thesis for close reading

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Use the guidelines below to learn about the practice of close reading.

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.

Fiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components, including subject, form, and specific word choices. Literary analysis involves examining these components, which allows us to find in small parts of the text clues to help us understand the whole. For example, if an author writes a novel in the form of a personal journal about a character’s daily life, but that journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do we learn about that character? What is the effect of picking a word like “tome” instead of “book”? In effect, you are putting the author’s choices under a microscope.

The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper that makes the most of your close reading work.

Close reading sometimes feels like over-analyzing, but don’t worry. Close reading is a process of finding as much information as you can in order to form as many questions as you can. When it is time to write your paper and formalize your close reading, you will sort through your work to figure out what is most convincing and helpful to the argument you hope to make and, conversely, what seems like a stretch. This guide imagines you are sitting down to read a text for the first time on your way to developing an argument about a text and writing a paper. To give one example of how to do this, we will read the poem “Design” by famous American poet Robert Frost and attend to four major components of literary texts: subject, form, word choice (diction), and theme.

If you want even more information about approaching poems specifically, take a look at our guide: How to Read a Poem .

As our guide to reading poetry suggests, have a pencil out when you read a text. Make notes in the margins, underline important words, place question marks where you are confused by something. Of course, if you are reading in a library book, you should keep all your notes on a separate piece of paper. If you are not making marks directly on, in, and beside the text, be sure to note line numbers or even quote portions of the text so you have enough context to remember what you found interesting.

Design I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small.

The subject of a literary text is simply what the text is about. What is its plot? What is its most important topic? What image does it describe? It’s easy to think of novels and stories as having plots, but sometimes it helps to think of poetry as having a kind of plot as well. When you examine the subject of a text, you want to develop some preliminary ideas about the text and make sure you understand its major concerns before you dig deeper.

Observations

In “Design,” the speaker describes a scene: a white spider holding a moth on a white flower. The flower is a heal-all, the blooms of which are usually violet-blue. This heal-all is unusual. The speaker then poses a series of questions, asking why this heal-all is white instead of blue and how the spider and moth found this particular flower. How did this situation arise?

The speaker’s questions seem simple, but they are actually fairly nuanced. We can use them as a guide for our own as we go forward with our close reading.

• Furthering the speaker’s simple “how did this happen,” we might ask, is the scene in this poem a manufactured situation?
• The white moth and white spider each use the atypical white flower as camouflage in search of sanctuary and supper respectively. Did these flora and fauna come together for a purpose?
• Does the speaker have a stance about whether there is a purpose behind the scene? If so, what is it?
• How will other elements of the text relate to the unpleasantness and uncertainty in our first look at the poem’s subject?

After thinking about local questions, we have to zoom out. Ultimately, what is this text about?

Form is how a text is put together. When you look at a text, observe how the author has arranged it. If it is a novel, is it written in the first person? How is the novel divided? If it is a short story, why did the author choose to write short-form fiction instead of a novel or novella? Examining the form of a text can help you develop a starting set of questions in your reading, which then may guide further questions stemming from even closer attention to the specific words the author chooses. A little background research on form and what different forms can mean makes it easier to figure out why and how the author’s choices are important.

Most poems follow rules or principles of form; even free verse poems are marked by the author’s choices in line breaks, rhythm, and rhyme—even if none of these exists, which is a notable choice in itself. Here’s an example of thinking through these elements in “Design.”

In “Design,” Frost chooses an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet form: fourteen lines in iambic pentameter consisting of an octave (a stanza of eight lines) and a sestet (a stanza of six lines). We will focus on rhyme scheme and stanza structure rather than meter for the purposes of this guide. A typical Italian sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme for the octave:

a b b a a b b a

There’s more variation in the sestet rhymes, but one of the more common schemes is

c d e c d e

Conventionally, the octave introduces a problem or question which the sestet then resolves. The point at which the sonnet goes from the problem/question to the resolution is called the volta, or turn. (Note that we are speaking only in generalities here; there is a great deal of variation.)

Frost uses the usual octave scheme with “-ite”/”-ight” (a) and “oth” (b) sounds: “white,” “moth,” “cloth,” “blight,” “right,” “broth,” “froth,” “kite.” However, his sestet follows an unusual scheme with “-ite”/”-ight” and “all” sounds:

a c a a c c

Now, we have a few questions with which we can start:

• Why use an Italian sonnet?
• Why use an unusual scheme in the sestet?
• What problem/question and resolution (if any) does Frost offer?
• What is the volta in this poem?
• In other words, what is the point?

Italian sonnets have a long tradition; many careful readers recognize the form and know what to expect from his octave, volta, and sestet. Frost seems to do something fairly standard in the octave in presenting a situation; however, the turn Frost makes is not to resolution, but to questions and uncertainty. A white spider sitting on a white flower has killed a white moth.

• How did these elements come together?
• Was the moth’s death random or by design?
• Is one worse than the other?

We can guess right away that Frost’s disruption of the usual purpose of the sestet has something to do with his disruption of its rhyme scheme. Looking even more closely at the text will help us refine our observations and guesses.

Word Choice, or Diction

Looking at the word choice of a text helps us “dig in” ever more deeply. If you are reading something longer, are there certain words that come up again and again? Are there words that stand out? While you are going through this process, it is best for you to assume that every word is important—again, you can decide whether something is really important later.

Even when you read prose, our guide for reading poetry offers good advice: read with a pencil and make notes. Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions you have in the margins or on a separate piece of paper. If you have ideas that may possibly answer your questions, write those down, too.

Let’s take a look at the first line of “Design”:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white

The poem starts with something unpleasant: a spider. Then, as we look more closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may see connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural. When we imagine spiders, we do not generally picture them dimpled and white; it is an uncommon and decidedly creepy image. There is dissonance between the spider and its descriptors, i.e., what is wrong with this picture? Already we have a question: what is going on with this spider?

We should look for additional clues further on in the text. The next two lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding spider:

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Now we have a white flower (a heal-all, which usually has a violet-blue flower) and a white moth in addition to our white spider. Heal-alls have medicinal properties, as their name suggests, but this one seems to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider? Does the mutation that changes the heal-all’s color also change its beneficial properties—could it be poisonous rather than curative? A white moth doesn’t seem remarkable, but it is “Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth,” or like manmade fabric that is artificially “rigid” rather than smooth and flowing like we imagine satin to be. We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a coffin, but even that is awry, for neither should be stiff with death.

The first three lines of the poem’s octave introduce unpleasant natural images “of death and blight” (as the speaker puts it in line four). The flower and moth disrupt expectations: the heal-all is white instead of “blue and innocent,” and the moth is reduced to “rigid satin cloth” or “dead wings carried like a paper kite.” We might expect a spider to be unpleasant and deadly; the poem’s spider also has an unusual and unhealthy appearance.

• The focus on whiteness in these lines has more to do with death than purity—can we understand that whiteness as being corpse-like rather than virtuous?

Well before the volta, Frost makes a “turn” away from nature as a retreat and haven; instead, he unearths its inherent dangers, making nature menacing. From three lines alone, we have a number of questions:

• Will whiteness play a role in the rest of the poem?
• How does “design”—an arrangement of these circumstances—fit with a scene of death?
• What other juxtapositions might we encounter?

These disruptions and dissonances recollect Frost’s alteration to the standard Italian sonnet form: finding the ways and places in which form and word choice go together will help us begin to unravel some larger concepts the poem itself addresses.

Put simply, themes are major ideas in a text. Many texts, especially longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes. That’s good news when you are close reading because it means there are many different ways you can think through the questions you develop.

So far in our reading of “Design,” our questions revolve around disruption: disruption of form, disruption of expectations in the description of certain images. Discovering a concept or idea that links multiple questions or observations you have made is the beginning of a discovery of theme.

What is happening with disruption in “Design”? What point is Frost making? Observations about other elements in the text help you address the idea of disruption in more depth. Here is where we look back at the work we have already done: What is the text about? What is notable about the form, and how does it support or undermine what the words say? Does the specific language of the text highlight, or redirect, certain ideas?

In this example, we are looking to determine what kind(s) of disruption the poem contains or describes. Rather than “disruption,” we want to see what kind of disruption, or whether indeed Frost uses disruptions in form and language to communicate something opposite: design.

Sample Analysis

After you make notes, formulate questions, and set tentative hypotheses, you must analyze the subject of your close reading. Literary analysis is another process of reading (and writing!) that allows you to make a claim about the text. It is also the point at which you turn a critical eye to your earlier questions and observations to find the most compelling points, discarding the ones that are a “stretch.” By “stretch,” we mean that we must discard points that are fascinating but have no clear connection to the text as a whole. (We recommend a separate document for recording the brilliant ideas that don’t quite fit this time around.)

Here follows an excerpt from a brief analysis of “Design” based on the close reading above. This example focuses on some lines in great detail in order to unpack the meaning and significance of the poem’s language. By commenting on the different elements of close reading we have discussed, it takes the results of our close reading to offer one particular way into the text. (In case you were thinking about using this sample as your own, be warned: it has no thesis and it is easily discoverable on the web. Plus it doesn’t have a title.)

Frost’s speaker brews unlikely associations in the first stanza of the poem. The “Assorted characters of death and blight / Mixed ready to begin the morning right” make of the grotesque scene an equally grotesque mockery of a breakfast cereal (4–5). These lines are almost singsong in meter and it is easy to imagine them set to a radio jingle. A pun on “right”/”rite” slides the “characters of death and blight” into their expected concoction: a “witches’ broth” (6). These juxtapositions—a healthy breakfast that is also a potion for dark magic—are borne out when our “fat and white” spider becomes “a snow-drop”—an early spring flower associated with renewal—and the moth as “dead wings carried like a paper kite” (1, 7, 8). Like the mutant heal-all that hosts the moth’s death, the spider becomes a deadly flower; the harmless moth becomes a child’s toy, but as “dead wings,” more like a puppet made of a skull. The volta offers no resolution for our unsettled expectations. Having observed the scene and detailed its elements in all their unpleasantness, the speaker turns to questions rather than answers. How did “The wayside blue and innocent heal-all” end up white and bleached like a bone (10)? How did its “kindred spider” find the white flower, which was its perfect hiding place (11)? Was the moth, then, also searching for camouflage, only to meet its end? Using another question as a disguise, the speaker offers a hypothesis: “What but design of darkness to appall?” (13). This question sounds rhetorical, as though the only reason for such an unlikely combination of flora and fauna is some “design of darkness.” Some force, the speaker suggests, assembled the white spider, flower, and moth to snuff out the moth’s life. Such a design appalls, or horrifies. We might also consider the speaker asking what other force but dark design could use something as simple as appalling in its other sense (making pale or white) to effect death. However, the poem does not close with a question, but with a statement. The speaker’s “If design govern in a thing so small” establishes a condition for the octave’s questions after the fact (14). There is no point in considering the dark design that brought together “assorted characters of death and blight” if such an event is too minor, too physically small to be the work of some force unknown. Ending on an “if” clause has the effect of rendering the poem still more uncertain in its conclusions: not only are we faced with unanswered questions, we are now not even sure those questions are valid in the first place. Behind the speaker and the disturbing scene, we have Frost and his defiance of our expectations for a Petrarchan sonnet. Like whatever designer may have altered the flower and attracted the spider to kill the moth, the poet built his poem “wrong” with a purpose in mind. Design surely governs in a poem, however small; does Frost also have a dark design? Can we compare a scene in nature to a carefully constructed sonnet?

A Note on Organization

Your goal in a paper about literature is to communicate your best and most interesting ideas to your reader. Depending on the type of paper you have been assigned, your ideas may need to be organized in service of a thesis to which everything should link back. It is best to ask your instructor about the expectations for your paper.

Knowing how to organize these papers can be tricky, in part because there is no single right answer—only more and less effective answers. You may decide to organize your paper thematically, or by tackling each idea sequentially; you may choose to order your ideas by their importance to your argument or to the poem. If you are comparing and contrasting two texts, you might work thematically or by addressing first one text and then the other. One way to approach a text may be to start with the beginning of the novel, story, play, or poem, and work your way toward its end. For example, here is the rough structure of the example above: The author of the sample decided to use the poem itself as an organizational guide, at least for this part of the analysis.

• A paragraph about the octave.
• A paragraph about the volta.
• A paragraph about the penultimate line (13).
• A paragraph about the final line (14).
• A paragraph addressing form that suggests a transition to the next section of the paper.

You will have to decide for yourself the best way to communicate your ideas to your reader. Is it easier to follow your points when you write about each part of the text in detail before moving on? Or is your work clearer when you work through each big idea—the significance of whiteness, the effect of an altered sonnet form, and so on—sequentially?

We suggest you write your paper however is easiest for you then move things around during revision if you need to.

Further Reading

If you really want to master the practice of reading and writing about literature, we recommend Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain’s wonderful book, A Short Guide to Writing about Literature . Barnet and Cain offer not only definitions and descriptions of processes, but examples of explications and analyses, as well as checklists for you, the author of the paper. The Short Guide is certainly not the only available reference for writing about literature, but it is an excellent guide and reminder for new writers and veterans alike.

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How to Write a Close Reading Essay: Full Guide with Examples

writing Close Reading Essay

There is no doubt that close-reading essays are on the rise these days. And for a good reason — it is a powerful technique that can help you make your mark as a student and showcase your understanding of the text.

In this type of writing, readers will read the literary text carefully and interpret it from various points of view. Read on.

What is a close Reading Essay?

A close-reading essay is an in-depth analysis of a literary work. It can be used to support a thesis statement or as a research paper. A close-reading essay focuses on the tiny themes inherent in a literary passage, story, or poem.

The focus of this type of essay is on critical thinking and analysis. The author will look at the small details that make up the overall meaning of a text.

The author will also consider how these tiny themes relate to each other and how they are presented within the text.

The key areas where a close reading essay focuses include:

• Motivation and setting – This includes why the author wrote the piece and their purpose when they chose to write it. You can explore this through character analysis as well as themes that are common across multiple works.
• Characters:  While characters may or may not have any significance in an overall plot, they can make up many of the elements discussed in this essay. For example, if you were analyzing Hamlet, then you would want to look at how Hamlet’s character affects his motivation for suicide (which is directly related to his madness) and how it relates to his relationship with Ophelia.

How to Write a Close Reading Essay -Step-By-Step Guide

1. read the selected text at least three additional times.

Analyze the text using your critical thinking skills. What are the author’s main points and purposes? How does the author develop these points? What evidence does he or she use to support these points? How do other writers in the field of the study compare with this author’s views?

Compare and contrast this author’s point of view with other writers in your field of study. What is their purpose in writing? What evidence do they use to support their positions?

How do they compare with this writer’s views?

2. Underline Portions of the Text that you Find Significant or Odd

The purpose of this section is to give the reader a sense of the author’s tone and approach to the subject.

A close-reading essay should be read at least twice, preferably three times. Underline or highlight any portions of the text that you find odd or significant.

Ask yourself: What does this mean? How does this affect my view of the work? What questions do I have now that I didn’t have before?

Take notes on what you think might be important. You may want to write down your questions and observations as they occur to you while reading your essay. Make sure they are hierarchical so they can easily guide your next step in writing about them.

3. State the Conclusions for the Paper

A close-reading essay analyzes a text and the author’s meaning. The key to this type of essay is the ability to conclude a text. It requires the student to think critically about what he/she has read and how it relates to other texts.

The most important aspect of writing a close-reading essay is being able to conclude after reading through a piece of work and analyzing it. The reader should always be able to answer questions like:

• What does this author mean?
• How can I apply this message to my life?
• Is this message relevant in today’s society?

4. Write your Introduction

The purpose of your paper is usually stated in the introduction somewhere (it might be buried in an abstract).

In other words, it’s not enough just to tell readers what they need to know; they also need some motivation to read further if they don’t know why they should read.

5. Write your Body Paragraphs.

A body paragraph is the bulk of your essay. It’s the place where you flesh out your ideas and connect them to the overall topic.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details when writing a close-reading essay, so it’s important to stay focused on the big picture of what you’re trying to say. Here are some tips for developing your body paragraphs:

• Start with a thesis statement: Make sure that each paragraph starts with an idea or question that relates to the main point of your thesis statement. For example, suppose you’re writing about how human beings have been impacted by technology in society; then, in your first paragraph. In that case, you might want to talk about how computers are changing our lives and what this means for us as individuals and as a culture.
• Link ideas together:  Be sure that each paragraph is directly related to the previous one (or else your readers will lose track). Use transition words like “however,” “however,” “in contrast,” and “on the other hand,” or even simply add supporting details from different sources throughout each paragraph.

6. Write your Conclusion

When writing conclusion to your close reading essay, you’ll make a few points about why you think the book is worth reading. You should focus on whether or not the author has succeeded in his or her main objective and whether or not it’s an interesting book.

You should also consider how the author has achieved these goals. Did they succeed because of their writing style? Or did they use an effective structure? Did they make some unique observations that you hadn’t thought of before?

Do you have any specific questions about what was done well in the book? If so, ask them now so that you don’t forget to ask them when it’s time for your argumentative essay!

3 Close Reading Essay Examples

Below are three close-reading essay examples on the topic of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first example is from a student named Brandon:

The main character, Jay Gatsby, is one of the most interesting characters in literature that I have ever read about.

He was a millionaire who married into a family of lower-class people and became friends with their daughter Daisy Buchanan, who had recently graduated from college and moved to New York City, where she met his son Nick Carraway.

Jay Gatsby was so fascinating to me because he had a lot of passion for life; he never gave up on what he wanted, even though he had nothing to back it up.

When I read this book, I learned that some people don’t care about what happens to them or what other people think about them; they just do their own thing and don’t let anything stand in their way of achieving their goals in life (Gatsby).

When I read this book, I also learned about love and hate because there were many different sides to each character’s personality throughout the book (Gatsby).

In conclusion, “The Great Gatsby” is an interesting book.

Example Two

The main character in the novel, Adam Bede, is a strong-willed country boy who looks down upon city folk. He has no interest in being educated and feels that he would rather work on a farm than attend school.

He does not seem to have any particular talent or skill that would make him stand out. However, it is not until he meets the wealthy Miss Lavendar that he can express his talents through writing poetry and music.

The first time Adam meets Miss Lavendar, she sits at a piano playing a piece by Mozart. Adam has never heard music like this before. It is so beautiful that he immediately falls in love with her. The two become friends and eventually marry each other.

However, when Adam becomes famous for his poems about Miss Lavendar, she begins to feel threatened by her new husband’s success. She leaves him for another man named Mr. Thornton. He has money and power but no talent for writing poetry or music like Adam.

 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

The play tells the story of a family during the Great Depression in Mississippi. Brick Pollitt has just returned home from World War I where he has been injured in battle and subsequently discharged with a disability pension.

His wife Maggie is expecting their first child, while his son Paul lives in New Orleans where he works as a pianist for a white man named Big Daddy Pollitt who owns a brothel in which Paul performs sexually explicit acts for the patrons at Big Daddy’s establishment called “The Brick House.”

With over 10 years in academia and academic assistance, Alicia Smart is the epitome of excellence in the writing industry. She is our chief editor and in charge of the writing department at Grade Bees.

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How to Do a Close Reading

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Close Reading Fundamentals

How to choose a passage to close-read, how to approach a close reading, how to annotate a passage, how to improve your close reading, how to practice close reading, how to incorporate close readings into an essay, how to teach close reading, additional resources for advanced students.

Close reading engages with the formal properties of a text—its literary devices, language, structure, and style. Popularized in the mid-twentieth century, this way of reading allows you to interpret a text without outside information such as historical context, author biography, philosophy, or political ideology. It also requires you to put aside your affective (that is, personal and emotional) response to the text, focusing instead on objective study. Why close-read a text? Doing so will increase your understanding of how a piece of writing works, as well as what it means. Perhaps most importantly, close reading can help you develop and support an essay argument. In this guide, you'll learn more about what close reading entails and find strategies for producing precise, creative close readings. We've included a section with resources for teachers, along with a final section with further reading for advanced students.

