Close Reading

Close Reading Non-Fiction Prose

Lesson 1 (Overview)

Sample text to analyze

Lesson 2 (Theme or Thesis)

Lesson 3 (Style)

Lesson 4 (Structure)

Close Reading Fiction

Lesson 1 (Overview)

• In analyzing a piece of fiction, you want to be able to say something concrete about: theme, plot, characters, style, and structure.
• The following lessons give you a sample short story (it's really short!), and some focus questions to begin crafting the kinds of sentences that instructors are looking for when you are being asked to read a story critically.

Lesson 2 (Theme)

• The first trick is to look for repeating words such as cold. There are other related words to "cold," such as "winter" and "chill."
• So one theme would be something about coldness.

• In this case, it seems as though the cold, winter setting echoes the emotional coldness the speaker expresses.
• When the atmosphere of a story reflects the character's mood it is referred to as pathetic fallacy, which is what seems to be at play here.

• This short story focuses around the theme of coldness, both in its actual landscape and the metaphoric landscape of the main character's emotions.

Lesson 3 (Plot)

To look again at our sample short story, we can begin thinking about its plot.

What happens in this story?

• Q: what is the setting? A: a car parked somewhere by a highway in winter.
• Q: who are the characters? A: one person sitting in the car, another one who runs to the car and gets in
• Q: what happens? A: there is a loud sound while one character is away from the car (perhaps a gun shot), and then both characters drive away

• So in this case, a plot summary may be something like: An unnamed speaker sits alone in a parked car in winter when she hears a loud sound; then her companion joins her in the car before they speed away, into the unknown.

Lesson 4 (Style)

• Another way to begin analyzing stories or other narrative texts is to look at the author's writing style.
• Writing style includes things such as word choice, point of view, or sentence length.
• All of these things work together to express a particular mode of writing, that we refer to as "style."

Let's look again at our sample short story:

• Q: what is the narrative perspective (also called narrative voice)? A: third person
• Q: is the diction simple or complex? A: simple, but not slang
• Q: are the sentences short or long and does it matter? A: the sentences are mostly simple, but short ones are mixed in with long ones
• Q: what is the verb tense (past, present, future? A: the action mostly takes place in the past tense, except for the last sentence (bonus points if you identify that the last sentence in subjunctive tense)
• Q: are the sentences mostly declarative, imperative, or interrogative? A: the sentences are mostly declarative

Lesson 5 (Structure)

• After looking at elements such as theme, plot, and style, you can also look to the structural elements of a fictive text to be able to bring structure into your analysis.
• Structural observations will often take the form of simply saying what genre the piece of fiction falls into.
• Is it a narrative essay? A short story? A play? An epic, narrative poem? A novel? A novella?

Let's look again at our sample short story:

• There are a variety of different types of narratives as suggested above.
• What is this one? It's clearly not a novel, and it's clearly not a play.
• So what is it? As mentioned, it's a short story.
• There is even a subset of short stories that are so short they could fit on a postcard, and so they are called postcard stories.
• This story is short enough, that you can call it either just a short story or a postcard story.

Close Reading Poetry

Lesson 1 (Overview)

Here's how we can begin walking through a poem:

1. Look at the Title
2. Paraphrase the Poem
3. Are there Poetic Devices to Note?
4. Is there anything about the tone/attitude to Note?
5. What is the poem's Style?
6. What is the poem's Structure?
7. Can you figure out a central Theme?

Lesson 2 (Analyzing a Poem)

Go through the 7 Steps to analyze this poem:

Close Reading from Shakespeare

Let's work through a sample soliloquy step by step:

Narrative Untrustworthiness and Bias

Lesson 1 (Overview)

• In real life do we always trust 100% what someone tells us?
• Are some people more trustworthy than others?
• Are some more reliable than others?

