Close Reading

The information below is from David F. Elmer's Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 14: Ancient Fictions: The Ancient Novel in Context¹:

What is Close Reading?

Close reading is the technique of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what it means, what it suggests, and how it connects to the whole work (that is, its context). A successful close reading will often take on all three tasks. It will delve into what a passage means in order to understand what it suggests, and will then link what the passage suggests to its context. One goal of close reading is to help readers to see facets of the text that they may not have noticed before. To this end, close reading entails “reading out of” a text rather than “reading into” it. The goal of close reading, therefore, is to notice, describe, and interpret details of the text that are already there, rather than to impose your own point of view on the text. As a general rule of thumb, every claim you make should be directly supported by evidence in the text.

Why Close Reading?

Close reading is a fundamental skill for the analysis of any sort of text or discourse, whether it is literary, political, or commercial. It enables you to analyze how a text functions, and it helps you to understand a text’s explicit and implicit goals. The structure, vocabulary, language, imagery, and metaphors used in a text are all crucial to the way it achieves its purpose, and they are therefore all targets for close reading. The skills you learn and employ in this paper will form the building blocks for the writing you do throughout the semester, but they will also continue to be useful during your time at Harvard and beyond. Practicing close reading will train you to be an intelligent and critical reader of all kinds of writing, from political speeches to television advertisements, trashy novels, and works of high literature.

Strategies for Close Reading

There are several strategies for getting to a meaningful close reading, once you have chosen your passage. The goal of close reading is to learn what the passage says, what the passage implies, and how the passage connects to its context. This phase should occur while you are planning and outlining your paper, before you have started writing. You might re-read the passage several times, each time keeping a set of reading approaches in mind:

• Reading for the Literal Meaning: rewrite the passage by paraphrasing it. You might not use this paraphrase verbatim in your essay, but in the final version of your essay you will want to be sure to orient your reader to the larger context from which your passage was taken. What does the text literally mean? What is it doing in the narrative? This first step in close reading will allow you to put aside what you think you know about the passage(s), and help you to read “out of the text” rather than “into the text.”

• Reading for Formal Elements: identify some of the formal mechanisms of the writing, such as:

  • Narrative: How would you describe the narrative voice in your passage? Is the narrator first or third person, male or female, omniscient or restricted in knowledge? What are the limitations of the narrator, and how are these reflected in the text?

  • Structure: How is the passage structured? Does it move from point A to B? Does it move from point A to B and then back to A again (ring composition)? Does it linger on a single detail?

  • Patterns: are there images, keywords, or other devices that reappear in the passage? Are these elements used the same way? Finding a pattern can help establish general characteristics of the text.

• Reading for Implications of the Passage: the next step in close reading is to start examining the implications of a passage. One way to delve into the implications of a passage is to connect its formal elements to your literal reading. Do these formal mechanisms underscore or undermine what the passage says on a literal level?

• Reading for Context of the Passage: Does this passage share imagery with another passage in the novel? Does it contradict it? Does the passage engage with larger themes in the novel (e.g., vision and voyeurism, the natural world, the nature of desire)? Are there important similarities and differences between this passage and others like it throughout the novel?

As you can see, the process of close reading becomes more sophisticated and complicated as you read and re-read, but it also helps you to focus on a text’s puzzling moments, patterns, or expectations. Close reading, in other words, is not just a static, mechanical process, but an analytical tool you leverage to make an argument.