To those who study literature, how would you define a 'close

>This seems overly simplistic to me
Yes, to me as well.

>>9244899
You are possibly, when commenting on the quotes, supposed to demonstrate how they say something about the wholw text, the author's style, the literary movement it represents, the use of literary techniques, etc. I guess the school's description of your class subject states some learning goals that they expect you to respond to and demonstrate, if it is a historically oriented subject, a thematically oriented subject, etc.

>What is this passage about?
>Uh... um... I don't know...

Sounds like your literature studies are paying off, OP.

>>9244899
I'm an English literature graduate from a UK university (UEA)

For me, this kind of essay would focus on the text in itself as much as possible, which means looking at literary devices: irony, pathos, elegy, similie, metaphor, allusion, rhythm, any rhetorical and poetic devices.

>>9244972
Not the point I'm making.

Take a text everyone knows, Shakespeare's Macbeth is a story about a guy who kills someone, takes his place, then he gets killed, but that's not what its actually about. It's about human greed, the power of the monarchy, the influence of violence on the psyche, that kind of thing. The point is, anyone can notice this, so it's a pointless task to ask 'what is it about?'.

>>9244985
A close reading is dedicated to a small section of a text, and in a close reading one pays attention to theme, form, and whatever else.

>>9244899
How can you be "well into your degree" and not understand close reading? Good writers are often subtle, sometimes intentionally ambiguous. They use allusions you may miss. Careful analysis to tease out all the details is a useful skill. Your focus is to ignore the broad shit like "themes" and get into the precise work, to look at the exact word choice and how the text is constructed.

>>9244985
But what you just said is the opposite of close reading. Close reading of Macbeth is, for instance, when you notice mention made of "a farmer" (well-known alias for Father Garnet of the Gunpowder Plot (2.4.4)) and "the equivocator" also central in the Gunpowder Plot against King James I (2.3.8), or when Macbeth compares himself to Mark Antony and Banquo to Octavius Caesar, who defeated Antony in the civil wars, alluding to a passage in Plutarch's biography of Antony. This kind of glossing is just one aspect of close reading, but it's a start.

>>9245029
Fair point, just seems a pointless excercise.

File: 8947594163484212.jpg (46KB, 582x436px) Image search: [Google]

46KB, 582x436px

>>9244899
You have to bring your face really close to the page while reading it. That's it. Hope that helps

Read the passage. Think about it for a minute. Read it again if you have too, but then freewrite. Freewrite your ass off. I know English teachers and professors like to throw this on you, but seriously, do it. Write whatever comes to your mind about the passage, and then, write whatever comes to your mind about the passage in context of the ENTIRE PLAY (or book or whatever).

If somehow this isn't working for you, then you're not doing what I said. Freewrite. After you've at least wrote a couple paragraphs of ANYTHING, then maybe think about your passage while you're walking to your next class, or driving, or taking a shit. An idea will pop into your head.

Some of the close reading IS GOING TO BE about summarizing what the text is about, but a good close reading essay will only do this minorly, while expanding on character reasonings, language use, blah, blah.

If you still need help with freewriting, I recommend writing the passage in a notebook or copying it into a word document, and from there highlighting and annotating things that catch your eye and your souuuuuuuul.

This entire process will make you a better reader and a better writer.

>>9244899
The purpose of criticism is to say what you have noticed (make an assertion) and then back it with evidence (the text itself). You make explicit what is already implicit in the text.

Here is a sort of lame thesis. "In Seneca's essay De Ira, he describes anger as a disease." This is my supporting evidence passage: "...as the marks of a madman are unmistakeable...so likewise are the marks of the angry man: blah blah blah things sort of like fever lips quiver teeth clenched breath shaky really red face" (1.1.??). This is obviously the exact wording of Seneca and here I will explicate how he describes an angry man as mentally ill. Seneca conflates the angry and the mad, etc. etc. I make my argument on the back of how similar these descriptions are to a contemporary writer's descriptions of such and so disease that I know Seneca read because he comments on the book in this letter: "real quote here" (citation).

And so on. Obviously everything I said about Seneca is not rigorous and is done from memory of a paper I read last week that I'm blatantly stealing from without credit. Some of it's probably immensely wrong. However the form remains valid, and in fact this is how all argumentation is done because the critic is a researcher just as much as a lab technician or M.D. may be. You build these paragraphs up until they prove your point. My last paragraph was close reading, while this paragraph is interpretation of the findings provided by the 'experiment' of close reading. You can't provide summary and expect it to stand alone the way you've implied that you expect: "How the shit do you do [sic] get marks from simply saying what the text is about?" (OP). Very simply, you don't. You absolutely need to make clear why you are citing the passages that you do and why they are important to your argument. If I didn't give you this paragraph, you may be confused about why I suddenly began talking about Seneca. However, because I am a person capable of arguing a point, if somewhat confusedly, I can give you a form of instruction that will hopefully be useful. Close reading is the building block of all literary commentary. What the fuck have you been doing otherwise?

>>9245083
see>>9244972

Interpret beyond the author's purpose. Write what the author's purpose was, defend that, and then add on to that observation with one of your own -- just be able to defend it.

>>9245372
>What the fuck have you been doing otherwise?
That sort of shit, really, I dunno maybe I'm just over complicating it.

I asked the person I'm meant to be writing this essay for about this. They said you couldn't figure out authorial intention for a poem in 100,000 words, but also said saying what a poem is about in 1000 words should be easy. Also got told that it should be something that isn't apparent on a first reading.

I think maybe what they were getting at is in a standard essay you apply a theme or set of themes to a text, where-as in close reading you are meant to pull the theme from the text.

can someone closeread the purpose of this thread

>>9245645
That's actually a pretty good idea.

>>9244899
Don't separate conceptually close reading from reading normally or reading with an eye for themes etc. Remember that there's only one act of reading - what you do in a close reading exercise is pay attention to different parts of your reading experience than when you read for thematic analysis. Whatever ideas you get about a text when you read it have come from, fundamentally, the individual words on the page. So in close reading you take a short passage and you look in minute detail at syntax, word choice, register etc etc AND then you work out how you reading these texts has resulting in you finding the themes you've previously found. Hope that helps

>>9246131
*reading these words, rather