What is Close Reading?

What are fictional elements?

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 Definitions:
 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.
 One can trace theories and applications of close readings from Classical philosophy to the present,
but the practice took its place as the dominant mode of literary study in the twentieth century as a
result of New Criticism. The New Critics, a group of mostly American critics in the early to middle
twentieth century, reacted to the impressionistic, biographical, and often moralistic approaches of
many earlier critics. Using a formalist approach to a text that sought links between the smallest
details of a work and its broadest, even mythical aspects, the New Critics followed the poet
Coleridge in thinking of the literary work as an organic whole—that is, as like a living thing with
diverse parts but a recognizable order and identity.
 A technique advocated by the New Critics in interpreting a literary work, Close Reading derived
from (I A Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson’s The Seven Types of
Ambiguity(1930). Endorsing the concept of “autotelic text”, that a text is a unified entity, complete
in itself, and containing meaning without any reference to external evidence such as the author’s
intention/history, biography or the socio-cultural condititns of its production, the New Critics,
Wimsatt and Beardsley cautioned against the fallacies of judging a literary work based on the
author’s intention or its impression on the reader, what they called “intentional Fallacy” and
“Affective Fallacy”.
 What does Close Reading Do?
 Close reading focuses on the formal aspects or the verbal/linguistic elements of a text such as figures of
speech, images, symbols, interaction between words, rhythm and metaphor.
 The form of the work is said to be a “structure of meanings”, in which an organic unity is achieved by
the play and counterplay of “thematic imagery” and “symbolic action”.
 In a successful work of literature, the linguistic elements manifest tension, irony, ambiguity and
paradox, to achieve a “reconciliation of diverse impulses” and “an equilibrium of opposed forces” to
protect the work, according to Cleanth Brooks, from the “heresy of paraphrase”.
 While the New Critics proposed close reading to highlight the unity of a work, poststructuralists
endorsed a deconstructive close reading to reveal the fissures and disunities within a work.
 Close reading involves paying careful attention to the details of a text: its diction, syntax, patterns of
imagery and metaphor, and so forth. The practice of close reading has become central to most forms
of literary criticism. (There are exceptions: for example, some critics study the production,
circulation, and purchasing of literary works in ways that do not require close reading of the works
themselves.)
 How to do a close reading ?
 Choose a method of capturing information before you read. You cannot do an
effective close reading without recording your thoughts as you read. The easiest
way to do this is probably to use a pencil to annotate your text. You may also find
that a computer or some other note-taking technology works well for you,
especially when you read a text (such as a library book) that you cannot mark with
a pencil. Do not use a highlighter for close reading. Highlighting is too blunt an
instrument for recording thoughts of any complexity.
 Make sure you know the meanings of the text’s words. If you do not know the
meaning of a word, look it up. If you see a word you think you know used in a way
that appears strange, use the Oxford English Dictionary (available through the
databases section of the library’s website) to check its meanings. The OED gives
chronologically arranged quotations for every definition, so it is a miraculously
useful tool for discovering older meanings of English words.
 Identify the text’s voice and implied audience. Who is speaking to whom?
Does the text invite you to question the authority of some speaker or speakers?
What is the tone of the text or its speakers?
 Identify the text’s genre and structure. How does the author response to the reader’s
expectations for a genre (as in a sonnet, a play, or a novel)? Once the reader recognizes the form
of the text, how does the author use or alter that form?
 Looking for patterns, identify the text’s imagery and metaphors. Look especially for details
that do not seem necessary to the simple plot or action of the text. How does the text evoke ideas
and contexts other than those suggested by the text’s literal action? Remember that part of the
importance of seeking patterns is to be able to identify breaks with the patterns you find. The
strange parts of a text are often the most interesting.
 Ask questions about the implications of what you have found. At this point, your close reading
could lead you to any number of approaches to the text. You may find, for example, that your
attention to word choice leads you to a cultural analysis of a concept in the author’s time. You may
find that an author attaches a certain kind of image to a certain character, or female characters, or
to Germany. You may find that the text’s narrator plays with the reader’s expectations about the
work’s genre in a way that leads you to conclusions about the reliability of the narrator. The key
here is to move beyond gathering details to wondering what a given set of details tells you about
the subtle meanings of a text.
