted to Moscow. The Prague Spring was crushed . In September, Ryszard Siwiec, a fifty-nine-year-old Polish war veteran, set himself on fire during a harvest festival, insuring that his protest against his country’s complicity in the invasion was witnessed by thousands of people. A more widely remembered act of self-immolation was committed several months later by a twenty-year-old Czech student named Jan Palach, who ran down a street in Prague after setting himself on fire.

Under conditions of democracy, people act politically because they think that their actions can lead to change. They cannot effect change alone, and change is never immediate, but their experience tells them that change is possible and that it is brought about by the actions of citizens. When people do not believe that change is possible, most do not act. Authoritarian regimes rely on a passive citizenry. Totalitarian regimes mobilize their subjects to imitate political action, but in a way that never brings about change. The vast majority comply. But a small minority can’t stand it. Dissidents are people who would rather pay the psychic cost of becoming outcasts because what Václav Havel called “living within the lie” is even worse. Within this minority, there seems to be an even smaller group of people who find their individual helplessness so unbearable that they are willing to do something as desperate as self-immolate. Jan Palach’s protest suicide was followed by several more in Czechoslovakia, then in Lithuania and Ukraine. In the past few years, self-immolation has reëmerged as a form of protest in Putin’s Russia.

What does it mean for an American to self-immolate? Since the Vietnam War, Americans have died by this form of suicide to draw attention to climate change, as the lawyer and conservationist David Buckel did, in Brooklyn in 2018, and the climate activist Wynn Bruce did, on Earth Day, 2022, on the steps of the Supreme Court . Like all of us, these men lived in a world that knows about the catastrophic threat of climate change, pays lip service to the need to protect the human population of the planet, yet fails to act. “Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help,” Buckel wrote in an e-mail that he sent to several media outlets before setting himself on fire in Prospect Park. Buckel had been a lifelong activist, a lawyer who had helped to advance L.G.B.T. rights. But, on the issue of climate, despite being surrounded with like-minded people and being able to act with them, he felt helpless.

We know very little about Aaron Bushnell. His Facebook page shows that he had been following the war in Gaza and admired Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, who is Palestinian American. We know that Bushnell belonged to a generation of Americans—adults under the age of thirty—who express more sympathy with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict. Perhaps, like Buckel, he was surrounded by people who thought as he did yet was constantly reminded of his helplessness. He probably watched as, in November, twenty-two Democrats joined House Republicans in censuring Tlaib for alleged antisemitic remarks, though Tlaib herself, who has family in the occupied West Bank, had taken pains to stress that her issues are with Israel’s government, not its people. He had been watching a Presidential race between two elderly men who seem to differ little on what for Bushnell was the most pressing issue in the world today: the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. What did it matter that Bushnell had the right to vote if he had no real choice? That he was a member of the military surely made matters worse. His final message on Facebook read, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” (The message, which contained a link to the page on Twitch where Bushnell was planning to live-stream his final act of protest, is no longer visible.)

Bushnell wrote a will in which he left his savings to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Perhaps he had watched the hearing of a case in federal court in California, brought by Defense for Children International-Palestine in an attempt to stop the Biden Administration from continuing to aid the Israeli attacks on Gaza . Perhaps he saw the U.S. government argue that there is no legal pathway for citizens to stop the government from providing military aid, even if it can be shown that the aid is used to genocidal ends. A few days later, the judge in the case, Jeffrey White, said that the legal system could indeed do nothing. “This Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza,” he wrote in his decision. Even the federal judge felt helpless.

Maybe Bushnell watched or read about the proceedings of South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Perhaps he listened to the litany of atrocities that grew familiar as fast as it became outdated: the exact thousands of women and children killed, the precise majority of Gazans who are experiencing extreme hunger. That court ordered Israel to take immediate measures to protect Palestinian civilians. Israel has ignored the ruling, and the United States has vetoed resolutions calling for a ceasefire and argued, in another I.C.J. case, that the court should not order Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This was a government that Bushnell had sworn to protect with his life, subverting mechanisms created to enforce international law, including law—such as the Genocide Convention—that the United States had played a key role in drafting.

We know that Bushnell planned his self-immolation carefully. He made final arrangements. He contacted the media. On the day of the action, he carried himself with purpose. His movements appeared rehearsed. Perhaps he dreamed that his protest would awaken a country that had descended into a moral stupor. Like Jan Palach, who ran down a street, and Ryszard Siwiec, who set himself aflame at a dance, Bushnell wanted us to see him burn.

In 2013, the Dalai Lama, long under pressure to call for an end to the practice of self-immolation, called it a form of nonviolence. Nonviolence should not be confused with passivity: as a form of protest, nonviolence is a practice that exposes violence. The philosopher Judith Butler has argued that nonviolence cannot be undertaken by a person acting alone. That would be true for nonviolence as a political act—an act aimed at effecting change, an act founded in hope. Self-immolation is a nonviolent act of despair. ♦

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