You might compare close reading to wringing out a wet towel, in which you twist the material repeatedly until you have extracted as much liquid as possible. When you close-read, you'll return to a short passage several times in order to note as many details about its form and content as possible. Use the links below to learn more about close reading's place in literary history and in the classroom.

"Close Reading" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's relatively short introduction to close reading contains sections on background, examples, and how to teach close reading. You can also click the links on this page to learn more about the literary critics who pioneered the method.

"Close Reading: A Brief Note" (Literariness.org)

This article provides a condensed discussion of what close reading is, how it works, and how it is different from other ways of reading a literary text.

"What Close Reading Actually Means" ( TeachThought )

In this article by an Ed.D., you'll learn what close reading "really means" in the classroom today—a meaning that has shifted significantly from its original place in 20th century literary criticism.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Washington)

This hand-out from a college writing course defines close reading, suggests  why  we close-read, and offers tips for close reading successfully, including focusing on language, audience, and scope.

"Glossary Entry on New Criticism" (Poetry Foundation)

If you'd like to read a short introduction to the school of thought that gave rise to close reading, this is the place to go. Poetry Foundation's entry on New Criticism is concise and accessible.

"New Criticism" (Washington State Univ.)

This webpage from a college writing course offers another brief explanation of close reading in relation to New Criticism. It provides some key questions to help you think like a New Critic.

When choosing a passage to close-read, you'll want to look for relatively short bits of text that are rich in detail. The resources below offer more tips and tricks for selecting passages, along with links to pre-selected passages you can print for use at home or in the classroom.

"How to Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading" ( We Are Teachers )

This post from a former special education teacher describes six characteristics you might look for when selecting a close reading passage from a novel: beginnings, pivotal plot points, character changes, high-density passages, "Q&A" passages, and "aesthetic" passages. 

"Close Reading Passages" (Reading Sage)

Reading Sage provides links to close reading passages you can use as is; alternatively, you could also use them as models for selecting your own passages. The page is divided into sections geared toward elementary, middle school, and early high school students.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Guelph)

The University of Guelph's guide to close reading contains a short section on how to "Select a Passage." The author suggests that you choose a brief passage. 

"Close Reading Advice" (Prezi)

This Prezi was created by an AP English teacher. The opening section on passage selection suggests choosing "thick paragraphs" filled with "figurative language and rich details or description."

Now that you know how to select a passage to analyze, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the textual qualities you should look for when reading. Whether you're approaching a poem, a novel, or a magazine article, details on the level of language (literary devices) and form (formal features) convey meaning. Understanding  how  a text communicates will help you understand  what  it is communicating. The links in this section will familiarize you with the tools you need to start a close reading.

Literary Devices

"Literary Devices and Terms" (LitCharts)

LitCharts' dedicated page covers 130+ literary devices. Also known as "rhetorical devices," "figures of speech," or "elements of style," these linguistic constructions are the building blocks of literature. Some of the most common include  simile , metaphor , alliteration , and onomatopoeia ; browse the links on LitCharts to learn about many more. 

"Rhetorical Device" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's page on rhetorical devices defines the term in relation to the ancient art of "rhetoric" or persuasive speaking. At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to several online handbooks and lists of rhetorical devices.

"15 Must Know Rhetorical Terms for AP English Literature" ( Albert )

The  Albert blog   offers this list of 15 rhetorical devices that high school English students should know how to define and spot in a literary text; though geared toward the Advanced Placement exam, its tips are widely applicable.

"The 55 AP Language and Composition Terms You Must Know" (PrepScholar)

This blog post lists 55 terms high school students should learn how to recognize and define for the Advanced Placement exam in English Literature.

Formal Features

In LitCharts' bank of literary devices and terms, you'll also find resources to describe a text's structure and overall character. Some of the most important of these are  rhyme , meter , and  tone ; browse the page to find more. 

"Rhythm" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

This encyclopedia entry on rhythm and meter offers an in-depth definition of the two most fundamental aspects of poetry.

"How to Analyze Syntax for AP English Literature" ( Albert)

The Albert blog will help you understand what "syntax" is, making a case for why you should pay attention to sentence structure when analyzing a literary text.

"Grammar Basics: Sentence Parts and Sentence Structures" ( ThoughtCo )

This article provides a meticulous overview of the components of a sentence. It's useful if you need to review your parts of speech or if you need to be able to identify things like prepositional phrases.

"Style, Diction, Tone, and Voice" (Wheaton College)

Wheaton College's Writing Center offers this clear, concise discussion of several important formal features. Although it's designed to help essay writers, it will also help you understand and spot these stylistic features in others' work. 

Now that you know what rhetorical devices, formal features, and other details to look for, you're ready to find them in a text. For this purpose, it is crucial to annotate (write notes) as you read and re-read. Each time you return to the text, you'll likely notice something new; these observations will form the basis of your close reading. The resources in this section offer some concrete strategies for annotating literary texts.

"How to Annotate a Text" (LitCharts)

Begin by consulting our  How to Annotate a Text  guide. This collection of links and resources is helpful for short passages (that is, those for close reading) as well as longer works, like whole novels or poems.

"Annotation Guide" (Covington Catholic High School)

This hand-out from a high school teacher will help you understand why we annotate, and how to annotate a text successfully. You might choose to incorporate some of the interpretive notes and symbols suggested here.

"Annotating Literature" (New Canaan Public Schools)

This one-page, introductory resource provides a list of 10 items you should look for when reading a text, including attitude and theme.

"Purposeful Annotation" (Dave Stuart Jr.)

This article from a high school teacher's blog describes the author's top close reading strategy: purposeful annotation. In fact, this teacher more or less equates close reading with annotation.

Looking for ways to improve your close reading? The articles, guides, and videos in this section will expose you to various methods of close reading, as well as practice exercises. No two people read exactly the same way. Whatever your level of expertise, it can be useful to broaden your skill set by testing the techniques suggested by the resources below.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, part of Harvard's comprehensive "Strategies for Essay Writing Guide," describes three steps to a successful close reading. You will want to return to this resource when incorporating your close reading into an essay.

"A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis" (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center)

Working through this guide from another college writing center will help you move through the process of close reading a text. You'll find a sample analysis of Robert Frost's "Design" at the end.

"How to Do a Close Reading of a Text" (YouTube)

This four-minute video from the "Literacy and Math Ideas" channel offers a number of helpful tips for reading a text closely in accordance with Common Core standards.

"Poetry: Close Reading" (Purdue OWL)

Short, dense poems are a natural fit for the close reading approach. This page from the Purdue Online Writing Lab takes you step-by-step through an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

"Steps for Close Reading or Explication de Texte" ( The Literary Link )

This page, which mentions close reading's close relationship to the French formalist method of  "explication de texte," shares "12 Steps to Literary Awareness."

You can practice your close reading skills by reading, re-reading and annotating any brief passage of text. The resources below will get you started by offering pre-selected passages and questions to guide your reading. You'll find links to resources that are designed for students of all levels, from elementary school through college.

"Notes on Close Reading" (MIT Open Courseware)

This resource describes steps you can work through when close reading, providing a passage from Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein  for you to test your skills.

"Close Reading Practice Worksheets" (Gillian Duff's English Resources)

Here, you'll find 10 close reading-centered worksheets you can download and print. The "higher-close-reading-formula" link at the bottom of the page provides a chart with even more steps and strategies for close reading.

"Close Reading Activities" (Education World)

The four activities described on this page are best suited to elementary and middle school students. Under each heading is a link to handouts or detailed descriptions of the activity.

"Close Reading Practice Passages: High School" (Varsity Tutors)

This webpage from Varsity Tutors contains over a dozen links to close reading passages and exercises, including several resources that focus on close-reading satire.

"Benjamin Franklin's Satire of Witch Hunting" (America in Class)

This page contains both a "teacher's guide" and "student version" to interpreting Benjamin Franklin's satire of a witch trial. The thirteen close reading questions on the right side of the page will help you analyze the text thoroughly.

Whether you're writing a research paper or an essay, close reading can help you build an argument. Careful analysis of your primary texts allows you to draw out meanings you want to emphasize, thereby supporting your central claim. The resources in this section introduce you to strategies suited to various common writing assignments.

"How to Write a Research Paper" (LitCharts)

The resources in this guide will help you learn to formulate a thesis, organize evidence, write an outline, and draft a research paper, one of the two most common assignments in which you might incorporate close reading.

"How to Write an Essay" (LitCharts)

In this guide, you'll learn how to plan, draft, and revise an essay, whether for the classroom or as a take-home assignment. Close reading goes hand in hand with the brainstorming and drafting processes for essay writing.

"Guide to the Close Reading Essay" (Univ. of Warwick)

This guide was designed for undergraduates, and assumes prior knowledge of formal features and rhetorical devices one might find in a poem. High schoolers will find it useful after addressing the "elements of a close reading" section above.

"Beginning the Academic Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Harvard's guide discusses the broader category of the "academic essay." Here, the author assumes that your essay's close readings will be accompanied by context and evidence from secondary sources. 

A Short Guide to Writing About Literature (Amazon)

Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain emphasize that writing is a process. In their book, you'll find definitions of important literary terms, examples of successful explications of literary texts, and checklists for essay writers.

Due in part to the Common Core's emphasis on close reading skills, resources for teaching students how to close-read abound. Here, you'll find a wealth of information on how and why we teach students to close-read texts. The first section includes links to activities, exercises, and complete lesson plans. The second section offers background material on the method, along with strategies for implementing close reading in the classroom.

Lesson Plans and Activities

"Four Lessons for Introducing the Fundamental Steps of Close Reading" (Corwin)

Here, Corwin has made the second chapter of Nancy Akhavan's  The Nonfiction Now Lesson Bank, Grades 4 – 8 available online. You'll find four sample lessons to use in the elementary or middle school classroom

"Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques Through Close Reading" ( ReadWriteThink )

This lesson plan for high school students includes material for five 50-minute sessions on sonic patterns (including consonance, assonance, and alliteration). The literary text at hand is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."

"Close Reading of a Short Text: Complete Lesson" (McGraw Hill via YouTube)

This eight-minute video describes a complete lesson in which a teacher models close reading of a short text and offers guiding questions.

"Close Reading Model Lessons" (Achieve the Core)

These three model lessons on close reading will help you determine what makes a text "appropriately complex" for the grade level you teach.

Close Reading Bundle (Teachers Pay Teachers)

This top-rated bundle of close reading resources was designed for the middle school classroom. It contains over 150 pages of worksheets, complete lesson plans, and literacy center ideas.

"10 Intriguing Photos to Teach Close Reading and Visual Thinking Skills" ( The New York Times )

The New York Times' s Learning Network has gathered 10 photos from the "What's Going on in This Picture" series that teachers can use to help students develop analytical and visual thinking skills.

"The Close Reading Essay" (Brandeis Univ.)

Brandeis University's writing program offers this detailed set of guidelines and goals you might use when assigning a close reading essay.

Close Reading Resources (Varsity Tutors)

Varsity Tutors has compiled a list of over twenty links to lesson plans, strategies, and activities for teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to close read.

Background Material and Teaching Strategies

Falling in Love with Close Reading (Amazon)

Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts aim to show how close reading can be "rigorous, meaningful, and joyous." It offers a three-step "close reading ritual" and engaging lesson plans.

Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading (Amazon)

Kylene Beers (a former Senior Reading Researcher at Yale) and Robert E. Probst (a Professor Emeritus of English Education) introduce six "signposts" readers can use to detect significant moments in a work of literature.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (YouTube)

TeachLikeThis offers this four-minute video on teaching students to close-read by looking at a text's language, narrative, syntax, and context.

"Strategy Guide: Close Reading of a Literary Text" ( ReadWriteThink )

This guide for middle school and high school teachers will help you choose texts that are appropriately complex for the grade level you teach, and offers strategies for planning engaging lessons.

"Close Reading Steps for Success" (Appletastic Learning)

Shelly Rees, a teacher with over 20 years of experience, introduces six helpful steps you can use to help your students engage with challenging reading passages. The article is geared toward elementary and middle school teachers.

"4 Steps to Boost Students' Close Reading Skills" ( Amplify )

Doug Fisher, a professor of educational leadership, suggests using these four steps to help students at any grade level learn how to close read. 

Like most tools of literary analysis, close reading has a complex history. It's not necessary to understand the theoretical underpinnings of close reading in order to use this tool. For advanced high school students and college students who ask "why close-read," though, the resources below will serve as useful starting points for discussion.

"Discipline and Parse: The Politics of Close Reading" ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

This book review by a well-known English professor at Columbia provides an engaging, anecdotal introduction to close reading's place in literary history. Robbins points to some of the method's shortcomings, but also elegantly defends it.

"Intentional Fallacy" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

The literary critics who developed close reading cautioned against judging a text based on the author's intention. This encyclopedia entry offers an expanded definition of this way of reading, called the "intentional fallacy."

"Seven Types of Ambiguity" (Wikipedia)

This Wikipedia article will introduce you to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity  (1930), one of the foundational texts of New Criticism, the school of thought that theorized close reading.

"What is Distant Reading" ( The New York Times)

This article makes it clear that "close reading" isn't the only way to analyze literary texts. It offers a brief introduction to the "distant reading" method of computational criticism pioneered by Franco Moretti in recent years.

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How to do a close reading essay [Updated 2023]

Close reading refers to the process of interpreting a literary work’s meaning by analyzing both its form and content. In this post, we provide you with strategies for close reading that you can apply to your next assignment or analysis.

What is a close reading?

Close reading involves paying attention to a literary work’s language, style, and overall meaning. It includes looking for patterns, repetitions, oddities, and other significant features of a text. Your goal should be to reveal subtleties and complexities beyond an initial reading.

The primary difference between simply reading a work and doing a close reading is that, in the latter, you approach the text as a kind of detective.

When you’re doing a close reading, a literary work becomes a puzzle. And, as a reader, your job is to pull all the pieces together—both what the text says and how it says it.

How do you do a close reading?

Typically, a close reading focuses on a small passage or section of a literary work. Although you should always consider how the selection you’re analyzing fits into the work as a whole, it’s generally not necessary to include lengthy summaries or overviews in a close reading.

There are several aspects of the text to consider in a close reading:

• Literal Content: Even though a close reading should go beyond an analysis of a text’s literal content, every reading should start there. You need to have a firm grasp of the foundational content of a passage before you can analyze it closely. Use the common journalistic questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why?) to establish the basics like plot, character, and setting.
• Tone: What is the tone of the passage you’re examining? How does the tone influence the entire passage? Is it serious, comic, ironic, or something else?
• Characterization: What do you learn about specific characters from the passage? Who is the narrator or speaker? Watch out for language that reveals the motives and feelings of particular characters.
• Structure: What kind of structure does the work utilize? If it’s a poem, is it written in free or blank verse? If you’re working with a novel, does the structure deviate from certain conventions, like straightforward plot or realism? Does the form contribute to the overall meaning?
• Figurative Language: Examine the passage carefully for similes, metaphors, and other types of figurative language. Are there repetitions of certain figures or patterns of opposition? Do certain words or phrases stand in for larger issues?
• Diction: Diction means word choice. You should look up any words that you don’t know in a dictionary and pay attention to the meanings and etymology of words. Never assume that you know a word’s meaning at first glance. Why might the author choose certain words over others?
• Style and Sound: Pay attention to the work’s style. Does the text utilize parallelism? Are there any instances of alliteration or other types of poetic sound? How do these stylistic features contribute to the passage’s overall meaning?
• Context: Consider how the passage you’re reading fits into the work as a whole. Also, does the text refer to historical or cultural information from the world outside of the text? Does the text reference other literary works?

Once you’ve considered the above features of the passage, reflect on its relationship to the work’s larger themes, ideas, and actions. In the end, a close reading allows you to expand your understanding of a text.

Close reading example

Let’s take a look at how this technique works by examining two stanzas from Lorine Niedecker’s poem, “ I rose from marsh mud ”:

I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds.

First, we need to consider the stanzas’ literal content. In this case, the poem is about attending a wedding. Next, we should take note of the poem’s form: four-line stanzas, written in free verse.

From there, we need to look more closely at individual words and phrases. For instance, the first stanza discusses how the speaker “rose from marsh mud” and then lists items like “algae, equisetum, willows” and “sweet green,” all of which are plants. Could the speaker have been gardening before attending the wedding?

Now, juxtapose the first stanza with the second: the speaker leaves the natural world of mud and greenness for the “rich/ rich silence of the church.” Note the repetition of the word, “rich,” and how the poem goes on to describe the “little white slave-girl/ in her diamond fronds,” the necessarily “rich” jewelry that the bride wears at her wedding.

Niedecker’s description of the diamond jewelry as “fronds” refers back to the natural world of plants that the speaker left behind. Note also the similarities in sound between the “frogs” of the first stanza and the “fronds” of the second.

We might conclude from a comparison of the two stanzas that, while the “marsh mud” might be full of “noisy/ birds and frogs,” it’s a far better place to be than the “rich/rich silence of the church.”

Ultimately, even a short close reading of Niedecker’s poem reveals layers of meaning that enhance our understanding of the work’s overall message.

How to write a close reading essay

Getting started.

Before you can write your close reading essay, you need to read the text that you plan to examine at least twice (but often more than that). Follow the above guidelines to break down your close reading into multiple parts.

Once you’ve read the text closely and made notes, you can then create a short outline for your essay. Determine how you want to approach to structure of your essay and keep in mind any specific requirements that your instructor may have for the assignment.

Structure and organization

Some close reading essays will simply analyze the text’s form and content without making a specific argument about the text. Other times, your instructor might want you to use a close reading to support an argument. In these cases, you’ll need to include a thesis statement in the introduction to your close reading essay.

You’ll organize your essay using the standard essay format. This includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Most of your close reading will be in the body paragraphs.

Formatting and length

The formatting of your close reading essay will depend on what type of citation style that your assignment requires. If you’re writing a close reading for a composition or literature class , you’ll most likely use MLA or Chicago style.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing. If your close reading is part of a longer paper, then it may only take up a few paragraphs.

Citations and bibliography

Since you will be quoting directly from the text in your close reading essay, you will need to have in-text, parenthetical citations for each quote. You will also need to include a full bibliographic reference for the text you’re analyzing in a bibliography or works cited page.

To save time, use a credible citation generator like BibGuru to create your in-text and bibliographic citations. You can also use our citation guides on MLA and Chicago to determine what you need to include in your citations.

Frequently Asked Questions about how to do a close reading

A successful close reading pays attention to both the form and content of a literary work. This includes: literal content, tone, characterization, structure, figurative language, diction, sound, style, and context.

A close reading essay is a paper that analyzes a text or a portion of a text. It considers both the form and content of the text. The specific format of your close reading essay will depend on your assignment guidelines.

Skimming and close reading are opposite approaches. Skimming involves scanning a text superficially in order to glean the most important points, while close reading means analyzing the details of a text’s language, style, and overall form.

You might begin a close reading by providing some context about the passage’s significance to the work as a whole. You could also briefly summarize the literal content of the section that you’re examining.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing.

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Article contents

Close reading.

• Mark Byron Mark Byron University of Sydney
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1014
• Published online: 25 March 2021

Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts (principally from the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic traditions) as well as the philological strategies applied to classical works such as the Homeric epics in the Greco-Roman tradition, or the Chinese 詩經 ( Shijing ) or Classic of Poetry . Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman law and the canon law of the Christian Church, and they also find expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books. As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the center of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past one hundred years or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late 1960s. This article provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant nonanglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.

• distant reading
• surface reading
• postcritique
• hermeneutics
• algorithmic reading

What Is Close Reading?

