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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
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.
