Close reading is a critical way of interpreting literature that was
developed in the first half of the twentieth century by a group of
scholars and intellectuals known as the New Critics. The movement found
success in the American University system because it both
professionalized criticism while simultaneously making refined
literature more accessible to a generation of students who had come to
college with a diverse set of cultural backgrounds. While the
theoretical and critical insights of the New Criticism have not been
“new” for some time, the methodology of close reading that they
pioneered still remains an important technique within literary studies
and a key component in classroom instruction.
The New Criticism derived in considerable in part from the British
scholars I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis as well as from the essays of
T. S. Eliot. However, the movement developed principally in the United
States by critics such as Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom
(who coined the term), and William K. Wimsatt. Of particular importance
are the critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (also a renowned
novelist) who developed a series of New Critical textbooks that were
widely adopted throughout the United States:
Understanding Poetry (1938),
Understanding Fiction (1943), and
Understanding Drama
(1945). These critics developed the New Criticism in response to the
prevailing interests of scholars, critics, and professors who were
particularly interested in the mind of the author or his biography, or
in the social context of literature. Instead, the New Critics argued
that the focus of literature ought to be the text itself and its
literary qualities.
As such, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley established two New Critical
“heresies” that would focus readers on the text itself. The first of
these, the Intentional Fallacy, declared that it was fallacious to be
interested in what the author intended to say. Since the New Critics
held that literature was autonomous and self-sufficient, what was in the
author’s mind did not matter. Furthermore, it was for all intents and
purposes unknowable. What mattered were the words on the page. The
second of these heresies, the Affective Fallacy, addressed the problem
from the other end, the reader. Just as they ignored the intention of
the author, they ignored the feeling of the reader. How literature might
affectively move a reader did not matter because an interest in this
got one away from the text. Thus, when you are constructing your own
close readings, you should leave your own affective responses out of
your explication of the text.
How to Close Read
According to M. H. Abrams, a prominent New Critic himself, the
principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. Literature is a
special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systemic
opposition to the language of science and of practical logical
discourse, and the explication procedure is to analyze the meanings and
interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is
on the “organic unity,” in a successful literary work, of its overall
structure with its verbal meanings, and we are warned against separating
content from form by what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of the
paraphrase.” New Criticism is therefore a formalist school of criticism
and close reading is a formalist activity. Close reading requires you to
pay close attention to form, or the way in which literature
communicates information. When performing a close reading, you should
consider the following:
Structure
- In what genre is the passage written? Is it heavily or lightly marked by genre?
- How does the passage fit in with the overall genre of the work in
which it occurs? (E.g., is it a humorous passage in a comedy, or a
moment of comic relief in a tragedy?)
- Does the passage consist of narration, description, analysis, or discourse?
- Is discourse direct, indirect, or free indirect?
Are there significant repetitions or redundancies? Does one part of the
passage contradict or modify another? Are there significant omissions?
Does the passage move quickly or slowly, briefly or at length?
Diction
- Connotation: why these specific words? (e.g., father, dad, daddy, pa, sire)
- Polysemy: do the words have other meanings or homonyms?
- What parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) predominate?
- Are the words:
- Common or unusual?
- simple or complex?
- long or short?
- concrete or abstract?
- particular or general?
- archaic or current?
- context-dependent or context-independent?
Syntax and Sentence Structure
- Do any sentences or clauses have an unusual word order ("California
is where I went")? (The basic word order in English is
subject-verb-object.)
- Does the word order make us wiat for information or provide it earlier?
- Does it call particular attention to one part of the sentence?
- Does it cause an initial mistkae or ambiguity that it later clears up?
Verbs
- Tense: past, present, future?
- Aspect: neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect?
- Mood: indicative, imperfect, conditional, subjunctive
- Valency: intransitive, transitive?
- Voice: active, passive?
Person and Number
- Are subjects first-, second-, or third-person? Singular or plural?
- Are objects singular or plural?
Tropes
- What figures of speech are used?
- Does the logic of the passage rely mainly on metaphor or metonymy?
- Are comparisons made through metaphor or simile?
Close Reading in Action
In
How to Read Literature (2013), Terry Eagleton, by no means a
New Critic, nonetheless demonstrates the power of close reading to make
critical observations about literature. Eagleton turns to the opening
passage of George Orwell’s
1984 (1949) in order to demonstrate close reading. Orwell’s novel begins like this:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort
to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of
Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty
dust from entering along with him.
Eagleton then goes on to interpret the passage by paying close attention
to the words used in the passage and noting their arrangement. In two
paragraphs he demonstrates how a close reading can be done on just two
sentences:
The first sentence gains its effect from carefully dropping the word
“thirteen” into an otherwise unremarkable piece of description, thus
signaling that the scene is set either in some unfamiliar civilization
or in the future. Some things haven’t changed (the month is still named
April, and winds can still be bitter), but others have, and part of the
effect of the sentence springs from this juxtaposition of the ordinary
and the unfamiliar. Most readers who open Orwell’s novel will know
already that it is set in the future, though in the author’s future
rather than our own…
This is a dystopian novel (dystopia being the opposite of utopia) about
an all-powerful state that can manipulate everything from the historical
past to its citizens’ habits of mind. No doubt it is this state that
gave Victory Mansions its triumphalistic name. Yet it may be that the
second sentence of the passage offers a mild degree of hope in this
dismal situation. As Winston Smith enters the Mansions, a swirl of
gritty dust manages to infiltrate the building along with him; and
though the novel itself seems to find some ominous meaning in this
intrusion (the wind is “vile”)… this gust of grist [may be] rather less
sinister. Dust and grit are signs of the random and accidental. They
represent bits of stuff without rhyme or reason, which fail to add up to
any total or meaningful design. One might therefore see them as the
opposite of the totalitarian regime portrayed by the novel. In the same
way, the wind might be seen as a force that defies human regulation. It
blows as it will, now this way and now the other. There is no rhyme or
reason to it, either. The state, it would appear, has at least not been
able to harness Nature to its purposes. And totalitarian states are
uneasy with anything they cannot dragoon into order and intelligibility.
Perhaps the regime cannot entirely banish chance, rather as Victory
Mansions cannot entirely keep out the dust. (42-43)
Thus, by paying attention to the first two sentences of
1984,
Eagleton provides some insight into Orwell’s novel. There is, despite
the omnipresence of Big Brother, and undercurrent of hope and it is
revealed even in these first two sentences.
Why Do This?
The benefits to close reading are vast. They allow for a thorough
interrogation of the text and its language. Knowing how to close read
will not only help you with basic reading comprehension, but it will
allow you a greater understanding of it; with close reading you will be
able to penetrate beyond the surface meaning of any text. Knowing how to
close read in your day to day life will allow you to see past the
everyday meanings of the texts you encounter and to gain a fuller
understanding of the world around you. That being said, while we will
work on our close reading throughout the quarter, we will not hold
consider it a sacrosanct methodology. As the quarter progresses we will
discuss how we can read historically while still paying close attention
to the language of the text.
This material was developed after consulting M. H. Abrhams’s Glossary of Literary Terms
and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature.