Anyone seriously engaged with literature [. . .] practices close reading; it only becomes one “approach” among others when the attempt is made to abstract some principles from it that are held to rule out the legitimacy of other ways of thinking about one’s reading. (Stefan Collini, “The Close Reader” 1 )

How does close reading function, and what kinds of knowledge does it afford? To close read is to examine a literary work (or part of a work) with sustained attention to such matters as grammar, syntax, vocabulary, rhetorical tropes, prosody, as well as the presence of literary allusion and other forms of intertextuality. A close reading procedure may entail one or more, or all of these elements, depending upon the motivations for close reading in the first place, as well as the aptitudes of the reader, that is, the ability to detect often subtle features of language usage and the presence of specific patterns of usage. Close reading may focus on a single poem—Cleanth Brooks’s reading of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a particularly well-known example—or on short passages scattered across larger texts or corpora, or on longer works, although the general tendency is toward intensive reading of shorter texts. The kinds of information a close reading may yield vary between close readers, but can be usefully reduced into such typologies as: specific linguistic usage and patterns, including etymology; prosody and sound-related language effects; rhetorical tropes and procedures of argumentation; historical and literary references; and linguistic choices indicating sustained engagement with traditions of interpretation of literary or sacred texts. These forms of knowledge are often deployed in aid of such arguments as the literary and ideological influences upon an author, stylometric identification of authorship, evidentiary bases for textual interpretation, arguments for or against the legitimacy of external resources in the production of literary meaning, and ideological and aesthetic discourses within and between reading communities.

Close reading, then, is a method, or a loose collection of methods, aimed at evaluating how a text is assembled and discerning the implications of its linguistic choices. Close reading has a long history, embedded in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts, and hews closely to the history of philology, especially as that discipline sought to establish authoritative texts from among its various witnesses. Methods of close reading are also critical to the development of the law, where precise definition, clear language, and the unambiguous use of concepts have stimulated legislative reforms as well as the “plain language” movement. 2 As a basis for interpretation, close reading is not only a hermeneutic procedure but a performance of the reader’s inclinations and aptitudes. Alternative reading strategies such as postcritique, surface reading, and distant reading respond to perceived limitations of the “depth” model of close reading practices. They instead seek ways of understanding texts and their contexts of production and reception attendant to direct (rather than encoded) meaning as well as to quantitative research methods. These innovations challenge the dominant structure of literary value in texts deemed to be interpretively rich, locating value in more dispersed frameworks such as genre, publication records, readership communities, and digital reach. Close attention to manuscripts, variant editions, and other textual sources—especially as these are collated in digital archives and editions—has stimulated renewed focus on philological methods. This development of textuality in the digital age provides a platform in which close reading methodologies and alternative methods of distant reading, surface reading, and so on, can intersect, each bringing an essential dimension to textual understanding.

Close Reading Sacred Texts

The shift to literacy in ancient civilizations provided the physical means to interpret, paraphrase, and attach commentary to sacred texts. This process was gradual, and ancient religions retained strong oral residues into the late-classical era. The presence of the Tetragrammaton ( יהוה ‎) in Jewish practice and the various nomina sacra in the early Christian tradition signify in writing the weight placed upon verbal enunciation of alternatives to the name of God. Various rhetorical patterns in sacred texts—dense anaphora in the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12), for example—also signify oral performance. Eventually, complex systems of reading and interpretation grew alongside written religious texts. While this article will focus briefly on the texts of the Abrahamic traditions, the transition from oral commentary to written texts also applies to the Avesta , the central texts of Zoroastrianism emerging from earlier oral practices and entering the historical record in the 5th century bce , during the early Achaemenid Empire. The textual tradition collected under the Zoroastrian term “ Zend ” encompassed exegetical glosses, commentaries, and translations of the Avestan texts. 3 Equally, ancient Vedic texts also emerged from an older oral cultural formation, and gave rise to the complex interpretive traditions of Mīmāṃsā . These schools of textual analysis provided the basis for subsequent developments in philology, Sanskrit linguistics, and the philosophy of language. 4 Ancient Chinese texts attracted long traditions of commentary—best preserved in the Confucian canon of the Four Classics and Five Books. The evolution of literary commentaries that reflect processes of close reading—philological, linguistic, intertextual, and so on—bears its history in the exegetical tradition of the 詩經 ‎ ( Shijing ), known as the Classic of Poetry or Book of Odes . By historical convention the poems were collected from the Yellow River plains during the Western Zhou Dynasty ( 1046–771 bce ), from which 305 were selected and arranged by Confucius in the 6th century bce into the text that eventually became part of the traditional Confucian canon during the Han Dynasty. 5

The founding texts of Judaism, the “dual Torah,” exist as the Written Torah—the Pentateuch ( תורה שבכתב ‎) or Five Books of Moses received at Mount Sinai—and the Oral Torah ( תורה שבעל פה ‎)—the sum of rabbinic commentary and other sources of Jewish culture and practice such as the Talmud and Midrash, which are considered as written records of extensive oral transmission. The history of Jewish textual reception is thus one of close reading and close listening. The largest reservoir of evidence for textual reception is the rabbinic literature stemming from the lands of Israel and Babylon between the beginning of the Common Era and the 7th century ce : the Oral Torah collected in the written texts of the Mishnah ( מִשְׁנָה ‎), which were in turn given critical scrutiny in the texts of the Jerusalem Talmud; and the Babylonian Talmud of late antiquity, which collected the Mishnah as well as several hundred years of subsequent commentary or Gemara. The cumulative layers of commentary and interpretation in this tradition is transmitted through intensive study. The meaning of Torah is “teaching” and that of Mishnah “study by repetition,” signifying in the names of Judaism’s core documents the central importance of close reading from which understanding gains the best chance of flourishing. This structure is not only cumulative but reflexive. The canon of the Torah, the Prophets, and Writings in the TaNaKh (an acronym for the Hebrew Bible in its totality) is considered in midrashic interpretation to be intimately interlinked through etymology and other philological features, the divine word combining into a seamless unity where each part sheds light on all others. 6 Every word of the text forms an essential part of the interpretive process in commentaries, and in some commentary traditions this extends to each letter, with attention to their numerical significance becoming a way of reading the “code” embedded in language ( gematria and notaricon ). The customary belief that the TaNaKh precedes and serves as a divine blueprint for Creation—recorded in the late-classical midrashic text the Genesis Rabbah ( בְּרֵאשִׁית רַבָּה ‎)—is an early manifestation of the notion that “There is nothing outside the text.” 7

Christian Bible

The history of biblical interpretation includes the assimilation of texts into one or other biblical canons, the development of biblical hermeneutics from the earliest patristic works, the consequences of the historical-critical method of establishing textual stability, the establishment of apocrypha and the assimilation of newly discovered textual versions (such as those contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls), and modern revisions to earlier interpretive methods, such as reading the Old Testament as generally prophetic of the New Testament. 8 These textual methodologies often entailed the practices of close reading, where the stability of the biblical text was contingent upon its mode of production and transmission. This had particular resonance in terms of translation, where meaning was contingent not only on the movement between languages—Koine Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian, and the modern languages into which the bible has been translated—but also on the specific historical contexts in which texts were transmitted. Modern challenges to the historical-critical method have resulted in closer attention to the intellectual world in which patristic authors were operating: the so-called “philological turn.” This revised view of the early church gave greater recognition to the central function of liturgy and homiletics alongside the formation of the scriptural canon as guides to interpretation. 9

The two major schools of exegesis in the early church were the Antiochenes, foremost John Chrysostom, who largely dealt with historical or literal exegesis, and the Alexandrians, principally Origen, who relied on allegory in their scholia, homilies, and commentaries. Exegetes of the Roman Empire include Hippolytus, Ambrose, Jerome, and the most important of all, Augustine, whose exegetical homilies are collected in the monumental Enarrationes in Psalmos . The Great Schism of 1054 saw the Eastern Orthodox Churches break away from the Catholic Church and develop their own methods of exegesis and homiletics, developing the genre of the catena (from the Latin word for “chain”) which “builds a scriptural commentary by excerpting passages from earlier exegetes and linking them together—usually in the margin of the text to which they all refer, but sometimes in close proximity in other ways.” 10 In the Latin West, the Reformation of the 16th century gave rise to exegetical doctrines that placed the Word—written and preached—at the center of reformed practice, grounded in “a basic commitment to the authority, sufficiency, and perspicuity of scripture.” 11 The Roman Catholic Church underwent its own exegetical revolution in the Second Vatican Council, whereby the publication of Dei verbum in 1965 encouraged a fuller embrace of historical-critical methods drawn from scholarship on Hebrew and Christian scriptures from the early 19th century onward, placing emphasis on the historical contexts of the production of biblical documents as guides to understanding their meaning. 12

The Qur’ān as well as the core Islamic texts known as hadith— pronouncements and actions traditionally attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and gathered several generations after his lifetime—gave rise to the tradition of تفسير ‎ ( tafsīr ) or commentaries. The boundaries between these genres are not always obvious or easy to identify. Walid Saleh puts its succinctly: “There seems to be a solid consensus among scholars as to what the genre is not, but very little agreement about what it is.” 13 This commentary tradition is still in its infancy as far as recognition in the West is concerned, but many of its elements are familiar when considered from an exegetical viewpoint. The stability and identity of the core texts of study form the basis of the discipline, much as textual criticism has done for biblical and classical hermeneutics, but the exegetical dimension of tafsīr (from fassarah , “to interpret”) extends well beyond textual matters into the domain of theological argument. Yet from its origins in Muhammad’s lifetime and the early years following his death, tafsīr was an instrument by which to explicate the Qur’ānic corpus and provide insight and guidance to the ummah or wider Islamic community. A مُفسّر ‎ ( mufassir ) is someone who aims to explain and interpret verses of the Qur’ān or hadith , drawing on many disciplines including linguistics (the morphology of Classical Arabic is a crucial element), theology, and jurisprudence. Further, intensive study of sentence structure and syntax allows the mufassir to deploy rhetorical readings of the Qur’ān, illuminating both zoohor (literal meanings) and khafa (hidden meanings) in the text. Sunni, Shia, and Sufi schools gave rise to different traditions of tafsīr , all of which began as oral traditions before collation into scribal texts. The scholarly centers of Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad also produced different schools of tafsīr . Islam has generated a wide range of approaches to Qur’ānic interpretation and commentary; however, there is a unity of purpose in the intensive focus on individual words and phrases as a method for inducing meaning.

Secular Reading in History

The history of secular reading is as ancient as that of religious texts, yet it has not received the same kind of scholarly attention with the exception perhaps of law. Some of the earliest written secular texts include the various law codes of Mesopotamia, the most celebrated among them the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, dated to c . 1750 bce . Its cuneiform text in the Akkadian language is dedicated largely to contract law, but contains a partial constitution and the earliest known reference to the presumption of innocence. The discovery in 1901 of the diorite stele on which the text is inscribed produced a revolution in Babylonian scholarship but also transformed the general understanding of ancient Mesopotamian law codes. 14 As objects of close reading, law codes form a central thread in the history of textuality: the replacement of Athenian oral law and blood feud by the written constitution of Draco ( c . 620 bce ), followed by the constitution of Solon a century later; the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables ( c . 450 bce ), which consolidated earlier laws and customs and was subsequently elaborated into categories of ius civile (law of citizens), ius gentium (law of the people), and ius naturale (natural law); and the amalgamation of Greek and Roman law in the great law codes of Byzantium such as the Codex Theodosianus ( 438 ce ), the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian ( 529–534 ), the Ecloga of Leo III the Isaurian ( 726 ), and the Basilika of Leo VI the Wise ( 892 ). 15 Roman and Byzantine law were largely secular, but each system exerted influence on the direction of canon law through the middle ages to modernity. The profound influence of Roman law upon European cultures bears its traces from antiquity to the time of modernity:

German legal theorist Rudolf von Jhering famously remarked that ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws. He might have added: each time more thoroughly. 16

Modern techniques of critical reading develop the historical importance of the close reading of statutes and other legal documents. The capacity to parse complex sentences—including often labyrinthine clausal structures—remains an essential skill in legal practice. 17

One of the most celebrated—and notorious—examples of how close reading practices in law shape the relation of the individual to the state, and the very identity and purpose of the state itself, is the jurisprudence that has grown around the Constitution of the United States of America. The interpretive modes applied to the central document of the Constitution and its twenty-seven ratified amendments range from originalism (reading the Constitution as having a fixed meaning contemporaneous with its ratification), judicial restraint (the Supreme Court’s role is to apply rather than to create the law), purposivism (reading the Constitution in terms of what it was intended to achieve even when departing from a literal account), to various forms of instrumentalism (reading the Constitution as a living document adaptable to reflect social change). Each relies on exacting interpretations of the text of the Constitution, but are supported by differing principles of how meaning is produced from that foundational text.

The history of close reading practices is closely interweaved with that of philology and textual scholarship. 18 From the earliest systematic attempts to collect, curate, and reproduce the entirety of the classical textual tradition in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, the philologos or chief librarian oversaw techniques for accurately representing textual matter. These techniques were not primarily aimed at close reading for the purposes of interpretation, but rather to ensure textual accuracy in the processes of copying. Different traditions emerged in the Mediterranean: the Alexandrian technique of analogy sought authority in consistency between witness texts, while the library at Pergamum developed the theory of anomaly , in which inevitable error could serve as a guide to the most reliable witness text by a process of elimination, working back using the stemmatic relations between witnesses. Philological techniques were refined through the medieval and early modern period, resulting in systematic ways of approaching internal textual evidence (word patterns and repetition that could lead to a scribe omitting intervening text, for example) and external evidence (such as the date, source, and relationships between witness texts). These techniques spanned text-based inquiry—the Greek and Roman classics, biblical texts, history, vernacular literature, and so on—and formed the basis of the modern humanities. Philology slowly gave way to modern disciplinary methods, yet its apparition persisted in literary studies in the practices of close reading. Despite some resistance to historical context (in some varieties of New Criticism, for example), many schools of literary study retained a sense of the linguistic and etymological roots of modern texts. 19 Newer methods of scholarship—poststructuralist theory, New Historicism, digital methods, and so on—mark a return to the methods of philology retooled for contemporary contexts of literary production and reception. 20

From Explication de texte to S/Z

The technique of explication de texte dominated French schooling from the 18th century . It provided a stable approach to the understanding of a text, revealing its meaning in the forensic attention to textual detail. Based upon classical rhetorical models of praelectio (oration), it offered students of the baccalaureate a suite of references and quotations to embellish their speeches in subsequent public careers. 21 This institutional practice was a powerful regulative tool of state education: students would divide their analysis into the three parts of summary description, identification of textual structure and genre, and an account of the literary and rhetorical devices used in the text, following a process that would result in a singular accepted interpretation of the text. This method prevailed beyond the mid 20th century , although one of its most influential proponents in the first half of the 20th century , Gustave Lanson, expanded its scope by introducing broader historical and cultural contexts into its hermeneutic mechanism. 22

The emergence of structuralist methods of linguistic, literary, and cultural analysis—particularly Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, elaborated in his Cours de linguistique générale (first published in 1916 ), and its application by Claude Lévi-Strauss to anthropological notions of “savagery” and “civilization” in his Tristes Tropiques (published in 1955 )—established a basis for the methods of semiology to break open reading processes and modes of interpretation across the humanities. 23 As a general science of signs, semiology provided a theoretical basis from which to read various sign structures in cultural objects and fields such as photography, film, literature, advertising, and fashion. In its application to literature, semiology—and structuralism more broadly—represented a challenge to the entrenched practices of explication de texte and biographical criticism, vividly illustrated when semiology’s most prominent practitioner, Roland Barthes, was elected to the prestigious Collège de France by a single deciding vote in 1976 (Lévi-Strauss was a sitting member of the Collège at the time). 24 Taken as a whole, Barthes’s literary analysis seeks to empower readers to engage closely with texts in a process that produces meaning in the exchange that takes place. This notion is captured in the provocation that concludes the essay “Death of the Author”: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” 25

Barthes applies his approach in S/Z , an extended reading of Honoré de Balzac’s novella “Sarrasine” ( 1830 ), where the text is divided into 561 fragments or lexias of varying length and subjected to a variety of critical and analytic operations: the “five codes” Barthes gathers under the terms hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic, and cultural. 26 This extended commentary moves between description and critical interpretation, circling back on the structure of Balzac’s story to reveal further dimensions in etymology, onomastics (the middle S of Sarrasine countering the expectation of a Z , which is the “slash” of La Zambinella’s initial and of Sarrasine’s symbolic castration), and the interaction between plot and narrative. In 1973 , Barthes develops these reading methods in Le plaisir du texte ( The Pleasure of the Text ) , theorizing a division between lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) texts; the former arouses pleasure in the passive reader, whereas the latter produces jouissance— roughly “joy” or “ecstasy”—in the active effort of producing a textual meaning through reading. 27 These techniques of close reading register the traces of a wider practice among Barthes’s French post-structuralist contemporaries: the opening analysis of Diego Velásquez’s painting “Las Meniñas” in Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses ( The Order of Things ) , or Jacques Derrida’s extended critical reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay “Essai sur l’origine des langues” (“Essay on the Origin of Languages”) ( 1781 ) and Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 work La pensée sauvage ( The Savage Mind ) in De la grammatologie ( Of Grammatology ) , to take just two prominent examples. 28

New Criticism

In the field of literary studies the term “close reading” has, until recently, borne close associations with mid-century techniques of literary criticism. The umbrella term New Criticism is often invoked to describe two broad movements in the United Kingdom and the United States that spanned roughly 1930–1970 , becoming the dominant orthodoxy in English departments around the world during that time. The British movement centered on Cambridge University, the scholars I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson, and the literary journal Scrutiny ; the American movement centered on Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College, the scholars John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Burke, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley, and the journal The Kenyon Review . Despite the slightly earlier work of several British scholars having a direct influence on their American counterparts, the British movement was less unified in its sympathies and methods. Both movements were profoundly influenced by the literary essays of T. S. Eliot, whose influence on close reading practices was foundational, and whose influence on the entire modern discipline of literary criticism would be difficult to overstate.

English New Criticism

Eliot’s early essays provide the groundwork for his methods of close reading. Such essays as “Hamlet and His Problems” ( 1919 ) and “The Metaphysical Poets” ( 1921 ) were written when Eliot was working at Lloyds Bank in London, after he had left behind his academic career at Harvard, Oxford, and Birkbeck College. In other essays of the time Eliot proposed general principles of literary criticism and the uses of literary history—notably “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ( 1919 )—but in these two essays Eliot turns his attentions to the procedures of criticism specifically by means of close reading. In “Hamlet” he makes the distinction between the apprehension and critical evaluation of the play, and the temptation of conflating the critic’s (or the critic’s proxy’s) imagination with that of the title character, as he accuses both Goethe and Coleridge of doing. Eliot combines close attention to the form and structure of Shakespeare’s play and its varied quality in versification, with deductions concerning its position in a history of dramatic works to which it is more or less indebted—a process of argument similar to that used in textual criticism in which both internal and external evidence are weighed to determine the authority of a particular text. His verdict is that Hamlet is a failure, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature” in its imperfect overlaying of a mother’s guilt upon a variable structure of preceding playscripts, evident in the failure of an “objective correlative” to manifest itself as an expression of Hamlet’s conflicted emotions. In other words, by close reading, Eliot discovers what is not there in the text of Hamlet, unable to be recuperated even with the most assiduous historical and biographical research. “The Metaphysical Poets” conducts a series of close readings of lines and short passages in poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and others, weighing the techniques of extended metaphor (the metaphysical conceit) against the lesser efforts of later poets. This concentration on poetic technique is magnified further in the essays “Phillip Massinger” ( 1920 ) and “Andrew Marvell” ( 1921 ). 29

The foundation text of the Cambridge movement is I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism published in 1929 , a comprehensive report on the “experiments” he conducted over several years with his students. Richards distributed “printed sheets of poems [. . .] to audiences who were requested to comment freely in writing upon them.” 30 The results were tabulated and a series of observations drawn from them to produce a theory of literary meaning. The rough analogy to such scientific procedures as biomedical clinical trials—anonymity standing in for randomization, texts cleared of any historical or biographical context standing in for placebo groups—gave these experiments an aura of empirical legitimacy. That Richards’s book is divided into a three-part experimental report is testimony to the efforts of demonstrating literary criticism as a discipline with a rigorous and replicable methodology: the Introduction of Part 1 serving as the aim and hypothesis; the Documentation of Part 2 combining the method and results; and the Analysis of Part 3 comprising the discussion of results. He is careful to distinguish literary analysis from the hard sciences, situating his experiment within “the natural history of human opinions and feelings.” 31 The proximate aim of these experiments was to have students read literary texts without the contextual encumbrances of history and biography. The wider aim was to infer methods of reading and interpretation from the formal textual qualities perceived by the students. Richards’s experiment founded a mode of teaching literature that still bears the name of Practical Criticism at Cambridge, although it must be said it serves more as a formalist foundation from which to develop a critical reading. The focus on formal analysis established the role of prosody in modern criticism—akin to rhetorical analysis in classical philology—providing readers with tangible literary attributes as evidence for their interpretations. However, the radical separation from biographical and historical context has received pointed critique especially in light of materialist and sociological theories of literature. Lyric poetry affords a kind of material decontextualization not available to drama or novels due to matters of scale. It can be extracted onto an otherwise empty page. Additionally the poems selected for the experiment uniformly belong to the age of print, neatly side-stepping some of the material aspects of presentation in medieval texts such as paleography and orthography.