Here are some types of unreliable narrators

• Naive - This narrator is unreliable because of their lack of experience. They come across as childlike or innocent, and in some cases the narrator may even be a child.
• Outsider - This narrator is different from the others in the story. For instance, this type of narration is common in speculative fiction or science fiction when a character from our time either travels to another planet and meets aliens, or goes back in time. They may not describe things fully accurately, because they are outsiders who don't understand what is going on.
• Picaro - A picaro is a narrator who likes to embellish or exaggerate a story. This is like the typical "fishing story," where the size of the fish becomes bigger and bigger with every story.
• Insane - A narrator who has lost touch with reality or is otherwise insane can tell a compelling story that may not be reflective of the truth.
• Liar - This type of narrator intentionally deceives. These are rare to encounter, but they tell a nuanced story as the reader must try to sort fact from fiction.

Lesson 2 (How to Spot an Unreliable Narrator)

Let's look at a sample excerpt from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

• It's set in 19th Century Western Yorkshire, the story focuses on two families who own neighbouring estates.
• The story begins in the present with Lockwood arriving at one of the estates, and through his visit, we learn of the intertwined past of the current landlord, Heathcliff, and his dead love, Catherine, who grew up on one estate, but married into the the neighbouring one.
• The story tells the intergenerational strife that began with Heathcliff and Catherine's generation, but carries through their children.
• The opening scene below is narrated in the first person, by Lockwood upon his arrival at Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's estate.

Dramatic Irony

• The entire plot of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, for example, works through dramatic irony.
• The play focuses on a brother and sister, separated by a shipwreck.
• The sister, Viola, dresses as her brother.
• The audience, of course, knows that she is Viola. So when she falls in love with Duke Orsino - and he thinks she is a boy - and the Countess Olivia - who the Duke Orsino is in love with - decides she loves "Viola," the entire cross-dressing, identity-swapping confusion of it all is appreciated by the audience, not the characters.
• In the end, of course, as happens in Shakespearean comedies, everyone is happy.

• In this play, the villain, named Iago, often turns to the audience to address us directly and tell us of his evil plans towards the main character, Othello.
• Othello, however, believes Iago to be his friend and refers to him often as "honest Iago," and says things like "I know thou ‘rt full of love and honesty."
• You can just imagine the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's day exploding with shouts from the audience!
• And, sadly in the end, as in Shakespearean tragedy, the tragic hero dies.

Aristotle

• For Aristotle, comedy represents human beings as "worse than they are," but he notes that comic characters are not necessarily evil, just ridiculous and laughable.
• He contrasts comedy with tragedy, which represents humans as "better than they are."

Oral Storytelling

Lesson 1 (Overview)

• Written texts in English follow a number of conventions, not the least of which is left to right and top to bottom reading, which leads to a sense of language progressing ever forward.
• English has developed from Old English in the times of Beowulf, through Chaucer's Middle English, to what we know today as Contemporary English.
• Through the centuries the language has unfolded in keeping with certain conventions of writing, especially from the 1588 invention of the printing press.
• From that point on, the oral storytelling techniques underpinning texts like Beowulf or The Aeneid or myths and stories from other cultures, became subsumed in a Euro-centric modality.

Canada

• What this means is that while other postcolonial countries had a European imperial colonizer and a large, local colonized population, say, for instance in many countries in Africa or in India, places like Canada and Australia had smaller indigenous populations when colonized by European powers, and then those European countries, and others, continued to settle across the landscape, overwhelming indigenous populations.
• There's more to it than that, of course, but at a high level, you see that Canada's literary culture is often considered to be its written culture, but First Nations story-telling long predates European settlement in Canada.
• First Nations story-telling practices focus on orality rather than linear plot lines.
• As teachers, we work to indigenize our curriculum and expand our own knowledge base into different ways of knowing and passing on information.

Lesson 2 (First Nations Example)

• The story of Turtle Island varies among Indigenous communities, but by most accounts, it acts as a creation story that places emphasis on the turtle as a symbol of life and earth (learn more).
• While there are different versions of Turtle Island stories, they are creation stories in which the turtle carries land on its back, and that land becomes the land upon which we all walk.
• These stories were shared long before they were written down.
• What is important in beginning to study First Nations literature (in Canada and globally) is to be aware that there are different modes of story-telling, different epistemologies, and different world views.
• Another element that is important in looking at First Nations literature is the idea of "cultural appropriation" or "appropriation of voice." Non indigenous writers perform a kind of literary colonization when they take indigenous stories and tell them. It's like stealing something to make it your own. Much better to get indigenous stories from indigenous artists and writers.