by Lisa Moore, Department of English (Posted to the Feminist Pedagogy website by Amanda Moulder)

Goals: The close reading assignments you will write in this class allow you to practice the skills of analysis that you will need to prepare for your final project and for other English classes; and they help you prepare for class discussion by allowing you to think in critical terms about the reading you are doing. Assignments #1. #2 and #3 on the syllabus will take the form of close readings. This handout could be used to help students refine their close reading techniques throughout the semester.

Close reading is a technique of literary analysis that uses careful discussion of the language and structure of a text to make an argument about the text's meaning. Typically, close readings focus on symptomatic moments that reveal the text's structure or ideology (set of values), arguing for the status of such moments as typical of the workings of a particular aspect of the text as a whole. Close readings often trace patterns of imagery, symbol, or allusion throughout a text or portion of a text in order to illuminate how meaning is built up around particular terms, definitions, characters, rhetorical devices or images.
Please keep the following guidelines in mind:
Your analysis will be brief, so it is crucial that it be precise. Focus on an issue limited enough to make an interesting argument about, yet significant enough to illuminate some aspect of the workings of the text as a whole that you believe will help the reader understand the novel. Some examples of possible issues to focus on: a particular image or network of images; a particular scene or description; structural feature, such as the use of dialogue, paragraph organization, use of repetition, how the beginning or ending of a chapter or incident is framed, use of titles or proper names; how a particular aspect of character is represented through the use of concrete details of time, place etc.; the relation of landscape or physical environment to character; the relation between the novel's narrator and other characters. An important part of the assignment will be for you to come up with appropriate, precise, convincing issues for analysis yourselves. Remember, although it is brief, your analysis must have a thesis, that is, a point you are arguing, and it must use evidence from the text--that is, careful quotation and analysis of those quotations--to support the thesis.
Read and comment in writing on your peers’ papers before the in-class peer editing session. Peer editing sessions will be spent discussing papers with your group. Revised version of your paper will be turned in in class on the date marked on your syllabus, in a manila folder that includes the first version of your paper and the copies your peers made comments on.