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Summary Close Reading (ENGL 221)
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Close Reading (ENGL 221)
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ENGL 221January 31st
Technical Workshop: Doing a Close Reading
Required readings: none
Explication du texte/Close Reading
● French “explication du texte” is an organized and analytical discussion of a literary work
as a text, while in English it is called a “close reading”
○ Composed of a series of related observations that provide evidence for a
thesis/argument concerning the text in question
○ The reading should never stray too far away from the text or else that is not a
“close” reading, and deviates away from the point of the text
Observations in Poetry
1. Speaking persona—who is speaking? Is it the author, a speaker or a narrator?
a. In romantic poetry, it is usually the author speaking. To be safe, make sure to still
refer to the persona as the speaker (always) rather than the author
2. Context of the poem/narrative: is the context important?
3. Prosody (scansion): rhythm and sound effects?
4. Diction and semantic elements—what words did the poet choose & meanings associated?
a. Don’t be too quick. The poet had options and they deliberately chose those words.
Assume that they made their choices for good reasons. If you reflect on the poet
choosing that word rather than others, you might uncover things.
b. If sound effects aren’t important to your argument, don’t mention them!
5. Structural, stylistic, tonal, rhythmical, or other aspects
6. Literary form: is it a sonnet, lyric, ode, or a series of couplets?
a. Often if it is a Shakespearean sonnet, the couplet at the end of the sonnet, it will
be a moment that comments on the whole series of the poem before the couplet
i. These last two lines (couplet) are often very important
7. Kinds of imagery, metaphors, symbols: does the imagery have a consistent theme?
8. Frequency of a structure (chorus?) or words, themes, motifs, etc. (Any repetition is
significant and should be included in a close reading)
9. The relation between form and content, what is implicit in an utterance.
a. How does the form communicate something to us that is somehow conveying a
certain sense of what the poem is saying further than what is explicitly said?
7 Points Towards a Close Reading
1. Abstractions (i.e. truth, death, love, history, memory, justice, the divine, power). Is the
abstraction “completed” by a concrete noun? Is there an implicit or explicit comparison?
2. Images and metaphors (poetry relies on evoking meaning through concrete images and
metaphorical comparisons). How metaphors and images interact/relate? What do the
images tell us? What do they evoke?
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