William Empson combined Richards’s close attention to formal aspects of poetry—Richards was his tutor at Magdalen College when he took a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Cambridge—with Eliot’s focus on Elizabethan poetry in his major early studies: Seven Types of Ambiguity , and Some Versions of Pastoral . In a series of close readings, Seven Types of Ambiguity demonstrated the grammatical, prosodic, and rhetorical flexibility of English poetry, yielding mutually exclusive or otherwise alternate interpretations. This text had a profound influence on New Criticism in the United States, setting an agenda that led to Empson teaching in the annual summer school of criticism at Kenyon College in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the company of Ransom, Tate, and Brooks. Empson turned his attention to modern authors in a series of essays during the early 1930s, including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Some Versions of Pastoral , while treating texts mostly from the early modern period, begins to argue for the role of authorial intention, historical and social contexts, and other extra-textual dimensions in the service of interpretation. This led to methodological differences with Richards and major disagreements with other critics such as F. R. Leavis. A vivid index of Empson’s versatility as a reader is his rediscovered manuscript (now edited and published) The Face of the Buddha . Empson’s appraisal of Buddhist sculpture in East and South-East Asia turns on his theory that some of the earliest and most important sculptures (mostly Korean and Japanese) divide the face of the Buddha into two expressions, where the left side presents an expression of passivity and meditation, and the right engages directly with the viewer. This capacity to “close read” sculptures belonging to a foreign tradition (or set of traditions) is a feature of Empson’s critical technique, where his attention to an author’s (or sculptor’s) historical and cultural context indicates a clear divergence from the Cambridge and Kenyon scholars with whom he is most commonly grouped.

The Cambridge movement’s most durable icon is F. R. Leavis. His name has functioned as a kind of metonym for criticism that attempts to become systematic in response to advances in the physical sciences—his notorious disagreement with C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument being a case in point, where Snow lamented the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, manifested in a general illiteracy concerning the momentous advancements of modern physics in particular. 32 The Leavis circle, which included Q. D. Leavis and the contributors to the journal Scrutiny , considered its analysis of a “shared moral economy” evident in literary expression as the basis for criticism. Leavis became a metonym against which historical criticism (Oxford) and theory-driven criticism (Yale, front running much of the academy) would define their primary tasks, invested in the historical and cultural contexts of literary production and reception. In his first major publication, in 1932 , New Bearings in English Poetry , Leavis produced a series of close readings of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, defining what was new and influential about their poetry. 33 Leavis’s analysis operated in the manner of Eliot’s criticism, setting out his arguments with the support of close textual examination. Yet his methods in this book—and more so in later publications such as The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit ––were grounded in the historical and social contexts that shaped literary production. In this sense Leavis shared an important feature with Empson (albeit from a narrower and eventually more irascible worldview), than with the approach of Richards or the New Critics of the United States—who treat literary texts as verbal icons separated from authorial and historical contexts—with which his criticism is commonly associated.

American New Criticism

The critical practices of close reading that were to dominate higher education in the United States following the Second World War developed out of a reaction to philology and biographical criticism in the early 20th century . Attention to literary form, and its implications for interpretation, was a central theme of the criticism of Tate, Ransom, and Warren—who met at Vanderbilt University in Nashville between the World Wars and became known as the “Southern Fugitives.” Their arguments over the success or otherwise of Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land centered on its form, and more specifically its intelligibility when set against the demands of realism in literature. Tate saw its experimentation as a successful negotiation with the conditions of modernity where Ransom saw fragmentation and formal incoherence. The shared reaction to the emergence of the “New South” lent these critics a conservative or even reactionary aura, but at the same time demonstrated their commitment to criticism that took into account the economic impacts upon cultural formations—recognized in their collective identity as the “Agrarian” movement. Literature had an aesthetic autonomy from both scientific discourses and economics, was not reducible to mere utility, and deployed its texture (the material patterns of a text such as its sound) as a way to critique its structure (conceptual or “rational” content). 34 Thus, a tension existed within the text, a product of its historical-cultural context in play with its form—a tension that placed a premium on the evaluation of irony in literary expression and its resistance to paraphrase. 35 This embodied the moral dimension of literature in its presentation of paradox and contradiction in response to the modern condition: iconic in presenting its complexity in its form. 36

This phase of criticism centered at Vanderbilt University began to coalesce into a movement: Warren and Brooks became editors of the Southern Review in 1936 , and Ransom moved to Kenyon College in 1937 , becoming editor of The Kenyon Review . Ransom responded to the crisis in the teaching of English literature in universities in his essay of the same year, “Criticism, Inc.,” seeing opportunity in leading reform in the Modern Languages Association. 37 The publication of Warren and Brooks’s Understanding Poetry in 1938 went further, setting out the New Critical agenda for the undergraduate classroom. The massive expansion of higher education in response to the Great Depression and the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act or GI Bill following the Second World War placed new pressure on the practice of literary studies in the academy to justify itself beyond the technical grounds of philology from which it emerged in the late 19th century . The New Critical emphasis on the text as a verbal construction allied the dual aims of language-based research and interpretation, providing an argument for the wider social relevance for the study of literature. It also offered a powerful negation of the concept of authorial intention, given that literature, as a public verbal articulation, was subject to the social operations of language that exceeded a single subjectivity (including the reader, whose interpretation was also part of the social nexus of language). These developments had foundational effects upon canon formation in the American academy, favoring the Metaphysical poets and Modernists such as T. S. Eliot—just as F. R. Leavis and other critics in England had done—but also giving new attention to Romantic poetry. New Critical close attention to literary form and linguistic complexity aligned with the distribution of literary texts during and after the Second World War, that is, the Armed Services Editions of modern literature distributed to enlisted and drafted soldiers in training barracks who were awaiting deployment. This initiative was supported by William Warder Norton, president of the publishing house that bears his name, resulting in the free distribution of 122 million free books and 1,322 titles. 38 The mass production of cheap titles unencumbered by extensive scholarly apparatus—and the emerging market for anthologies on which the W. W. Norton publishing firm was to have such an impact—served the vastly expanded academy following wartime, and realized the purposes of New Critical reading techniques.

The processes of close reading in the New Critical program established a readily identifiable lexicon: verbal icon, paradox, ambiguity, conceit, irony, and so on. The methods of close reading were analytic rather than illustrative, that is, authority resided in the critic’s ability to parse (usually poetic) texts and reveal the tensions between form and subject matter. This focus on technique—both evident in the literary work and in the processes of interpretation—provided a repertoire that legitimated English Literature in the research university. To take one of the more prominent examples, Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry performs a series of poetic close readings from Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, to Pope, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, to Tennyson and Yeats. Similarly to I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism , Brooks acknowledges that his studies stem from the classroom, in this case not as written exercises of evaluation but class discussion of “celebrated English poems, taken in chronological order,” developing a general theory of poetic structure from concrete examples. 39 The book’s dedication reads: “To the members of English 300-K (Summer Session of 1942 , University of Michigan) who discussed the problems with me and helped me work out some of the analyses.” Brooks makes repeated reference to Richards in the essays “Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination” and “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes.” They share a method of close attention to poetic texts without concern for their historical contexts, although Brooks makes clear he sees value in such context and is seeking out whatever “residuum” remains after dealing with the poem’s cultural context. Brooks concentrates on the functions of paradox—the first chapter is titled “The Language of Paradox”—and does the most interesting work by extending its application from its native terrain of Metaphysical poetry to that of Romanticism.

The essay on Wordsworth puts aside biography (temporarily) to focus on paradox, irony, and, following Empson, the ambiguity inherent in Wordsworth’s choice of symbolism in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The method of analysis approximates line commentary, repeated in the essay on Keats but with less direct quotation from “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In that essay, Brooks attends to the rhetoric and logic of the poem, finding paradox in the way it sets out a portrait of an aesthetic object—the object of his book’s title, no less—but ends with a “sententious statement” equating truth and beauty and then asserting it to be “the whole of mortal knowledge,” which is for the poem “‘to mean’ with a vengeance.” 40 The essay examines whether the urn’s final “utterance” constitutes a break in the poem’s tone, or whether its thread of paradox—beginning with the urn’s “silence” obviated by its role as “historian,” and continuing with the immobile urn’s ecstatic scenes—accommodates its chiasmus of truth and beauty. That final expression by the urn of its own nature is thus, for Brooks, an utterance “in character,” supported by the preceding scenario of urn and mythic scenery painted upon it. Brooks’s argument rests upon taking the poem as a whole as an expression of its subject matter, possessing a view on the world (and its world) that defies paraphrase. He sees Keats’s poem as a performance akin to his own critical method of close reading. 41

This attention to complex verbal structures such as conceit and paradox, and such modes of expression such as irony, had the effect of installing certain kinds of literature at the center of the New Critical project at the expense of other kinds. The Metaphysical poets took precedence over Milton, and the Modernists over the Victorians and the Romantics—although some critics such as Brooks were far more even-handed in their appraisal than others such as T. S. Eliot. By attempting a definition of literature—the kinds of texts most amenable to these critical operations—New Criticism became associated with an ideology of aesthetic autonomy against which newly emergent fields such as cultural studies, semiotics, and poststructuralist theory would press. The long-standing hegemony of New Criticism in much of the anglophone scholarly world waned from the 1970s—prompting leading critics such as Helen Vendler to lament the eclipse of prosodic close reading practices 42 —but the methods of close reading took on new form in many of the emergent theoretical methodologies of the period.

Theory and Close Reading

One persistent legacy of New Criticism on both sides of the Atlantic is its perceived ownership of the method of close reading. Cognate with this notion is the sense that to read closely is to separate the text’s meaning from history, ideology, biography, and other discursive forces. Yet as French critical methods have shown, close reading has an extensive history as a central feature of interpretation. More generally, the emergence of modern literary studies from the long history of philology—of sacred and secular texts—means that exacting attention to minute textual detail has been a cornerstone of reading during the entire history of textual transmission and reception. In the anglophone context, and especially in the United States, the eclipse of New Criticism as the dominant paradigm was hastened by the introduction of French theory in the later 1960s. The legendary conference, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man held at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966 , is often taken as a symbolic point of transition. Talks by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Lucien Goldman, Georges Poulet, René Girard, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Hyppolite, and Roland Barthes introduced several ideas that were to become hegemonic in the adoption of structuralist and poststructuralist thought in the anglophone academy: that speech and writing are subjects of discourse rather than expressions of authorial autonomy; that systems of ideas drive the major actors in intellectual history rather than the other way around; and that the metaphysics of presence is undercut by the operations of the unconscious, the absence of the transcendental signifier, and so on. 43 Edward Said was profoundly influenced by his participation in the event, and its effect on scholarly discourse was significant.

What is germane here is that structuralism and post-structuralism introduced a range of tools by which to analyze literary texts in the context of language, ideology, culture, and so on, and their effectiveness partly hinged on the application of close reading techniques. Each of deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, semiology, French feminist theory, and New Historicism demand close attention to the way various codes are installed within literary language, requiring what has come to be known as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” or “paranoid reading” to reveal these dimensions of the text to the reader. 44 In his foundational work published in 1967 , De la grammatologie , Derrida performs a deconstructive reading of structuralist linguistics through a close reading of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale , and develops his theory of the supplement by way of an extremely detailed reading of Rousseau’s “Essai sur l’origine des langues.” Derrida’s extensive oeuvre demonstrates variety in its subject matter and approach, yet he deploys a consistent method to the analysis of concepts—presence, erasure, archive, and so on—by examining their origins and the conditions of their use, demonstrating that with sufficient pressure, a rift will open up to show that the discourse in questions contains the conditions of its own contradiction. This method bears echoes of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, yet its careful linguistic analysis always draws it back to the processes of close reading.

Derrida’s approach to textuality profoundly influenced North American literary scholarship, particularly the so-called “Yale School” of Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and, for a time, Harold Bloom. This influence extended to the techniques of reading and evaluating literature. Paul de Man noted the continuities between New Criticism and deconstructive literary theory in their shared close reading practices: “a straightforward report on the present state of literary theory in the United States would have to stress the emphasis on reading, a direction which is already present, moreover, in the New Critical traditions of the forties and fifties.” 45 The turn from matters of aesthetics to those of linguistics—bearing a connection with philology that deserves fuller examination—meant reading closely for ruptures in the logic and rhetoric of the text’s discourse in a deployment of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The Yale School had its greatest impact in the 1970s and 1980s, and unusually for theory-driven literary analysis, gave much of its focus to close readings of Romantic poetry. 46 Several of these have become classics of the genre, such as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host”—dealing with the various etymologies of “host,” chains of signification that defy singular meaning, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Triumph of Life”—and Geoffrey Hartman’s “The Interpreter’s Freud,” which applies Freud’s idea of free association in dreams to a reading of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” to reveal a rich polysemy beneath an otherwise integral text surface. 47

Critical approaches to literature in the age of theory tend to pair close reading techniques with interpretive methods driven by the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: reading against the grain of the text, observing “symptoms” of a submerged discourse that throws the text surface into relief, analyzing the rhetorical and conceptual structure of a text to find its blind spots and points of contradiction. This model, in which the text surface is layered upon its uncanny depths, adapts some of the key themes of psychoanalysis (for example, dreams, the unconscious, and linguistic slippage), and proves to be a fertile model for a wide range of discursive explorations. One of the more foundational texts in theory-driven literary analysis is Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious published in 1981 , in which the political perspective is not one method of reading literature among others, but “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” 48 Analysis thus centers upon the assemblage of specific codes or concepts that clarify where and how ideology operates within literary texts. More generally, the approach of symptomatic reading that was to become the dominant form in the 1980s proceeds by examining dialectical pairs of concepts such as presence/absence, surface/depth, and manifest/latent, where the role of interpreter is to foreground codes that were otherwise repressed or unspoken. Such procedures are prone to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms “paranoid readings,” in which interpretation is engaged in an inescapable process of doubling in a “drama of exposure.” Instead, an alternate interpretive strategy of reparative reading considers the text as a source for replenishment rather than an object of critique. 49

New Historicism represents another style of close reading in literary scholarship, in which texts (or textual fragments) are read as embedded in their material networks and cultural contexts. Drawing on intellectual history and cultural studies, such texts in the genre as Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions examines how travel narratives, judicial documents, and other source texts embody a sense of the “marvelous” in the service of colonial appropriation in the early modern period in the New World. Other texts in the genre, such as Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare , operate by a mode of “thick description,” in which literary production is shown to be deeply entrenched in prevailing social and economic conditions. Orgel places Shakespeare’s dramatic works in the historical context of a deeply collaborative theater in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages, replacing the image of the writer of genius with that of a well-trained and highly competent guild craftsman. 50 New Historicism represents a different kind of close reading in its focus on the constitutive elements of a written text within the wider contexts in which is it produced, thus “reading” social and economic formations with equal assiduity. A case could be made for numerous modes of theory-driven literary scholarship to be considered forms of close reading, such as postcolonial literary criticism, queer and feminist literary criticism, and cognitive literary criticism, among others. Close attention to the particularities of texts has driven literary analysis throughout history, but perhaps the distinction in the theory and post-theory landscapes since the 1960s is the attention given to other intellectual and social structures as means by which to generate meaning, or to show how meaning is networked between texts and their contexts.

The commonalities shared by theory-driven and empirically-based methods of close reading raise interesting questions concerning how discursive and ideological positions toward literary texts tend to rely on a stock of reading methods. In their aptly subtitled anthology Close Reading: The Reader , Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois divide their chosen excerpts into two groups, representing “formalist” and “non-formalist” or “political” modes of reading respectively, but which find common ground in their shared attention to the close examination of literary texture. 51 The first group, “Formalism (Plus),” contains some of the most influential American New Critical essays by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, and R. P. Blackmur, as well as close readings by a later generation of scholars not identified as New Critics but who engage closely with textual detail in the prosecution of their arguments, such as Helen Vendler and Stanley Fish. The second group, “After Formalism?” demonstrates the methodological suitability of close reading to the articulation of certain kinds of literary theory, with essays by Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Houston A. Baker Jr., and Homi Bhabha. This group also includes representative essays from the methodological viewpoints of New Historicism and Distant Reading. Although this volume almost exclusively comprises work by North American scholars, it demonstrates the portability and suppleness of close reading techniques.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith draws attention to the reading strategies common to much of Anglo-American literary analysis over the 20th century —from historical philology to New Criticism to deconstruction—where variations in target texts, the discourses motivating critical inquiry, and the dispositions of inquiry all tend to rest on close textual examination. 52 The calls to professionalize literary criticism by Ransom and others sought its systematization and accreditation in university academic programs, where it quickly became the core of humanistic study in the middle decades of the last century. From an identifiably narrow canon of texts—with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats, George Eliot, and T. S. Eliot at its center—the pressures of other methodological approaches on the canon pointed to matters of scale and the purposes of interpretation: “As literary studies have been pursued under the auspices of structuralism, semiotics, New Historicism, deconstruction, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial criticism, and queer theory, the types and cultural status of the texts examined by literary scholars and read closely in their classrooms have continuously expanded.” 53 How do professional readers of literature respond to these pressures? Do they persist with the methods of close reading, or do they seek out alternative ways of managing a vastly expanded corpus? The kinds of literary evidence at issue may be looked at from a different vantage, such as surface over depth, or the scale of “data” taken from a text or a corpus might be greatly expanded to establish the existence of patterns (word usage, grammatical features, punctuation) not readily apprehended from “analog” reading processes.

Beyond Close Reading

With the slow waning of theory’s hegemony and the rise of digital methods in literary studies, attention has shifted to the critique of close reading as a method that privileges certain kinds of literary evidence and epistemological modes. The reading strategies most closely associated with Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion” are taken to task for implicit assumptions of value and the role of “evidence” in literary understanding: namely, that the pursuit of underlying discourse by means of its “symptoms” or coded proxies at the text’s surface is to be prized above reading a text at face value, which as a consequence becomes a naïve undertaking. The roots of such a mode of reading are traced to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”—who each warn against surface meaning and seek out more difficult or unpalatable truths by reading against the grain of the text. 54 The challenge to the hermeneutics of suspicion takes a variety of forms, but might be conveniently classed under the rubric of postcritique. As a mode of reading postcritique seeks alternatives to interpretation as the primary goal of scholarly interaction with literary texts. This draws on a heritage that includes Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” which extols an erotics of art in place of hermeneutics, 55 as well as Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte of 1973 in its distinction between pleasure in readerly texts and jouissance in writerly texts—the former retaining a stable subject position and the latter fracturing or liberating it.

