Close Reading

An English teacher’s heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it’s not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren’t about the real world; they’re about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem’s most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray’s famous “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The surface-level meaning is something like this: “At evening, when the curfew bell rings, the cows and the plowman go home and leave me in the dark.” Many students read passages like this, “decode” them into something they can understand, and then ask, “Why didn’t he just say that?”

That’s usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, “Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?” But in fact “Why didn’t he just say that?” can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you’re on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never “Because he had to rhyme” or “Because he couldn’t do it any better.”)–Jack LynchClose Reading (Getting an A on an English Paper)

It’s really little wonder that college students want to talk about “the real world,” since their high school English teachers often rewarded them for being able to apply a literary work to their own life. Thus, when reading a poem that invokes fear, students were encouraged to talk about times that they felt afraid. This is fine if it’s presented as a way to get into the text, or if it is part of an informal response journal. But students who can’t get beyond their vague impressions (perhaps because they didn’t actually do the readings) can distract and stifle a classroom discussion.

Few things give me “that sinking feeling” more sharply than when, during a rickety class discussion, where a few students who haven’t done the readings are still trying to fake me out by asking clarifying questions, and the students who have done the reading aren’t ready to take a stand, someone makes a reference to a movie or TV show they just watched, and then hands suddenly shoot up all over the room, and I ask, “Can we relate Desperate Houswives to Arthur Miller?” and the hands go back down.

5 thoughts on “Close Reading

  1. Thanks to you both for your feedback. I like the “Relevance?” response, since it rewards those students who can make the connection.

    I’ve given pop quizzes too, often in the first few minutes of class, which adds another incentive for the students to arrive on time.

    Of course, then I have to grade the pop quizzes, which I don’t particularly enjoy… but if the questions are good enough, then the act of trading papers with a classmate and going over the answers in class becomes formative and reflective, rather than a simple enumeration of correct answers. That is, if a student offered an answer that differed from the answer I gave as “correct,” and can show me a page number that contains evidence to support their claim, I’m willing to be flexible.

  2. Jack Lynch’s overview is quite good. Close reading is a skill and it takes practice to sharpen. Of course, it’s only one of many ways of “processing” a text, but it does enable interpretive analysis quite nicely.

    In regards to the class dynamic of a lit course, I’ve confronted the ruse you describe, too — though sometimes it isn’t unpreparedness (e.g., they could have read the text, but don’t understand it, or don’t want to entertain the teacher’s agenda about it, and would rather talk about TV). If I’m savvy about the pop culture text they want to discuss, I’ll press them to think critically about it or even intertextually. But more often, I simply call them on it: “Relevance?” I ask curtly, and await their reply. If they can make the connection, then good, I’ll play along; if not, I shift immediately to something else while they scratch their temple.

    Dealing with students who don’t read (or who have cut corners with the reading, such as using Cliff Notes or whatever) is the albatross dangling from every literature teacher’s neck, and it will always be there, even when students don’t actively try to steer the convo away from “the text itself.” You develop a repetoire of strategies for dealing with it, or you pull your hair out and hate your life as a teacher.

    Sometimes “close reading” isn’t necessary. Sometimes a pop quiz is. Sometimes a reflection is in order. Sometimes you just go where the class wants to and try to find the issues and assumptions behind their claims. Sometimes, you just have to have everyone open up to a page (or put it up on the projector), read it out loud, and have them (often along with your gentle prompting) perform the close reading “live” so that they’ll know what you’re expecting them to do before class. Sometimes you just lecture and let those who didn’t read suffer. Sometimes you assign group work and let them hide — and learn from the good students who model academic inquiry wihtout the teacher’s immediate influence. Sometimes you just cancel class and call it a reading or research day. Different approaches keep them on their toes, but a consistent return to the text itself is what gives the course coherency, so keep at it.

  3. Sounds like a great course. I also agree with you that students use personal responses to disguise their unpreparedness. Interestingly, though, I found this more prevalent among graduate students than either undergraduates or high school students. Among high school students especially, a culture of reticence (not cool to talk much in class) prevents them from “going off” on their own personal stories. Grad students, however, are generally less inhibited by their social setting. I’ve had entire courses hijacked by students who run down memory lane with every poem (particularly more modern “chatty” poetry that requires less rigorous analysis).

  4. In my “Media Aesthetics” course, students did final presentations on Titanic and A Night to Remember, on the TV series Alias, and on images of women in advertising (as well as images of the body in classical architecture… where did she come from?), so I’m perfectly willing to accept popular culture as a subject of discourse. When students who haven’t done the assigned reading bring up tangential material in order to fill up classroom discussion time, that’s another matter.

  5. Good to see New Criticism raising its ugly head now and again.

    I agree that our students do tend to follow what I.A. Richards called “mnemonic irrelevances,”–that is, the sort of tangential personal memories or connections that can distract from the text. But we’ve also got to acknowledge that reading is a transaction between reader and text, and whatever the student brings to the text–even Desperate Housewives–is finally a part of the meaning that is created.

    As for high school teachers rewarding students for talking about their own lives, it’s pretty well documented that New Criticism remains the dominant approach to secondary literature study, whether high school teachers know it or not. Teachers do use reader response techniques, but most often to engage students prior to the reading (“remember a time when . . “) and not as a means to assess comprehension. Check out the questions that follow any selection in a high school anthology and you’ll get my point: most ask students to root out the sorts of elements that the New Critics loved: ambiguity, irony, etc.

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