Fictional Elements
 Characterization is a means by which writers present and reveal characters – by direct
description, by showing the character in action, or by the presentation of other characters
who help to define each other.
 Irony is not so much an element of fiction as a pervasive quality in it. It may appear in
fiction in three ways: in a work’s language, in its incidents, or in its point of view. But in
whatever form it emerges, irony always involves a contrast or discrepancy between one
thing and another. The contrast may be between what is said and what is meant (verbal
irony), what is expected to happen and what actually happens (situational irony) or
between what a character believes or says and what the reader understands to be true
(dramatic irony).
 Plot, the action element in fiction, is the arrangement of events that make up a story. Many
fictional plots turn on a conflict, or struggle between opposing forces, that is usually
resolved by the end of the story. Typical fictional plots begin with an exposition, that
provides background information needed to make sense of the action, describes the setting,
and introduces the major characters; these plots develop a series of complications or
intensifications of the conflict that lead to a crisis or moment of great tension. The conflict
may reach a climax or turning point, a moment of greatest tension that fixes the outcome;
then, the action falls off as the plot’s complications are sorted out and resolved (the
resolution or dénouement). Be aware, however, that much of twentieth-century fiction
does not exhibit such strict formality of design.
 Point of view refers to who tells the story and how it is told. The possible ways of telling a story are many,
and more than one point of view can be worked into a single story. However, the various points of view that
storytellers draw upon can be grouped into two broad categories: Third-Person Narrator (uses pronouns he,
she, or they):
 1. Omniscient: The narrator is all-knowing and takes the reader inside the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and
motives, as well as shows what the characters say and do.
 2. Limited omniscient: The narrator takes the reader inside one (or at most very few characters) but neither
the reader nor the character(s) has access to the inner lives of any of the other characters in the story.
 3. Objective: The narrator does not see into the mind of any character; rather he or she reports the action and
dialogue without telling the reader directly what the characters feel and think.
 First-Person Narrator (uses pronoun I): The narrator presents the point of view of only one character’s
consciousness, which limits the narrative to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or can
find out by talking to other characters.
 Setting is the physical and social context in which the action of a
story occurs. The major elements of setting are the time, the
place, and the social environment that frames the characters.
These elements establish the world in which the characters act.
Sometimes the setting is lightly sketched, presented only because
the story has to take place somewhere and at some time. Often,
however, the setting is more important, giving the reader the feel
of the people who move through it. Setting can be used to evoke
a mood or atmosphere that will prepare the reader for what is to
come.
 Style is the way a writer chooses words (diction), arranges them in sentences and
longer units of discourse (syntax) and exploits their significance. Style is the
verbal identity of a writer, as unmistakable as his or her face or voice. Reflecting
their individuality, writers’ styles convey their unique ways of seeing the world.
 A symbol is a person, object, image, word, ore vent that evokes a range of
additional meanings beyond and usually more abstract than its literal
significance. Symbols are devices for evoking complex ideas without having to
resort to painstaking explanations. Conventional symbols have meanings that are
widely recognized by a society or culture, i.e., the Christian cross, the Star of
David, a swastika, a nation’s flag. A literary or contextual symbol can be a
setting, a character, action, object, name, or anything else in a specific work that
maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings. For example,
the white whale in Melville’s Moby Dick takes on multiple symbolic meanings in
the work, but these meanings do not automatically carry over into other stories
about whales.
 Theme is the central idea or meaning of a story. Theme in
fiction is rarely presented at all; it is abstracted from the details
of character and action that compose the story. It provides a
unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point
of view, symbols, and other elements of a story are organized.
Be careful to distinguish theme from plot – the story’s sequence
of actions – and from subject – what the story is generally
about. Tone is the author’s implicit attitude toward the reader,
subject, and/or the people, places, and events in a work as
revealed by the elements of the author’s style. Tone may be
characterized as serious or ironic, sad or happy, private of
public, angry or affectionate, bitter or nostalgic, or any other
attitudes and feelings that human beings experience.