Please look at the file I give you. what I write down below is from the file
What follows is the longer version, which is more involved but also more informative about what
I want you to do. It lays out how your reading, writing, and critical analysis will depend on a
sustained attention to details in order to find patterns, which will create the basis for your
argument. Also, that your argument will have a thesis, which I will return to shortly.
1. “Close” in What Sense?
First, a note about “close reading.” On some level we’ve already been doing this in each
of our class discussions. However, I have not assigned you anything that defines this process.
I’m posting a link to Patricia Kain’s brief explanation and demonstration alongside this
document, which is both informative and, potentially, a springboard for more questions.
Close reading means re-reading as you rethink and revise your understanding of the text.
As you do this, you will begin to work toward identifying a significant idea that shows up in the
text more than once, and changes each time it recurs. This, as you may have heard in other
classes, is a “theme.”
As you may have heard, a theme differs from a topic because a topic is synonymous with
the subject matter of a text, while a theme is about an overarching idea within the text. One
topical description of Louise Erdrich’s “The Years of My Birth” would be: a narrator who was
abandoned as a child must decide what kind of relationship she wants to have with her
biological family. If I was to offer one for Michael Cox’s “Visitor” it might be: a middle-aged
man pieces together his childhood memories of an abusive father. There are lots of other topical
sentences that would usefully describe these narratives. However, their purpose is generally to
summarize the plot. That is not your main concern in this essay. You can assume that your
reader is familiar with the work and will not need you to rehash details at that level.
So, how do you fill these pages if you’re not doing plot summary? That’s where theme
comes in. In my opinion, it is always better to think in terms of “themes” rather than imagining
that there is one controlling master-theme that fully explains a text. That being said, let’s pick
one that’s hard to miss. The theme of the double is present in both Cox and Erdrich. In fact, for
each of those pieces, there may even be too many examples of the doubling to manage in four
pages. Because the goal for this paper is not just to show that you can gather instances of a
theme, but to create an analysis that weaves those examples together in a meaningful way.
Figuring out which direct quotes will best support your argument is an essential part of the
process. Doing that will depend on your ability to craft a good thesis statement (see section 3).
But what is a close reading doing beyond pointing to specific moments in which some
broader theme is being alluded to? Close reading requires that you slow down, asking the reader
to slow down with you. It requires that you notice and specify how the author uses particular
literary tools and techniques to express, investigate, and develop the theme you’re tracking. Pay
attention to broad formal features (point of view, punctuation, paragraph breaks, word choice,
white space) and sonic effects (alliteration, assonance, anaphora, rhyme and slant-rhyme), along
with tone (irony, ambiguity, diction) and figurative language (metaphors, similes,
personification). You might feel tempted, at times, to just offer up a quote (“look, she literally
finds the word ‘doppelgänger’ in a crossword!”) and offer little or no commentary. But this is
not the goal of the assignment. As a rule of thumb, if a quote seems self-explanatory, you
probably shouldn’t include it. Instead, look for moments that you can really sink your teeth into,
offering sustained, multifaceted readings of how choices that the author made are reinforcing and
adding depth to the theme you want to focus on.
To summarize: Making a broad thematic claim about a text (“doubling is an important
feature in Cox/Erdrich”) is one part of the process. But if you leave it there, it’s still just a
generalization. The goal of a close reading is to examine how that theme manifests itself across
multiple instants and effects within the fabric of the text itself.
also please use a lot from direct quote from the book “The Years of My Birth”