A primary aim of postcritique is to recuperate dimensions of the reading experience excluded or ignored by conventional critical exegesis and analysis. 56 The ubiquity of critique in literary studies must first be recognized—Rita Felski describes it as “a thought style that slices across differences of field and discipline” 57 —and its function as the dominant metalanguage in the discipline understood as potentially limiting. Felski sees the application of critique as a frequent mistaking of “a part of thought with the whole of thought, and that in doing so we are scanting a range of intellectual and expressive possibilities.” 58 The manner in which critique positions the reader in relation to a text is one of congenital skepticism, and even though its operations include modes of close reading, critique forces an ironic separation of reader and text—the cold, critical eye. By installing this kind of approach to the text, critique becomes a “regime of thought.” Postcritique instead centers its operations on the reading experience, whereby affect and somatic response play central parts in interpretation in place of a detached analytic rigor. Postcritique keeps open a depth model of reading—not relegated to the text’s surface but able to identify deeper patterns of imagery or theme—and is consistent with the practices of close reading. Felski’s model of postcritique draws on the work of Bruno Latour, particularly by reconfiguring hermeneutics not as a sign of human mastery over a world of objects, but rather as a mode of engagement in a network of actors. She also develops the thought of such French critics as Marielle Macé and Yves Citton, in which reading is not a separation from life but an “embodied mode of attentiveness,” and where interpretation is a process of textual reinvention that exercises analytic and affective processes of understanding the text’s details. 59

The depth model of knowledge implicit in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” has also been challenged by different strategies collected under the rubric of surface reading. 60 This term describes approaches to literary texts that draw on methods from anthropology, history, political science, and cognate disciplines, themselves drawing on methods of close reading brought about by the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s. 61 Broadly speaking, surface reading rejects the kinds of symptomatic reading that have dominated modern criticism, taking exception to Fredric Jameson’s view of ideology in his Political Unconscious : namely, that it relies on and is constituted by an essential lack of transparency. Surface reading aims to read texts on different terms than those of “suspicion” or an imperative to decode. Rather, it takes the text surface on its own terms. Close reading methods remain essential—a text’s meaning is revealed by close attention to its language and form. Surface reading is thus not a variety of close reading per se, but a collection of practices that each force an evaluation of what kinds of close reading are deployed and to what purposes. Surface reading tends to a position of anti-instrumentalism, but rather than an acquiescence into quietism, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus “want to reclaim from this tradition the accent on immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value), for we understand that attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom.” 62 This non-purposive aim of literary reading aligns with Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading in its foreclosure on paranoid or coded readings, but may concede too much ground in its avoidance of ideology critique and other modes of situating texts within larger linguistic and cultural contexts.

Close reading operates by circumscription (this text, not others) and dilation (intensive focus on language, imagery, historical reference, and so on). But how might literary studies attempt to understand literature as a social phenomenon, as something shared in various social networks, distributed across languages and geography, produced in a commodity economy of publishing, and as a factor in national economies and self-imaginings? Some of these questions are aided by developments in information storage and data manipulation, such as photographic or digital archives of popular fiction, newspapers, and magazines, and databases tracking the number and distribution of publications within and between nations. This incursion of big data into the fields of bibliography and book history has invoked different forms of reading. No longer primarily concentrated on linguistic and formal elements for the purposes of interpretation, distant reading investigates the composition of literary corpora (such as modes of narration and characterological features in novels, the relative distribution and frequency of poetic genres and of other literary or linguistic features), as well as larger movements in literary discourse such as the distribution over time and across geographic zones of literary modes (the novel, drama) and of proxies for reading such as sales figures and library circulation records.

The concept of distant reading is most closely associated with the work of Franco Moretti who outlined the problem of canon formation and the limits of reading in his essay “Conjectures on World Literature” in 2000 . 63 Those limits not only concern the sheer volume of literary publication—there is not time enough for adequate coverage of any literary genre—but also relate to method, where close reading performs a series of procedures evaluated for their insight and competency. Matthew Wilkens describes a problem in which literary studies has a “single working method [. . .] the need to perform always and only close reading as a means of cultural analysis.” 64 Rather than one paradigm dominating scholarly engagement with literary texts in this way, he advocates a valuation of literature “as indicators of larger cultural issues” where reading at scale rather than by a process of selectivity brings about a different kind of emphasis in reading literary texts. This view understates the variety and efficacy of critical approaches at the scale of individual works of literature, but its main aim is to advocate for such techniques as bibliometrics, data mining, quantitative analysis, geospatial analysis, economics of the book trade at national and global levels, and other measures of literary consumption at scales exceeding analog empirical research methods.

Moretti’s and Wilkens’s practices of distant reading entail the deployment of digital scholarly methods to evaluate aspects of literary history such as the frequency, distribution, and location of literary publishing (in general and by genre, gender, nationality, and other categories). Literary, periodical, and publishing databases have proven effective in widening and deepening the understanding of text production and circulation. One striking example is Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field , in which Katherine Bode mines the AustLit database to examine how the 19th-century Australian novel was transmitted internationally, often in periodical form prior to book publication. 65 In A World of Fiction , Bode provides a nuanced and comprehensive critique of Moretti’s use of big data in his formulations of literary history in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History and Distant Reading . The conflation of data with “fact” rather than as already interpreted information leads Moretti to “present literary data and digital collections as pre-critical, stable, and self-evident,” and betrays a tendency to gloss over methodological gaps, which blunts the effectiveness of his approach. 66 The role of data mining methods in literary studies has received mounting critical scrutiny in the 2010s—coinciding with a reassessment of the digital humanities job market in higher education—particularly the tendency to overlook assumptions of gender, race, disability, economic status, and other embodied ways that scholars approach the field. In these critical assessments, distant reading loses the hermeneutic nuance and contextual richness of close reading methods, but it also blunts many of the pressing issues of equity and access that impinge upon digitally mediated literary scholarship. 67

How Close Is Too Close?

The various methods of close reading seek to derive evidence from the text as a foundation for interpretive arguments. These arguments often extend well beyond the text material itself, taking in historical, linguistic, philosophical, political, and intertextual discourses. Yet at the center of these arguments can be found the vocabularies, image networks, rhetorical strategies, and other elements of the text’s language. Are there practical or formal limits to the degree of intensity of a close reading? At what point does a focus on the minutiae of a text distort the larger discourses and hermeneutic networks to which it belongs, or against which it chafes? Taking the example of poetry—language charged with meaning in highly concentrated form—close reading takes for its subject patterns of sound, imagery, metaphor, as well as word-choice, rhyme scheme, and larger patterns. A highly concentrated close reading might evaluate etymology, slippages between languages and dialects, punctuation, and intertextual echoes embedded in sound as well as direct allusion. Yet close reading might extend to matters of bibliography as much as to verbal material: illuminated capitals, paper quality (or parchment, or papyrus), types of binding, the form of the book (codex, scroll, loose leaves), methods of printing (hot metal, photographic offset), and other material aspects of the text that contribute directly to its meaning. 68 Such loving attention to detail is ripe for parody, most famously exploited in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire , in which John Shade’s 999-line poem of that name is overwhelmed by the antic commentary of his nemesis Charles Kinbote. While Kinbote’s obsessions continually lead away from his target text—comprising much of the comedy and pathos of the novel—the capacity for close reading to generate critical discourse is not in dispute, particularly when the attentions of critics to this novel are taken into account.

The English poet J. H. Prynne engages in what might be called extremely close reading in a series of poetic studies: They That Haue Powre to Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 ( 2001 ), Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and others ( 2007 ), George Herbert, Love III: A Discursive Commentary ( 2011 ), and Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 ( 2015 ). Each text takes one poem as its focus—Sonnet 94 is given 86 pages of commentary, “The Solitary Reaper” 135 pages, “Love III” 92 pages, and Sonnet 15 is given 74 pages—and engages in intensely close reading using the method of line commentary. 69 The etymology and intertextual references embedded in individual words are read within a discursive context of social, political, scientific, literary historical, and bibliographic information, and a variety of interpretive possibilities is negotiated as a consequence of this process. These exercises in commentary demonstrate the embeddedness of texts within linguistic and social discourses, showing how deeply enmeshed verbal images and individual words are within their histories. Rather than abutting the limits of close reading, Prynne’s commentaries illustrate what lies beyond the foothills of most conventional close readings.

Discussion of the Literature

The prehistory of modern literary close reading practices is wide-ranging, taking in scriptural exegesis of the world’s major religions, the interpretation of written legal documents—and between these two categories a large part of the history of textuality per se—as well as classical philology and historical criticism. The history of interpretation of Abrahamic sacred texts is given a systematic overview in Jacob Neusner’s Introduction to Rabbinic Literature , Walid A. Saleh’s The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qur’ān Commentary of al-Tha’labī (d. 427/1035) , and The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies , edited by Susan Ashbrook and David G. Hunter, as well as the three-volume History of Biblical Interpretation edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson. Renewed interest in the history and methods of classical philology is represented in the excellent study by James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities . For non-Western traditions of philology the collection of essays World Philology , edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin is an indispensable resource.

Techniques of close reading in modern literary studies arose in reaction to narrow historicist or biographical modes of literary interpretation. Roland Barthes’s S/Z captures the dexterity of semiological methods by breaking a literary text into small sections or lexias and reading them through various “codes.” The dominant modes of close reading in 20th-century university literature departments were associated with New Criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. The British manifestation was varied: I. A. Richards set out his classroom methods of analysis in Practical Criticism , his student William Empson set out a program of close reading that combined formal analysis with historical context in Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral , and F. R. Leavis turned his attention to matters of technique in New Bearings in English Poetry and to a formal-historical analysis of prose in The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit . Perhaps the central text of New Critical close reading, and even of modern literary criticism, is T. S. Eliot’s collection of essays The Scared Wood . New Criticism in the United States was shaped by two books co-authored by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction . Brooks’s essays on poetry, The Well Wrought Urn , also became a staple guide to literary analysis in a rapidly expanding academy following the Second World War.

Following a hegemonic generation (or two) of New Critical approaches to literature, the influence of French literary and critical theory upon reading methods became pronounced from the 1960s onward. Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie not only brought new methods to bear on literary analysis—writing under erasure, différance , the supplement—it also engaged with intensive modes of close reading, avowing its own intellectual origins in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale and bringing that text’s analysis of the linguistic sign into sharp focus. This intensive attention to the structure of language also opened the way for close reading that sought to reveal codes of meaning within texts that often ran against the grain of the surface narrative. These methods drew on psychoanalysis, feminist theory, queer theory, Marxist criticism, postcolonial theory, and other discourses to show how meaning operates in complex and often contradictory ways. The resonance with a New Critical emphasis on irony and paradox has become a topic of greater interest since the waning—or at least dispersion—of theory’s influence. This complicated history is examined in the essay collection Close Reading: The Reader , edited by Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois.

The impact of theory on close reading practices in anglophone higher education institutions is profound, particularly in the adoption of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” set out in De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud . Among the innumerable applications of this notion to literary interpretation, perhaps Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious has had the furthest reach, combining Ricoeur’s notion with the methods of Marxist critique. Reading against the grain of the text is especially suited to psychoanalytic close reading—beginning with Freud’s own case studies—as well as ideology critique, feminist and queer reading practices, and postcolonial criticism. New Historicism provides a sharp example of how close reading of historical documents can be turned to this effect, and such examples as Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions and Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare provide elegant case studies. The ubiquity of “suspicious” reading in literary studies and cognate disciplines led to a counter-movement in close reading practices in which the jouissance of a reading experience would take precedence, drawing on Barthes’s classic Le plaisir du texte as well as Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation.” This celebration of a textual “erotics” produced a queer mode of reparative reading, enunciated in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.”

From the beginning of the 21st century a number of alternative modes of reading have arisen in general dissatisfaction with close reading as the prime mode of textual engagement in literary studies. Rita Felski’s Limits of Critique has established a provocative agenda for post-critical accounts of reading in which somatic and affective resources count as much as cognitive and analytic modes of textual apprehension. In their Introduction to a 2009 special issue of Representations , Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus set out a case for surface reading, in which a non-purposive reading mode attends to textual detail, but not in service of any discursive agenda. Other ways of reading sought distance form the matter of literary texts in favor of larger systems of publication, distribution, and circulation made quantifiable and thus put into the service of data analysis. The methods of distant reading have computational analysis of “big data” at their center, most prominently captured in Franco Moretti’s work, including in particular Graphs, Maps, Trees and Distant Reading . This quantified approach to literary analysis has drawn widespread criticism from scholars operating within the digital humanities as well as those in the business of a more typical literary interpretation—demonstrating rather efficiently that close reading describes any sustained engagement with a literary text, attentive to its technical and affective structures, and without which one cannot be said to have read literature in any meaningful sense.

Links to Digital Materials

Not surprisingly the application of digital methods in distant reading is well represented in digital resources, as are the various critiques of distant reading as it has been practiced. The following is a brief list of essential starting points in this ongoing and complicated discourse:

• The Stanford Literary Lab .
• Tanya Clement , “ The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining ” (2016).
• Laura Mandell , “ Gender and Big Data: Finding or Making Stereotypes? ” (2016).
• Bethany Nowviskie , “ What Do Girls Dig? ” (2011).
• Lisa Marie Rhody , “ Why I Dig: Feminist Approaches to Text Analysis ” (2016).

Further Reading

• Anker, Elizabeth S. , and Rita Felski . “Introduction.” In Critique and Postcritique . Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski , 1–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Barthes, Roland . S/Z: An Essay . Translated by Richard Miller . New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.
• Barthes, Roland . The Pleasure of the Text . Translated by Richard Miller . New York: Hill & Wang, 1975.
• Best, Stephen , and Sharon Marcus . “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–2.
• Bode, Katherine . Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field . London: Anthem, 2014.
• Brooks, Cleanth . The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry . New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
• de Man, Paul . “The Resistance to Theory.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 3–20.
• Derrida, Jacques . Of Grammatology . Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Eliot, Thomas Stearns . The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism . London: Methuen, 1920.
• Empson, William . Seven Types of Ambiguity . London: Chatto & Windus, 1930.
• Empson, William . Some Versions of Pastoral . London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
• Empson, William . The Face of the Buddha . Edited by Rupert Richard Arrowsmith . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Felski, Rita . The Limits of Critique . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Foucault, Michel . The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . New York: Pantheon, 1971.
• Goodrich, Peter . Reading the Law: A Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques . London: Blackwell, 1986.
• Gorke, Andreas , and Johanna Pink , eds. Tafsīr and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Greenblatt, Stephen . Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Hartman, Geoffrey . “The Interpreter’s Freud.” In Easy Pieces , 137–154. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
• Hauser, Alan J. , and Duane F. Watson , eds. The History of Biblical Interpretation . 3 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008, 2018, and 2017.
• Herrnstein Smith, Barbara . “What Was ‘Close Reading’?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies.” Minnesota Review 87 (2016): 57–75.
• Jameson, Fredric . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . New Bearings in English Poetry . London: Chatto & Windus, 1932.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad . London: Chatto & Windus, 1948.
• Leavis, Frank Raymond . The Common Pursuit . London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.
• Lentricchia, Frank , and Andrew Dubois , eds. Close Reading: The Reader . Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
• Litz, A. Walton , Louis Menand , and Lawrence Rainey , eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Lönnroth, Harry , ed. Philology Matters! Essays on the Art of Reading Slowly . Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017.
• Marx, William . The Hatred of Literature . Translated by Nicholas Elliott . Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2018.
• Miller, J. Hillis . “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447.
• Moretti, Franco . “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.
• Moretti, Franco . Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History . London: Verso, 2005.
• Moretti, Franco . Distant Reading . London: Verso, 2013.
• Neusner, Jacob . Introduction to Rabbinic Literature . New York, NY: Random House, 1994.
• Norman, Buford . “Explication de texte.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics . Edited by Stephen Cushman , 472–473. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Orgel, Stephen . The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage . New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002.
• Pollock, Sheldon , Benjamin A. Elman , and Ku-ming Kevin Chang , eds. World Philology . Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Ransom, John Crowe . The World’s Body . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.
• Ransom, John Crowe . The New Criticism . New York: New Directions, 1941.
• Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment . New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1929.
• Ricoeur, Paul . Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation . Translated by Denis Savage . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
• Schleiermacher, Friedrich . Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings . Edited and translated by Andrew Bowie . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky . “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction . Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
• Sontag, Susan . “Against Interpretation.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays , 13–23. New York: Dell, 1966.
• Striphas, Ted . The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Tate, Allen . Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.
• Turner, James . Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
• Vendler, Helen . The Breaking of Style . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
• Warren, Robert Penn , and Cleanth Brooks . Understanding Poetry . New York: Henry Holt, 1938.
• Warren, Robert Penn , and Cleanth Brooks . Understanding Fiction . New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943.
• Wimsatt, William K. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954.

1. Stefan Collini, “ The Close Reader ,” The Nation (February 1, 2007).

2. “Plain English” was formally instituted as a movement in US legal circles by David Mellinkoff in The Language of the Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).

3. See Mary Boyce, Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

4. See Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles E. Moore, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

5. For a brief overview of the history of Shijing scholarship and its modern manifestations, see Yong Ren, “Traditional Chinese Critics’ Response to the Confucian Exegesis of the Classic of Poetry : A Counter Tradition,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 40–53. On the relation of the written texts of the Shijing to oral performance and musicality, see Achim Mittag, “Change in Shijing Exegesis: Some Notes on the Rediscovery of the Musical Aspect of the ‘Odes’ in the Song Period,” T’oung Pao 79, no. 4–5 (1993): 197–224.

6. For further explication and analysis of these processes of reading and understanding, see the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory article “ Midrash ” by Carol Bakhos. This structure of prolepsis and confirmation anticipates Dante’s system of allegory in his Letter to Can Grande ( c . 1314–1316). See Zygmunt G. Barański, “The Epistle to Can Grande,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , vol. 2, The Middle Ages , ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 583–589. See also the Oxford Classical Dictionary article “ Midrash ” by Martin Goodman.

7. For a comprehensive overview of the canon of rabbinic texts, see Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Random House, 1994) .

8. For an overview of scriptural interpretation and the history of its methods, see Frances M. Young, “Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies , ed. Susan Ashbrook and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 845–863.

9. Young, “Interpretation of Scripture,” 850. For a comprehensive account of the reception and interpretation of the Bible in the early church and the development of patristic exegesis, see Charles Kannengiesser, ed., Handbook of Patristic Exegesis , 2 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004).

10. Tia M. Kolbaba, “Byzantine Orthodox Exegesis,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible , vol. 2, From 600 to 1450 , ed. Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 485–504 [485].

11. Carl R. Trueman, “Scripture and Exegesis in Early Modern Reformed Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800 , ed. Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, and A. G. Roeber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 179–194 [179].

12. For an overview of these developments, see Joseph G. Prior, The Historical Critical Method in Catholic Exegesis (Rome, Italy: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1999).

13. Walid A. Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qur’ān Commentary of al-Tha’labī (d. 427/1035) (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 16.

14. See Martha T. Roth, trans., Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Williston, VT: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997). The Code of Hammurabi may be the most celebrated, but older codes exist, such as the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu ( c . 2050 bce ) and the Code of Lipit-Ištar ( c . 1870 bce ), and the Akkadian Laws of Eshunna ( c . 1930 bce ).

15. See Michael Gagarin and David Cohen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Laius Tuori, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Bernard Stolte, “Byzantine Law: The Law of the New Rome,” in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History , ed. Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 229–248.

16. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 91–92.

17. There is a substantial literature on the topic of legal critical reading. Peter Goodrich sets out the case for reading law as a specialized secular practice derived from priestly interpretation of sacred texts in Reading the Law: A Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques (London: Blackwell, 1986); and Jane Bloom Grisé sets out a range of techniques for reading case content, evaluating and synthesizing cases, and dealing with unclear legal text in Critical Reading for Success in Law School and Beyond (Eagan, MN: West Academic, 2017).

18. This treatment of philology is necessarily brief, serving to demonstrate historical continuities of close reading methods. Its focus on Western philological methods bypasses discussion of extensive philological traditions in non-Western contexts, such as the Chinese and Sanskrit traditions. For an overview of the global range of philological practices, see World Philology , ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) .

19. For an excellent account of this history, see James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) .

20. The application of philological methods to scholarly inquiry in the 21st century is explored in the essay collection Philology Matters! Essays on the Art of Reading Slowly , ed. Henry Lönnroth (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017) .

21. See Buford Norman, “Explication de texte,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , ed. Stephen Cushman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 472–473 .

22. For a contemporary account of Lanson’s profound influence upon French literary scholarship, see Jean-Albert Bédé, “Gustave Lanson,” The American Scholar 4, no. 3 (1935): 286–291. For a defense of Lanson’s methods against claims of narrow positivism—claims leveled by Roland Barthes among others—see Nabil Araújo de Souza, “Revisão do Lansonismo: O Cientificismo Brando de Gustave Lanson e a Perpetuação Acadêmica da História Literária,” [Review of Lansonism: Gustave Lanson’s Scientificism and the Academic Perpetuation of Literary History] Revista de Letras 52, no. 2 (2012): 95–112.

23. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics , trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). The standard French text is Cours de linguistique générale , ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (Paris: Payot, 1971). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1961). This was originally published as Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955).

24. See Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).

25. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text , trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142–148 [148].

26. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18–20. This was originally published as S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970).

27. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text , trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1975) . This was originally published as Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971) . This was originally published as Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). This was originally published as De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967).

29. “Hamlet and His Problems” and “Phillip Massinger” were collected in T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920) . “Andrew Marvell” was first published in the Times Literary Supplement , March 31, 1921, followed by “The Metaphysical Poets” in the issue of October 20, 1921.

30. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1929), 3 .

31. Richards, Practical Criticism , 6.

32. Snow first presented the thesis of the “two cultures” in the 1959 Sir Robert Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Leavis’s rebuttal appeared in an essay of March 9, 1962, in the Spectator , and was published in The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). The controversy attracted an enormous amount of critical response then and subsequently. For a useful overview of this history, see Guy Ortolano, “Two Cultures, One University: The Institutional Origins of the ‘Two Cultures’ Controversy,” Albion 34, no. 4 (2002): 606–624.

33. In New Bearings , Leavis conducts a dismantling of Ezra Pound’s Cantos , arguing instead that Mauberley is his great poem. Pound had already published “How To Read”—his own manifesto on the merits of close reading—in the New York Herald Tribune in 1929, glossing a curriculum of literature (poetry, drama, prose) ancient and modern, including the complete works of Confucius. Leavis took issue with Pound’s approach—using literary examples as illustrative rather than evidentiary, and prioritizing technique over sensibility—in How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound (Cambridge, UK: Minority Press, 1932). Pound expanded his material in ABC of Reading (London: Routledge, 1934), which functioned as a primer for students, extolling direct engagement with the literary text rather than relying upon criticism, but also the development of a historical and cultural awareness of each text’s significance. This text also adverted to Pound’s theory of language and meaning: phanopoeia (images stimulating the visual imagination), melopoeia (sound), and logopoeia (“the dance of the intellect among words”). Pound thus occupied a sui generis critical position, but one that overlapped with each of Eliot, Richards, Leavis, and Empson. For further consideration of Pound’s critical pedagogy, see Elizabeth Pender, “Exemplarity and Quotation: Ezra Pound’s How to Read , Modernist Criticism, and the Limits of Close Reading,” Critical Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2019): 67–81.

34. Mark Jancovich, “The Southern New Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , vol. 7, Modernism and the New Criticism , ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 200–218 [205].

35. See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 176–196.

36. This word enters into the New Critical vocabulary by way of William K. Wimsatt’s coinage in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954) .

37. John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” Virginia Quarterly Review 13 (1937): 586–602.

38. Much of this history was captured soon after the program ended, in John Alden Jamieson, Books for the Army: The Army Library Service in the Second World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). Beth Luey places the Army Library Service in a wider context of publishing in the United States in “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America , ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 29–54.

39. Brooks, “Preface,” in The Well Wrought Urn , n.p.

40. Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” in The Well Wrought Urn , 139.

41. Murray Krieger provides an inflection to Brooks’s claim, stating the Keats’s poem is metapoetic, bringing into existence a poetics in its ekphrastic play between space (the urn and its pictorial depictions) and time (poetic utterance). See Murray Krieger, “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited,” in Close Reading: The Reader , ed. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 88–110.

42. See Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6 .

43. The talks were collected, translated, and published in The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man , ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). The volume also contains essays by Gilles Deleuze, Gérard Genette, and Roman Jakobson, who were unable to attend the conference.

44. Paul Ricoeur dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as founders of the “school of suspicion” ( école du soupçon ) in his De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud [Interpretation. Essay on Sigmund Freud] (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the cognate term “paranoid reading” to describe reading “against the grain” of a text to reveal hidden patterns of meaning. See Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction , ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37 .

45. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 3–20 [18] .

46. For a fuller account of the Yale School and its methodologies, see Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

47. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447 ; and Geoffrey Hartman, “The Interpreter’s Freud,” in Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 137–154.

48. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 17 .

49. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 1–37.

50. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) ; and Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002) .

51. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, eds., Close Reading: The Reader (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003) . The rationale is set out in the unpaginated Preface.

52. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “What Was ‘Close Reading’?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies,” Minnesota Review 87 (2016): 57–75 .

53. Smith, “What Was ‘Close Reading’?”: 65.

54. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation , trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32 ; translation of De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965).

55. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 13–23 . Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

56. For a comprehensive overview of the limits of critique and the ways postcritique seeks to remedy them, see Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Critique and Postcritique , ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–28.

57. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2 .

58. Felski, The Limits of Critique , 5.

59. Felski, The Limits of Critique , 175–178.

60. See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21 . This journal special issue comprises the central statement of surface reading’s aims and practices, as well as demonstrating the variety of approaches gathered under its name.

61. See Judith Serkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 700–722.

62. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction”: 16.

63. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68 .

64. See Matthew Wilkens, “Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities , ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 249–258 [251].

65. Katherine Bode, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem, 2012).

66. Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 20–21.

67. For a survey of these discussions and critiques, see Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities , ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

68. For a virtuoso example of this method of close reading, see Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

69. Prynne’s commentaries demonstrate how the forms of close reading are as important as the material they yield: line commentary, which has a deep philological history stemming from the scholia of classical antiquity (themselves preceded by Mesopotamian commentaries of the first millennium bce ), and the line-by-line procedure adapted in the 9th century by John Scottus Eriugena to his reading of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [ The Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury ], one of the most influential texts of the entire Middle Ages. Eriugena’s method became a standard scholarly procedure in the Middle Ages. It informed later scholiasts in the early modern period, as well as modern scholars such as William Empson, whose commentary on Sonnet 94 in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) serves as a major framing reference for Prynne’s treatment of the same poem. For Eriugena’s line commentary see Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–45.

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Write a Close Reading

What is close reading, what are different close reading assignments, what are the parts of a close reading, resources to help with writing your essay.

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Close reading is a way of carefully analyzing a short passage or poem in order to explain how language and organization is used and/or how an author builds an argument, elicits a response from the reader, and/or creates a particular mood. Attention to specific details allows you to assess and discuss the larger themes or concerns of the text as a whole.

An effective close reading discusses HOW the selected passage communicates meaning (what poetic or rhetorical strategies are used) as well as addresses WHY these strategies are used in this particular way. For example, what is the author trying to communicate to the reader? What decisions has the author made about word choice, tone, etc.?

There are two common kinds of close readings— English literature and Philosophy. However, close reading is a useful technique in any kind of analytical writing and these strategies can be applied to other disciplines.

Close reading can also be a good place to begin if you are having difficulty formulating an argument for a longer paper. Even if the assignment does not explicitly ask you to conduct a close reading, the strategies described above can be useful tools for more involved textual analysis. Keep in mind that longer papers may require close readings of more than one passage of a text; the connections between these close readings often form the basis of a more complicated argument.

The parts of the close reading will depend on the type of assignment. You might be asked to do something like the following:

• Write a formal essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion that closely examines elements from a text or passage and explains their importance or effect.
• Write a paragraph or series of paragraphs examining a passage or excerpt, explaining how it produces effects on the reader and how it contributes to the meaning of the larger text as a whole.
• Write an explication that traces a poem’s development from beginning to end, explaining how it creates certain effects on the reader or develops arguments and themes.

Words associated with a close reading include explication, exegesis, and analysis.

In most close reading assignments, you will want to include these elements:

An introduction or introductory sentence

• Identify the passage and its context (if it is an excerpt, tell us where it fits in the overall text).
• Tell us why it’s important to analyze this particular passage or text (why should we care?).
• For example, “George Eliot’s use of diction and narrative perspective in this passage of Middlemarch complicates the conventional understanding of gender and gender relations by refusing to adhere to a strict separation of gendered traits.”

A clearly stated argument

State your argument about the passage clearly and concisely. Although the length and style of a close reading that focuses on an excerpt may differ from an essay that focuses on a literary work in its entirety, your assignment should still have a clear argumentative thesis.

Your explanation of how you see the text creating effects or making arguments

When you are choosing your evidence, consider the tone of the passage and the specific words used to describe a character or event. Some authors create characters whose views significantly differ from their own. Some literary works feature narrators who are unreliable. When analyzing a passage, consider not only WHAT is said, but HOW it is said:

• No: “The author uses a variety of diction about men’s and women’s positions in society.” 
• Yes: “The author’s use of diction allows her to highlight how gender is associated with specific social and economic positions.”

Specific examples highlighted from the text

Focus in on words, phrases, and short passages that illustrate how you see the text creating its effects and meaning. For example, “Eliot uses the words ‘nature’ and ‘greatness’ in relation to men, suggesting that they are inherently more intelligent, powerful, and capable than women--or are at least considered to be so in the social context of the story."

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Close Reading

Close reading as analysis.

Close reading is the technique of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to the larger work. A close reading delves into what a passage means beyond a superficial level, then links what that passage suggests outward to its broader 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. Let the text lead, and listen to it.

The goal of close reading is to notice, describe, and interpret details of the text that are already there, rather than to impose your own point of view. As a general rule of thumb, every claim you make should be directly supported by evidence in the text. As the name suggests this technique is best applied to a specific passage or passages rather than a longer piece, almost like a case study.

Use close reading to learn:  

• what the passage says
• what the passage implies
• how the passage connects to its context

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. Practicing close reading will train you to be an intelligent and critical reader of all kinds of writing, from political speeches to television advertisements and from popular novels to classic works of literature.

Wondering how to do a close reading? Click on our Where to Begin section to find out more!

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How to Write a Close Reading Essay

Last Updated: May 2, 2023 References

This article was co-authored by Bryce Warwick, JD . Bryce Warwick is currently the President of Warwick Strategies, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area offering premium, personalized private tutoring for the GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Bryce has a JD from the George Washington University Law School. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 8,851 times.

With a close-reading essay, you get to take a deep dive into a short passage from a larger text to study how the language, themes, and style create meaning. Writing one of these essays requires you to read the text slowly multiple times while paying attention to both what is being said and how the author is saying it. It’s a great way to hone your reading and analytical skills, and you’ll be surprised at how it can deepen your understanding of a particular book or text.

Reading and Analyzing the Passage

• Think of “close reading" as an opportunity to look underneath the surface. While you may understand a text’s main themes from a single read-through, any given text usually contains multiple complexities in language, character development, and hidden themes that only become clear through close observation.

Tip: Look up words that you aren’t familiar with. Sometimes you might figure out what something means by using context clues, but when in doubt, look it up.

• Alliteration
• Personification
• Onomatopoeia

• What themes are present in the text? Is the passage about, for example, love, or the triumph of good over evil, a character's coming-of-age, or a commentary on social issues?
• What imagery is being used? Which of the 5 senses does the passage involve?
• What is the author’s writing style? Is it descriptive, persuasive, or technical?
• What is the tone of the passage? What emotions do you feel as you read?
• What is the author trying to say? Are they successful?

Tip: Try reading the text out loud. Sometimes hearing the words rather than just seeing them can make a difference in how you understand the language.

• Word choice
• Punctuation

Drafting a Thesis and Outline

• Close-reading essays can get very detailed, and it often is helpful to come back to the “main thing.” This summary can help you focus your thesis in one direction so your essay doesn’t become too broad.

• For example, you could write something like, “The author uses repetition and word choice to create an emotional connection between the reader and the protagonist. This sample from the book exemplifies how the author uses vivid language and atypical syntax throughout the entire text to help put the reader inside of the protagonist’s mind.”

• For example, you may quote a sentence from the passage that uses atypical punctuation to emphasize how the author’s writing style creates a certain cadence.
• Or you may use the repetition of a color or word or theme to explain how the author continually reinforces the overall message.

• There are a lot of different ways to outline an essay. You could use a bullet-pointed list to organize the things you want to write about, or you could plan out, paragraph by paragraph, what you want to say.
• Many people cannot write fast because they do not spend enough time planning what they want to state.
• When you take a couple of extra minutes to plan an essay, it's a lot easier to write because you know how the points should flow together.
• It is also obvious to a reader whether you plan and write the essay or make it up as you write it.

Writing the Essay

• The last thing you want is to write an essay and later on realize that you were required to include an outside source or that your paper was 5 pages longer than it needed to be.

• Some people find it easier to write their introduction once the body of the essay is done.
• The introduction can be a good place to give historical, social, or geographical context.

• Make sure to reference why the proof you’re giving is relevant. It should directly tie back to the main theme of your essay.
• Evidence can be a direct quote from the passage, a summary of that information, or a reference from a secondary source.

• The conclusion isn’t the place to add in new evidence or arguments. Those should all be in the actual body of the essay.

• An impactful close-reading essay will weave together examples, interpretation, and commentary.

• Try reading your essay out loud. You may notice awkward phrases, incorrect grammar, or stilted language that you didn’t before.

Expert Q&A

• Sites like Typely, Grammarly, and ProofreadingTool offer free feedback and edits. Keep in mind that you’ll need to review proposed changes because they may not all be correct for your particular essay. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/c.php?g=130967&p=4938496
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading#
• ↑ https://blogs.umass.edu/honors291g-cdg/how-to-write-a-close-reading-essay/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/introduction/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/paragraph-structure/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/category/academic-essay/

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writingxhumanities

A "how to" guide for UC Berkeley writers

Close Reading

Scholars in the humanities approach texts using various methodologies and techniques, but the process of close reading is their basic analytic tool. While scientists conduct experiments and engineers build prototypes, humanities scholars write close readings showing how the details of a text create meanings for the work as a whole. Close reading, then, is the first step in writing a paper in the humanities. 

“Close reading” is a funny phrase, though, because it’s both a verb and a noun, a process and a product. You do “close reading,” paying careful attention to the details of a text, and then you produce—and your instructors might ask you to write—“a close reading”: an argument about how those details work, what they say, and what they show about the text. To add to the confusion, the term close reading is sometimes used to refer to a whole essay: sometimes an entire essay can consist of just one close reading: a careful exploration, say, of the way that color works in a single painting. But other times, a close reading is just one part of a larger paper: an essay about the representation of women in a novel, for example, might use multiple close readings, each one addressing a different moment in the text, in the course of its argument. 

  The ambiguous status of close reading—as a verb and a noun, a process and a product, a whole and a part—results from the way that close reading, much like the writing process as a whole, is iterative and recursive. This means that close reading proceeds through multiple, repeated phases of rethinking and revision. As you close read a text, you’ll notice more and more details that seem significant, and seem to work together to create meaning. Then, since your understanding of the text’s meaning has deepened, more and more details will in turn seem meaningful.

  A word of advice: because the term close reading can be used to describe so many different things, and often more than one thing at a time, it’s important to ask your instructor what they means by close reading, especially when it comes to writing your essays. 

In your classes in the humanities, you will be asked to read and write about cultural objects, or texts, of various kinds. We tend to think of “text” as a term for written documents only, but anything you can analyze can be considered a text, including TV shows and film, music and dance performances, archaeological relics and billboard advertisements. Of course, the formal features you find in a text will depend on what type of text you are analyzing: you may make observations about the camera angles in a film, about the color palette of a painting, or about the rhythm or rhyme scheme of a poem.

Even historical events and cultural practices, and sometimes even scholarly works, may themselves be interpreted as primary texts, though they are more often considered as critical contexts for reading primary texts. (F or more on using such texts as secondary sources, see What is Reading Critically ? in the section on Doing Research.)  But whatever type of text you are studying, the practice of close reading assumes that there is a relationship between content (what the text says) and form (how it says it). The practice of close reading also assumes that attending to the interplay between these realms can help you to understand both.

Knowing the date and author of a text is always helpful when you are reading, but there are other contexts to consider before and during your reading. Beyond knowing who created a text and when, you might ask: Where was this work created? What kind of cultural context was it produced in? What material or other conditions influenced its making? Where has it been read before, and what have previous readers said about it? You can even think about context in relation to when a work was created relative to its author’s full body of work (their “oeuvre”), or where a passage or episode occurs within a narrative, or where a poem appears in a book of poetry.

In addition to the historical and material contexts in which a text appears, another relevant context for your reading is the college course in which this particular text was assigned. Do you know why your instructor selected this text? Where does it fall in the syllabus? What are you expected to do with it? Is it a primary object of textual analysis or is it a secondary source that you will consider in relation to a primary text? Is writing about this particular text optional or required? Asking yourself and/or your instructor these kinds of questions will help you to read strategically and productively.

Every text has unique formal elements, which means that one task for your close reading will be to decide which elements to focus on. To do this, you might begin with the text’s genre or media, since these categories can provide helpful contexts for selecting and understanding formal elements. Novels, poems, films, plays, dances, paintings, photographs, and other types of cultural objects all depend upon different formal conventions influenced by the cultural contexts in which they developed. Considering how a given text conforms to or departs from these conventions is a good place to start your close reading. 

When you read a novel, for instance, you might want to consider some of the most commonly recognized features of the novel as a genre: omniscient versus non-omniscient narration; first-person versus third-person narration; character and setting; a happy versus an unhappy ending. For poems, you might observe the use of such devices as rhyme scheme, rhythm, or meter, as well as a host of other sonic effects and literary devices such as figures of speech and diction. For paintings and photography, things like surface texture, composition, and subject matter are key formal elements. Remember: many texts have elements that reflect their relation to more than one precursor or genre—a novel might draw on both the epic and romantic traditions, or on both realist and fantasy genres. And some texts—such as a collage or an animated film—can be considered multimedia. 

When you are in the process of reading a text closely, you may want to begin by compiling a list of the formal elements you notice. But when you write an essay, it’s never sufficient merely to list these observations . In order to produce a compelling, thesis-driven essay based on close reading , you need to make the move from observation to evidence. That is to say, you need to move from merely noticing what’s there to selecting the most important details and speculating about their potential meanings , and then to developing an interpretation of how these meanings contribute to the meaning of the text as a whole. 

