Edgar allan poe, the fall of the house of usher.
What is close reading? When we read a piece of literature or watch a play or a film, we assume that those forms use language in ways that differ from our everyday use of language. Literature uses strategies of representation to present a world in ways that may be unfamiliar or disorienting, and that require closer attention to detail than “everyday” language. It also rewards closer attention to detail. Close reading attends to those details in order to gain a clearer understanding of how texts generate meaning through the mechanics of language. It attempts to account for the complexities of language and the ways in which the aesthetic aspects of texts complicate language’s purely referential functions. This handout will focus on close reading with reference to literature, but these strategies are equally applicable to all language. The Process of Close Reading: Close reading involves several steps. Reading for overt meaning. Reading for overt meaning means making certain that we understand the most basic, declarative meaning of the text. We do this by: Making sure we understand the words individually. This may mean looking up words we don’t completely understand, reading the textual notes and annotations that the play’s editors provide, and trying to determine whether a word might mean something differently to the author’s audiences than it does to us. Paraphrasing each sentence, line, or speech. Once we understand all of the individual words, it will be easier to decide what an initially confusing sentence means. Example: once we know that the phrase “had as lief” in the sentence “I had as lief thou didst break his neck as his finger” (William Shakespeare, As You Like It 1.1.137-8) means “would like as much,” we can paraphrase this declaration as meaning: “I would just happy to have you break his neck as his finger, and in fact, I’d prefer it.” (Note: some people think doing this is reductive, absurd and even heretical. They’re not wrong, if you end your interpretation here.) Once we’ve figured out overt meaning, we can start paying attention to how a text makes meanings beyond simple declaratives. This means looking at the mechanics of a text—its rhyme and meter, its use of imagery, tone, and various rhetorical and figurative devices (see below)—to understand the various levels of meaning and ambiguity it might contain, and the larger thematic issues it might be contemplating. As we do this, we should always bear in mind that the ways in which a text creates meaning can tell us many things about its character and intentions. As we pay attention to the ways in which the text’s language makes meaning, we should also be mindful of the contexts, both those internal to the text and those existing in the culture from which it emerges, in which it produces meaning: what kind of narrator are we dealing with? What genres are we working within? What are the text’s ongoing thematic and rhetorical interests, and how are they being expressed/challenged/ manipulated/explored/revised in this particular piece of language? These three ways of reading—for overt meaning, for figurative meaning, and for contextual meaning—when taken together help us read more fully for a text’s significance. How texts make meaning The English language’s resources for making meaning are vast. Below is an outline of some aspects of rhetoric and mechanics that will help us formulate arguments about how texts and their narrators/speakers/authors generate meaning for readers. Reading for aural qualities: Start a close reading, even of a piece of prose*, aloud, looking for the following patterns. *Prose seldom relies on aural qualities unless it is meant to be spoken, so, a speech might have these qualities—rhetoric and theatre often do. One thing that we might forget as contemporary readers of older forms is that forms that we now seldom read aloud, like novels and newspapers, were often meant to be read that way in the past. So while a novel written in 2018 might not have be written with its aural qualities in mind, that’s not the case for, for example, writers like Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Dickens, who were writing at least in part for audiences who would hear their fiction rather than read it. Meter When we talk about meter, we talk about the rhythm of cadence of a verse or speech. Meter shapes the cadence and tempo of a line. For example, if we look at Yeats’ line That twenty centuries of stony sleep We can hear stresses on every other syllable: That twenty centuries of stony sleep For a list of common meters in English, see the list at the end of the worksheet. Rhyme: similar or identical sounds that occur at the end of lines (or, with internal rhyme, within or between lines in words that don’t necessarily end lines) Rhythm: the patterns of punctuation in a stanza that imply stops for breath (including end-stopped lines, enjambment, and caesura) Patterns in sound, including consonance, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, syllable length, etc.