In order to take this next step, you might start by noting any formal elements that seem odd, weird, or puzzling. This might be something that stops you, or at least slows you down in your reading, and makes you say “hmm…” or “huh?” It might be an unexpected departure from character, a shift in narrative tone, or an unexpected plot twist in a novel. In a poem, it might be a change in rhythm or rhyme scheme, a strange image or word choice, or a striking figure of speech or rhetorical device. A painting might depict a machine where you would expect it to show a person, a splotch where you might expect fine detail, or other oddities of design affecting composition (arrangement of parts of or in the work), color, scale, proportion, or balance. Even the use of repetition in a text—something predictable or rhythmic rather than unexpected or jarring—might be worth noting and speculating about. 

You can also think about significant textual elements and their potential significance in terms of the gaps, ambiguities, or contradictions in form or in the meanings that they create. If you don’t understand what’s going on in a text at a certain point, or if you read something that challenges your sense of the text’s surface or deeper meaning, don’t assume you’ve missed something: those moments may be ripe for readerly observation, interpretation, and argument. Your job as a reader is not to smooth over (or ignore!) these kinds of confusing or contradictory elements in a text; rather, your job is to identify these sites of tension or complexity in order to develop an argument about their significance.

Here are a few practical guides to help you get started with close reading: Three Close Reading Methods 12 Steps to Literary Awareness Close Reading Literature Literary Terms for Close Reading There are many more close reading handouts and exercises at Teaching Close Reading (in the For Instructors section of this website.) 

Poetry and fiction are the most common forms that you will encounter in literature-focused classes. Before you begin your close reading, it may be helpful to familiarize yourself with some of the literary terms used to describe the fundamental elements of prose fiction and the figurative devices that constitute the basic elements of poetry .

The principle of close reading has its origins in the study of literature, particularly poetry, which is one reason that there are many more literature-specific guides to close reading than there are guides of this sort for other disciplines. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that since different humanities disciplines explore texts from different historical periods, geographic locations, languages, and media, they tend to close read their texts in somewhat different ways, by asking different questions and using different terminologies and methodologies. As such, the particular discipline within which you encounter a text—possibly related to the course and department in which you are studying that text—might well be considered as an important context for your close reading of it.

As we develop the “Writing Across the Humanities” website, we will include more resources for close reading non-written and non-literary texts. In the meantime, Montclair State University Center For Writing Excellence provides an excellent annotated compendium of resources that can help you to begin close reading texts in various humanities genres, media, and disciplines. Your instructor and your librarian can suggest many more resources providing information about discipline-specific reading practices.

For additional materials, go to Teaching Close Reading in the For Instructors section of this website.

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Close Reading!

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Close reading is an important tool for writing an essay and doesn't have to be as overwhelming as it sounds. Here are some tips to make it easy and effective.

When do I close read?

Obviously, it's impractical to close read an entire book. Unless your material is fairly short, close read the parts which address an aspect of your essay or assignment. Doing so will help you understand the subtleties in the passage that will help you add analysis to your paper. If you are reading through a book, article, etc. for the first time, you should take small notes as you read instead of a close analysis. This can include noting important passages, passages you don't understand, and passages which might be helpful for a future assignment. Some people like to summarize chapters or pages, so that they don't have to reread material later. This type of quick close reading helps you to understand the material better. It takes a lot less time than it sounds like it does!

How do I close read?

Once you have found a quote to close read, look for  what the author's message is , and  how she/he gets that message across to readers (you) . The first step is to make sure you understand what is going on: if you have questions, get them answered because the wrong idea here can alter your whole close reading. Next, find:

Themes : repeating ideas discussed in the passage, such as individuality, friendship, etc.

Symbols : one noun standing for another person, place, concept, etc.

Audience : who is the speaker addressing? It can be character(s) in the novel as well as a group of people whom the author wants to read her book.

Tone : the emotional perspective the speaker gives to the passage, always an adjective. Often, the diction and syntax can help you find the tone. Examples are confused, overwhelmed, formal, etc.

Syntax : the sentence structure. The length, level, etc. can change the tone and give you some important clues into the message of the quote.

Diction : the words the author chose. Different words have small differences in meaning, and can bring to mind different settings and atmospheres--this is called connotation.

Speaker : who is actually talking to you in this passage, the narrator. How does the speaker's position, background, etc. affect what she says?

All of these terms will not necessarily be in your quote. Also, they are by no means the only things you can look for while close reading, but they are a good start. These different devices are used by the author to address the two important aspects of close reading underlined above. Look for how a device is used and ask yourself why it is used this way and how it connects to the author's message or what it does for the quote as a whole.

"Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of the noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships. . . ."

--from  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , by Frederick Douglass, p.71. Downloaded August 18, 2011, from  Forgotten Books .

Questions for Close Reading

1. Again, summarize the speaker's literal meaning and any themes you see.

2. Imagery, pictures painted by the speaker's words, plays a big role in this passage. What aspects of the imagery are symbols, and what do they stand for? How do the symbols further the themes you found?

3. Who is the speaker, and who is the audience? Can you find different perspectives mentioned here? Why would the speaker include this? How do diction and syntax, or any other aspects of the excerpt that you notice, create the perspectives?

Grace Patil

Student Learning Center, University of California, Berkeley

©2007 UC Regents 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Strategies for Close Reading

Overview: what’s close reading.

A Close Reading (sometimes colloquially referred to as simply Reading ) is a sustained analysis of the form and content of a text. Close Reading may also be referred to as Close Reading Analysis ; Textual Analysis ; Literary Analysis ; or Interpretive Analysis .

While your Close Reading may reflect some of your perspective on the text, strictly speaking your Close Reading in and of itself is not the same as your argument claim or thesis.

Rather Close Reading is what you do (i.e. read, contextualize, analyze, compare, etc.) in order to arrive at your thesis, and in order to illustrate your thesis (i.e. make your argument) you will provide your audience with a concise and relevant selection of your Close Reading so as to illustrate how you arrived at your argument.

Providing a compellingly curated version of your Close Reading, is crucial to successfully arguing your thesis claim because it enables your audience to understand what exactly you examined; how you examined it; and what your method of examination reveals about the object you’re examined.

Close Reading Methodologies

In reality there are numerous ways to read, analyze, and interpret. Moreover, most sophisticated interpretive claims actually employ a variety of different close reading methods. Indeed, we must remember that close reading simply implies a sustained and focus examination of a text, and as you can imagine, there are a lot of different ways to study and pay attention to a particular text.

However, below I discuss two common close reading strategies (i.e. methods). The advantage of using these two methods (at least as a starting point) is that these two methods are already logically coherent.

Part of the trickiness of creating a literary analysis argument is making sure that the interpretive claim (i.e. thesis) you present is cogent and arguable within the parameters of the particular paper, presentation, or project you’re working on (e.g. you can’t realistically prove an argument that would require a book’s worth of research and analysis in only 5 pages!)

The two methods I present below can help you narrow the scope of your analysis, which in term helps you increase the rigor and thoroughness of your analysis, which in turn should help you to organize your observations and formulate a clear (coherent) and logically-sound (cogent) interpretive claim or thesis!

Close Reading Methods*

• 1.  Archeological Dig*  — the careful dissecting of one clear and appropriately-focused part of (i.e. passage in) the text
• 2.  Follow the Trail* —the careful examination of a focused pattern or recurring element in the text

*Disclaimer the names of these two methods are my own inventions, so be warned, if you use them in another class, your professor may not understand what you’re referencing. Relatedly, these names are solely for the purpose of being able to identify and discuss these methods. At no place in any paper, presentation, or project should you explicitly refer to using or doing “archeological dig” or a “follow the trail” reading. When illustrating your thesis, you simply employ the strategies without actually referencing them.

Archaeological Dig

The archeological dig method entails a careful dissection of one particular passage. For the sake of example, we will assume we want to write a close reading paper on Richard Wright’s Black Boy .

1- The first thing you need to do is select the passage you will examine. 

• For most college level papers, it’s important you really narrow the scope of your examination. You don’t want the passage to be too big. A good rule of thump for a prose text is to pick a passage that’s somewhere between a paragraph and two pages long.
• In an archaeological dig, the passage is your object of examination [see handout on “What is a Textual Object?” for more details]. You will develop your entire argument around and about how you understand this passage working in the text. Ultimately then, the thesis statement you arrive at will go something like: Analyzing Y (THE FORMAL WORK of X), I argue that X (THE PASSAGE) in TITLE OF THE TEXT shapes our understanding of W (SOME PART OF THE TEXT’s CONTENT) in Z WAY.  

2- Study the passage and its context.

3- Identify as many of the various formal elements at work in this passage. By formal elements, I mean the specific literary or language choices the writer makes in order to depict their content.

• Maybe you point out that in this passage he uses only short sentences.
• Or maybe you notice that he uses words that remind you of fire. (Note: when a writer employs a particular category of words we refer to that language choice as diction.)  

4- Think about how each of these formal elements work individually.

5- Think about how these formal elements work together as a whole to shape this passage. How does this particular assemblage of formal choices (as opposed to other similar choices the author could have made) shape the way we might read the content communicated in this passage?

Follow the Trail

The Follow the Trail method entails identifying and carefully examining a focused pattern or small recurring element in the text. Again, for the sake of example, we will assume we want to write a close reading paper on Richard Wright’s Black Boy .

Follow the trail The second option involves gathering evidence as you go along.  With this method you are trying to look closely at the text to see what kind of themes, patterns, ideas are growing in the text.  

Instead of picking one longer quote, here you will concentrate on a specific element or formal choice that repeats across various passages.

In order to compelling establish a pattern, you need to find enough instances in which the writer repeats this formal element. How many instances does it take to establish a pattern depends on a various factors but mostly on the length or size of the text. For most of the book length narratives in this course, you will most likely want to find at least four or five instances of this element occurring throughout the text as a whole or in a particular chapter or section of the text. (Note: You will not need to discuss every single instances in your paper, but in order to establish a pattern, you will want to know there is in fact a recurring element.)

1. Identify the formal object you will examine as a trail or pattern in the text.

• Again narrowing your scope and being specific are really important. You want to make sure that the tracks or bread crumbs you’re following are not actually huge interstate signs. You also want to make sure that you’re identifying a trail rather than localized elements of a particular passage.

Examples [note how even though each of the different textual objects might relate to a larger motif of visual knowledge or sight, they are all different from one another and will result in distinct trails and enable different interpretations.]:

• Maybe you notice that Wright repeatedly uses optical metaphors to describe feelings of isolation.
• Or maybe you notice a repeated association between reading and pictures throughout the narrative.
• Maybe you wish to focus specifically on the way Wright describes (and doesn’t describe) the eyes of female characters.

2. Examine each instance in which this formal element appears. What work does this formal element do in each instance? (i.e. How does it shape our understanding of the content in that instance?).

3. Compare and contrast how this formal element works in the different instances. What similarities do you notice? What differences do you notice? Does the formal element have the same function in each of the instances? Are there similarities between the content depicted in these instances? Are their similarities and/or differences in how the writer pairs this formal element with other elements from one instance to the next?

Close Reading (Analysis) –> Interpretation (Argument)

Possible thesis 1 – archaeological dig.

In t he opening passage in which Wright describes how at age four he set fire to his grandparents’ home, Wright depicts his boyhood thought process and curiosity in increasingly visual terms. In doing so, Wright establishes a tension between “natural” child curiosity and the dangers of black boys asking questions through which much of the themes and dynamics of the rest of the narrative will unfold.  

I might start by describing the scene in general and pointing out how Wright describes his boyhood yearning to know how the world works in a way that seems to to take him out of the physical reality of his present moment until it’s too late and the whole house is on fire.  I might point out how in describing this scene, Wright starts with a nod to sight, sound, and feeling, but as his curiosity about the fire grows, he describes all his moves in terms of sight and thoughts.  I would then need to explain how making this choice, Wright shows how when he is fascinated and thinking about something it also makes him distant.  Even though he is close to the fire, he sees it more than feels it.  Unlike touching something, we can see something from vey far the same way we can think about something that is distant from us.  It is as if the reality of the fire’s heat and smell and crackling sound are far away until the moment when he touches the forbidden to touch curtains and it is too late  Then all of the sudden the scene becomes tangible and dangerous.   To aid this point  I might also point out how Wright includes a couple of very short rhetorical questions in telling this scene.  I would explain that these questions are almost not needed for their content, but that what they do is mirror his anxious and excited thought process and suggest that there was only one right answer, one possible way for the events to unfold.  I would explain how this prodding questions with their inevitable answers add to the sense that Wright’s curiosity and his yearning were like something set in motion that couldn’t be stopped, but like the flame had to keep going.  I could point to maybe one other strategy that aids to this sense of Wright being caught in a growing desire for knowledge and hands on experience with the world that is perhaps understandable but ultimately dangerous to him and the people around him.  

Possible Thesis 2 – Follow the Trail

In Richard Wright’s narrative, the narrator emphatically depicts his black family and community’s resistance to books and reading. Yet [I argue that] his repeated references to books and the language of literacy (specifically his use of the word “read”) when describing instances of black people negotiating the visual logics of of race and racism also suggests that black people in a racist America are always reading and writing themselves as characters for white people to read.   

To illustrate this claim, I might point to Wright’s meditation on how the white woman who asks him if he can steal must be reading him like all black people as a child. Then I might point out the man at the optics company who puts on such a show that he actually invites the white people to kick him for a quarter.   Then I might point out his frustration with the white man from the north who seems to be able to read his hunger despite his best attempts to play the part of a happy negro, and finally I might conclude with the necessity of giving white people what they want to read by talking about Wright’s fear that once he starts reading the white people will see it in him, that they will be able to read the result of his reading. 

DEAN’S BOOK w/ Prof. CONNIE GRIFFIN

Honors291g-cdg’s blog, how to write a close reading essay.

CLOSE READING The purpose of close reading is to suspend personal judgment and examine a text in order to uncover and discover as much information as we can from it. In close reading we ask not just “what does this passage say?” but also “how does it say it?” and even “what does it not say?” Close reading takes us deeper into the passage, below its surface to the deeper structures of its language, syntax and imagery, then out again to its connections with the whole text as well as other texts, events, and ideas. Desired Outcomes: • Identify and reflect on major themes in the book. • Analyze specific details, scenes, actions, and quotations in the text and discuss how they contribute to your interpretation of the meaning of the larger text. • Extract as much information from a chosen passage of writing as possible. • Listen to and understand others’ differing (perhaps) interpretations of the same text. • Generate questions and topics for further inquiry.

Assignment One: A Close Reading Instructions Now that you’ve finished the book, choose a passage from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and compose your own close reading of it. Apply the same techniques to this paper that were applied in in-class close readings and discussions, now taking into account the context of your chosen passage, additional selections from the text, as well as the book as a whole. Following MLA documentation style, correctly cite your chosen passage and any other quotations from the text that support your interpretations and claims. For help with MLA style, go to the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) and search for “MLA format.” Organizing your close-reading essay In writing your close-reading essay, you may wish to start by introducing the book and describing your chosen passage’s importance within it. You could then offer relevant details to support your thesis. Questions you raise may appear as part of your conclusion, suggesting avenues for further thought and study. Paper length Your paper should be 650-750 words long, maximum. Be detailed but concise. Edit out unnecessary words and redundancies. (Include your selected passage in your paper, but do not count it as part of the total length.) A sample close reading essay is available online. Search the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) for “close reading essay.” Questions to consider as you prepare to compose your close reading Examine the passage by itself • What does this passage explicitly say? • Is there a meaning beneath or beyond the explicit message? What is it? How is it communicated? • What might the passage suggest about the writer’s motivations? • How do the writer’s style, imagery and choice of language create a tone or intensify a meaning? • What specific examples in the passage (and additional passages) support these observations? Examine the passage in light of surrounding passages and the rest of the book • What themes running through the book are evoked explicitly and implicitly in this passage? • How does this passage fit—or not fit—into its immediate context as well as the book as a whole? What insights into the book does it reveal? • What questions does the passage raise about the story being told? • What conclusions can be drawn from this passage about the author and the text? A note about writing You should consider this paper a final version: pay attention to the quality of your writing and proofread your work. Strive to be concise and clear as well as correct. This means writing in a style that’s both academic and accessible. Always keep your audience in mind. You are writing for your interested peers. Grading This essay will be worth 15% of your final grade. Note: You will submit your paper at next week’s class. You will also be asked to summarize your paper and present its main points orally during class discussion. Therefore, you may want to jot down a few “talking points” in preparation.

Email: [email protected] Phone: 650-430-8087 (text or call)

• Apr 9, 2023

Close-Reading Strategies: The Ultimate Guide to Close Reading

Close reading helps you not only read a text, but analyze it. The process of close reading teaches you to approach a text actively, considering the text’s purpose, how the author chose to present it, and how these decisions impact the text.

The close reading strategy improves your reading comprehension, your analysis, and your writing. Close reading will help you write essays and perform well on standardized tests like the SAT Reading Section . Any age group can practice close reading, and it works with any text.

This article will outline everything you need to know about close reading, including what it is, why it's important, how to do a close reading, and 5 strategies to improve your close reading abilities.

What is close reading?

Close reading is a reading method that examines not only the text’s content but how the author’s rhetorical, literary, and structural decisions help develop it to achieve a purpose.

No matter the text genre–narrative, informational, argumentative, poetry, or editorial–the author uses language to achieve some purpose: to inform, convince, entertain the audience, or a combination. In every text, the author utilizes a variety of rhetorical and literary strategies, or devices, to achieve these effects on the audience.

Common literary strategies or devices that impact every text:

Diction: Word choice

Syntax: Sentence structure

Tone: Emotion of the words used

Conflict: Problems, issues, or disagreements within or related to the text

Structure: The order of the words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas

Point of view: The speaker’s perspective on the events or subject matter

Genre: The category or “type” of text–fiction, science-fiction, scientific article, etc.

Imagery: The sensory or visual language the author uses to describe the subject, characters, setting, etc.

Close reading observes how the author uses these strategies to develop the text, create an intended effect upon the reader, and build a central message or main idea.

Why is close reading important?

Close reading is important because it helps you comprehend the text, develop deeper ideas about its meaning, and write and talk about the text with more sophistication. When you consider not just what the text says, but how and why the author constructs it that way, you move beyond surface-level reading into analysis.

Close reading allows you to notice details, language, and connections that you may have previously overlooked. These observations create insights about the text, leading to richer class discussions, better essays, and more joy while reading. Observing an author’s strategies also improves your writing, as you gradually begin to emulate the strategies you notice.

How do you do a close reading?

Do a close reading by selecting a text passage, closely observing the writing style and structure while you read, noticing the author's language choices, underlining and annotating your observations, and asking questions about the text.

General Close-Reading Process:

Select a text passage: Pick a piece of text or passage that you want to analyze. The sweet spot usually lies between roughly one and three paragraphs. Songs and poems also work well for close reading.

Notice the writing style: As you read, ask yourself “What stands out to me about this author’s style? What patterns, words, and choices do I notice?” Pay attention to the emotions you feel as you read, identifying what in the text triggers that response.

Observe the structure: Notice how the author orders words, sentences, lines, and paragraphs. Consider how this order builds an image or idea about the text’s subject. Ask yourself, “How does this structure develop my understanding of the subject?”

Notice language choices: The author selected particular words to build a tone, evoke images in the reader’s mind, create a nuanced argument, or have some other effect on the reader. Note powerful or significant diction–word choice–and consider the purpose it serves, or how it develops any of the devices listed above, such as tone or imagery.

Underline: Have a pencil while you read and–if you’re allowed to mark the paper–underline any observations you make. Underline any of the devices listed above, anything that has an effect on you, or anything you enjoy. There’s no right or wrong way to underline a text, so underline whatever catches your interest.

Annotate: Record your thoughts and observations as you read, by writing in the margins, on a separate sheet of paper, or using an assigned annotation format. Feel free to note questions, individual words, literary devices, or anything you notice.

Ask questions: Along with the annotation ideas listed above, formulate questions and write them down while you read. Generally, the best questions begin with how or why . For example, “Why did the author use this word?” or “How does this detail affect the reader?”

5 Close Reading Strategies to Improve Analysis and Comprehension

Here are my 5 favorite strategies to improve your close reading, analysis, and reading comprehension:

Generate a purpose question (PQ)

Annotate with your PQ in mind

Track the 5 Ws

Notice the conflict

Identify the tone

Generate a Purpose Question

A purpose question (PQ) is a question you pose before reading a text to help you read actively. You can create a PQ for a text of any genre or length–a novel, a short story, a poem, a passage, or an informational text–and there is no right or wrong way to create a PQ.

To create a purpose question, consider any pre-reading context you have:

Text images

School assignment guidelines

Any task you’re expected to complete when you finish reading

Examine the text’s title to guess what the text is about, then formulate an open-ended question that relates to the text, what it might say, and what might be important. As you read, seek and underline information that relates to your PQ and helps you answer it. By the time you finish reading, you should be able to answer your PQ.

Generally, the best open-ended questions begin with how or why .

Your PQ will sometimes simply repurpose the text’s title into a question, like these examples:

Text TitleExample PQ “A Good Man is Hard to Find?” (fiction)Why is a good man hard to find?“The Lady with the Dog” (fiction)What is so important about the lady and her dog?“The Fringe Benefits of Failure” (essay)How can failure be beneficial?“An Epidemic of Fear” (essay)What is causing the epidemic of fear?“New Therapies to Aid Muscle Regeneration” (article)How do these new therapies aid muscle regeneration?

Write down your PQ, either on the text itself or on a separate sheet of paper for note-taking. When you read with a purpose–like answering a question–it becomes easier to identify and annotate what’s important in the text.

Annotate with your PQ in Mind

It’s much easier to take good notes when you have a reading goal–something to answer or accomplish, such as a PQ.

As you read and annotate the text, refer to your purpose question. Search the text for details that relate to and help you answer your PQ. When you find relevant details, underline them and record how the detail relates to your PQ. If you can’t write on the text itself, record your thoughts on a separate paper or word document.

Here’s how and where I annotate a text, and what I usually write in my annotations.

Where and How to Annotate a TextWhat to Write Underline the text Questions –what did you ask or wonder while reading?Write in the margin Thoughts and connections –what did the text make you think about?Use a separate sheet of paper Comments –what made you underline that particular word or detail?On your phone or computer–use a notetaking app or a Google Doc Significance –why is that particular detail important?

As you read the text, constantly ask yourself, How does this information help me answer my PQ? When you’re finished with the text, you should be able to answer your purpose question–and the notes you’ve taken should help you do that.

To monitor your own comprehension while you read, remain aware of the text’s 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why.

After every sentence or section, reflect to verify the following information:

Who: Who is the text about? Who is narrating, or telling the story?

What: What is the text about?

Where: Where do the text’s events take place?

When: When did the text’s events occur?

Why: Why did this main event occur? Why did the storyteller write this text?

At any given point while you read, you should be able to identify this context. If you realize that you’re disoriented and have lost track of some key Ws, revisit the most recent sentences to see if you missed something critical. Then, continue on with the text, mindfully searching for the information you’re missing.

If you finish reading and still feel uncertain about this core information, revisit the first paragraph. A passage’s first paragraph usually provides fundamental details–such as the characters, setting, main event, and the story’s general context. Revisiting this paragraph sometimes alerts you to basic details you overlooked during your first readthrough.

The 5 Ws also work as an annotation strategy, where you underline all textual information related to the 5 Ws.

Notice the Conflict

Every story or passage centers around at least one conflict. A conflict is the characters’ primary struggle–the issue they’re faced with, the main challenge they try to overcome.

Keep in mind that a conflict can be external or internal. An external conflict takes place outside the character in the physical world–such as a fistfight, an argument with a friend, or committing a bank robbery. An internal conflict takes place inside the narrator–such as struggling to get over a girlfriend, becoming jealous of a friend, or worrying about how peers will perceive a behavior.

As you read, ask yourself “What is the character’s primary issue or challenge?” While there may be more than one, try to identify the most central, prominent conflict. By identifying a story’s conflict, you can observe and annotate how the author emphasizes it through storytelling elements–character development, tone, word choice, and structure. Underline these elements and write a few words describing how they build or relate to the central conflict.

Identify the Tone

A text’s tone is the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter–actions, characters, or events in the text. Every piece of writing has multiple tones, which develop and change throughout the text according to the writer’s word choice.

Describe the tone using adjectives :

To Kill a Mockingbird began with a lighthearted tone and progressed to a dark , tense tone as the plot continued.

The article about bees used an informative , professional tone.

My writing always has an informal tone, even when I want it to be academic .

Hermann Hesse ends Siddhartha with a serene and beautiful tone.

Each sentence carries a unique tone, causing a story’s tone to change subtly every few lines. As you read, notice how the tone develops as the story continues. Underline the words and phrases that most powerfully create the tone, describing the tone in the margin. If you notice a sudden shift in tone, underline the point where it changed and write a few words about how it changed.

Close Reading Strategies Make You a Better Reader

Close reading is more than just a classroom assignment–it’s a reading method that helps you analyze and comprehend all texts. It will help you in class, on your own, and on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT Reading Sections .

While you may initially practice close reading by underlining and writing notes in the margin, over time it will influence the way you approach all texts: You will find yourself prereading a text, considering the title, generating a purpose question, tracking the 5 Ws while you read, asking questions, observing the text’s conflict, and noticing the tone.

Close reading helps you comprehend difficult texts, and it helps you write essays for class. It’s an all-purpose writing strategy.

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Poetry: Close Reading

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Introduction

Once somewhat ignored in scholarly circles, close reading of poetry is making something of a comeback. By learning how to close read a poem you can significantly increase both your understanding and enjoyment of the poem. You may also increase your ability to write convincingly about the poem.

The following exercise uses one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets (#116) as an example. This close read process can also be used on many different verse forms. This resource first presents the entire sonnet and then presents a close reading of the poem below. Read the sonnet a few times to get a feel for it and then move down to the close reading.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Performing the close read

The number indicates the sonnet’s place in a cycle or sequence of sonnets. Although you may examine the poem on its own terms, realize that it is connected to the other poems in the cycle.

Admit impediments.

Form is one of the first things you should note about a poem. Here it is easy to see that the poem is fourteen lines long and follows some sort of rhyme scheme (which you can see by looking at how the final words in each line). The rhyme of words makes a connection between them. Our first rhyme combination is “minds/finds.” What do you make of this pairing of words?

The first phrase (in this case a full sentence) of the poem flows into the next line of the poem. This is called enjambment, and though it is often made necessary by the form of the verse, it also serves to break up the reader’s expectations. In this case, the word “impediments” is placed directly before the bleak and confusing phrase “love is not love,” itself an enjambment. How does this disconnection between phrase and line affect the reader? How does it emphasize or change the lines around it?

Love is not love

O r bends with the remover to remove:

Notice all of the repetition or use of similar words in the last two and a half lines. When close reading a poem, especially a fixed verse form like the sonnet, remember the economy of the poem: there’s only so much space at the poet’s disposal. This makes repetition very important, because it places even more emphasis on the repeated word than does prose. What does the repetition in these lines suggest? Also, note that we’ve come to the end of our first quatrain (four-line stanza): usually the first stanza of a sonnet proposes the problem for the poem. What is this problem?

Our next quatrain gives a pair of metaphors ( click here to read about metaphors, or click here ) for the “thesis” argued in the first stanza. Look carefully at these images as they relate to the subject of the poem. What actual objects do they describe? Do they bear any similarity to each other? Is there a connection between the use of “ever-“ in line 5 and “every” in line seven?

The image in lines 5-6 is especially complex: What is the “mark” Shakespeare is talking about and how does it “look?” Answers to some of these questions may require some research into older definitions of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Our third and final quatrain uses all of its four lines to expand a single metaphor. Consider how this metaphor relates to the previous ones, and why so much space in the poem is devoted to it, especially as it relates to the poem’s argument. Also, look at similarity of phrasing between line 9’s “rosy lips and cheeks” and line 11’s “brief hours and weeks.” They certainly rhyme, but how does the similar construction affect the reading?

This is our closing couplet (two-line stanza), meant to “resolve” the problem addressed in the poem. Look carefully at the way the couplet starts. Does it provide resolution or not? Note that the first person (“me/I”) has returned (last seen in the first line of the poem). Consider also the negations in the final statement. Have we seen something similar in the poem before? Where and why are the connections made?

From reading to writing

The observations and questions in the close reading notes are by no means complete, but a look over them suggests several possibilities for a paper. Among these possibilities are:

• The repetition of similar words and phrases in the poem
• The use and relationship of the three main metaphors in the poem
• The ambiguity, which begins (“let” suggests that something may or may not be allowed to happen) and ends (the weighty word “if”) the poem
• The connection between the physical and the spiritual.

These ideas need not be exclusive, either. The observations gained from the close reading should provide you with examples and insight for anyone of the proposed essays listed above.

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How to create a great thesis defense presentation: everything you need to know

Get your team on prezi – watch this on demand video.

Anete Ezera April 13, 2024

Ready to take on your thesis defense presentation? It’s not just about wrapping up years of study; it’s your moment to share your insights and the impact of your work. A standout presentation can make all the difference. It’s your chance to highlight the essentials and really connect with your audience.

This is where Prezi comes into play. Forget about flipping through slide after slide. With Prezi, you craft a narrative that pulls your audience in. It simplifies the complex, ensuring your key points hit home. Let’s explore how Prezi can help transform your thesis defense into a successful presentation.

What is a thesis defense presentation and why are they needed? 

Whether you’re preparing for a master’s thesis defense or a Ph.D. thesis defense, this final step in your academic journey is the one with the most significance, as it dramatically influences your final grade. It’s also your chance to display the dedication and effort you’ve put into your research, a way to demonstrate how significant your work is. 

So, why is this such a big deal? A good presentation helps convince your teachers that your research is solid and makes a difference in your field. It’s your time to answer questions, show that your research methods were sound, and point out what’s new and interesting about your work. In the end, a great thesis defense presentation helps you finish strong and makes sure you leave a lasting impression as you wrap up this chapter of your academic life.

Best practices for making a successful thesis defense presentation 

In order to craft a standout thesis defense presentation, you need to do more than just deliver research findings. Here are some key strategies to ensure success, and how Prezi can play a crucial role in elevating your presentation.

Start with a strong introduction

Kick-off with an engaging introduction that lays out your research question, its significance, and your objectives. This initial segment grabs attention and sets the tone. Using Prezi’s zoom feature can make your introduction pop by visually underscoring key points, helping your audience grasp the importance of your work right from the start.

Organize your presentation clearly

A coherent structure is essential for guiding your audience through your thesis defense presentation. Prezi can help by offering a map view of your content’s layout upfront, providing a clear path through your introduction, methodology, results, and conclusion. This clarity keeps your audience engaged and makes your arguments easier to follow.

Incorporate multimedia elements

Adding multimedia elements like videos, audio clips, and animations can greatly improve the appeal of your thesis defense presentation. Prezi supports the seamless integration of these elements, allowing you to bring your research to life in a more vibrant and engaging way. Videos can serve as powerful testimonials or demonstrations, while animations can help illustrate complex processes or changes over time. This variety keeps your audience engaged and helps convey your message in a more exciting way.

Simplify complex data

Your findings need to be presented in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. Prezi shines here, with tools that transform intricate data into clear, engaging visuals. By implementing charts and graphs into your presentation, you can make your data stand out and support your narrative effectively.

Engage your audience

Make your thesis defense a two-way conversation by interacting with your audience. Whether it’s through questions, feedback, or direct participation, engagement is key. Prezi allows for a flexible presentation style, letting you navigate sections in response to audience input, creating a dynamic and engaging experience.

Highlight key takeaways

Emphasize the key takeaways of your research throughout your presentation to ensure your audience grasps the most critical aspects of your work. With Prezi, you can use spotlighting and strategic zooming to draw attention to these takeaways, making them stand out. This method helps reinforce your main points, ensuring they stick with your audience long after your presentation concludes. By clearly defining what your audience should remember, you guide their understanding and appreciation of your research’s value and implications.

Practice makes perfect

Confidence in delivery comes from thorough practice. Familiarize yourself with every aspect of your thesis defense presentation, including timing, voice control, and gestures. Prezi Video is a great tool for rehearsing, as it allows you to blend your presentation materials with your on-camera performance, mirroring the live defense setting and helping you polish your delivery.

End with a lasting impression

Conclude your presentation powerfully by summarizing your main findings, their implications, and future research directions. Prezi’s ability to zoom out and show the big picture at your conclusion helps reinforce how each section of your presentation contributes to your overall thesis, ensuring your research leaves a memorable impact on your audience.

By using these tips and taking advantage of what Prezi offers, you can make your thesis defense presentation really stand out. It’ll not only hit the mark with your audience but also clearly show why your research matters.

Meeting tight deadlines with Prezi 

Facing a looming deadline for your thesis defense presentation? Prezi offers smart solutions to help you create a polished and engaging presentation quickly, even if it feels like you’re down to the wire.

A closer look at Prezi AI features

Prezi AI is a standout feature for those pressed for time. It assists in structuring your presentation efficiently, suggesting design elements and layouts that elevate your content. This AI-driven approach means you can develop a presentation that looks meticulously planned and executed in a fraction of the time it would normally take. The result? A presentation that communicates the depth and value of your research clearly and effectively, without the last-minute rush being evident. Here’s what Prezi AI can do:

• Streamlined creation process: At the core of Prezi’s efficiency is the AI presentation creator . Perfect for those last-minute crunch times, it’s designed to tackle tight deadlines with ease.
• Easy start: Kick off your presentation creation with just a click on the “Create with AI” button. Prezi AI guides you through a smooth process, transforming your initial ideas or keywords into a structured and visually appealing narrative.
• Visual impact: There’s no need to dive deep into design details. Simply provide some basic input, and Prezi AI will craft it into a presentation that grabs and holds your audience’s attention, making your thesis defense visually compelling.
• AI text editing: Spending too much time fine-tuning your message? Prezi AI text editing features can help. Whether you need to expand on a concept, clarify complex terms, or condense your content without losing impact, Prezi AI streamlines these tasks.
• Content refinement: Adjust text length for deeper explanation, simplify language for better understanding, and ensure your presentation’s content is precise and to the point. Prezi AI editing tools help you refine your message quickly, so you can focus on the essence of your research.

Using Prezi Video for remote thesis defense presentations

For remote thesis defenses, Prezi Video steps up to ensure your presentation stands out. It integrates your on-screen presence alongside your presentation content, creating a more personal and engaging experience for your audience. This is crucial in maintaining attention and interest, particularly in a virtual format where keeping your audience engaged presents additional challenges. Prezi Video makes it seem as though you’re presenting live alongside your slides, helping to simulate the in-person defense experience and keep your audience focused on what you’re saying.

Using these advanced Prezi features, you can overcome tight deadlines with confidence, ensuring your thesis defense presentation is both impactful and memorable, no matter the time constraints.

The Prezi experience: what users have to say 

Prezi users have shared compelling insights on how the platform’s unique features have revolutionized their presentations. Here’s how their experiences can inspire your thesis defense presentation:

Storytelling with Prezi

Javier Schwersensky highlights the narrative power of Prezi: “This is a tool that is going to put you ahead of other people and make you look professional and make your ideas stand out,” he remarks. For your thesis defense, this means Prezi can help you craft a narrative that not only presents your research but tells a story that captures and retains the committee’s interest.

Flexibility and creativity

Tamara Montag-Smit appreciates Prezi for its “functionality of the presentation that allows you to present in a nonlinear manner.” This flexibility is key in a thesis defense, allowing you to adapt your presentation flow in real time based on your audience’s engagement or questions, ensuring a more dynamic and interactive defense.

The open canvas

Vitek Dočekal values Prezi’s open canvas , which offers “creative freedom” and the ability to “create a mind map and determine how to best present my ideas.” For your thesis defense, this means Prezi lets you lay out and show off your work in a way that makes sense and grabs your audience’s attention, turning complicated details into something easy and interesting to follow.

Engagement and retention

Adam Rose points out the engagement benefits of Prezi: “Being able to integrate videos is extremely effective in capturing their attention.” When you need to defend a thesis, using Prezi to include videos or interactive content can help keep your committee engaged, making your presentation much more memorable.

These real insights show just how effective Prezi is for crafting truly influential presentations. By incorporating Prezi into your thesis defense presentation, you can create a defense that not only shows how strong your research is but also leaves a lasting impression on your audience.

Thesis defense presentations for inspiration 

Prezi is much more than a platform for making presentations; it’s a place where you can find inspiration by browsing presentations that other Prezi users have made. Not only that, but Prezi offers numerous templates that would be useful for thesis defense presentations, making the design process much easier. Here are a few examples that you may find helpful: 

Research project template by Prezi 

This Prezi research project template stands out as an ideal choice for thesis defense presentations due to its well-structured format that facilitates storytelling from start to finish. It begins with a clear introduction and problem statement, setting a solid foundation for the narrative. The inclusion of sections for user research, interviews, demographics, and statistics allows for a detailed presentation of the research process and findings, which are crucial when defending a thesis. 

Visual elements like user mapping and journey maps help make complex information understandable and engaging, which is crucial for maintaining the committee’s attention. Additionally, addressing pain points and presenting prototypes showcases problem-solving efforts and practical applications of the research. The template culminates in a conclusion that ties everything together, emphasizing the research’s impact and future possibilities. Its comprehensive yet concise structure makes it an excellent tool for communicating the depth and significance of your work in a thesis defense.

Civil rights movement Prezi

This Prezi on the Civil Rights Movement exemplifies an effective thesis defense presentation by seamlessly blending structured content, multimedia enhancements, and dynamic navigation. It organizes information into coherent sections like “About,” “Key Events,” and “Key People,” offering a comprehensive view ideal for a thesis presentation. The strategic use of videos adds depth, providing historical context in a dynamic way that text alone cannot, enhancing the audience’s engagement and understanding. 

Furthermore, Prezi’s open canvas feature brings the narrative to life, allowing for a fluid journey through the Civil Rights Movement. This method of presentation, with its zooming and panning across a virtual canvas, not only captivates but also helps to clarify the connections between various elements of the research, showcasing how to effectively communicate complex ideas in a thesis defense.

AI-assisted history template

This AI-assisted presentation template stands out as a great choice for thesis defense presentations, especially for those rooted in historical research. By merging striking visuals with rich, informative content, you can use this template to craft a narrative that breathes life into past events, guiding the audience on an engaging journey through time. Its sequential storytelling approach, empowered by Prezi AI , ensures a smooth transition from one historical point to the next, demonstrating the depth and continuity of your research. This template showcases Prezi AI’s capability to enhance narrative flow. By integrating advanced visuals and text, it captivates audiences and makes it an invaluable tool for presenting complex historical theses in a clear, compelling way.

Master your final grade with a Prezi thesis defense presentation 

Preparing for a thesis defense, whether for a master’s or Ph.D., is a pivotal moment that significantly influences your final grade. It’s your platform to demonstrate the dedication behind your research and its importance in your field. A well-executed presentation convinces your educators of your research’s validity and your ability to bring fresh perspectives to light.

To craft a successful thesis defense presentation, Prezi’s innovative features can be a game-changer. Prezi can empower you to transform presentations into captivating stories and provide you with the flexibility and creative freedom needed to make your presentation an outstanding success. Incorporating videos or utilizing Prezi’s non-linear presentation style can keep your committee engaged and emphasize your research’s significance.

Prezi also serves as a hub of inspiration, offering templates perfect for thesis defenses. From structured research project templates to dynamic historical narratives, Prezi provides tools that communicate your thesis’s depth and significance effectively, ensuring you leave a memorable impact on your audience. So, it’s time to revamp your thesis defense presentation and change it from dull to inspirational with Prezi. 

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