Johnston/English 220

Any work of literature, of any genre, is made up of systems of language. Therefore, when you read, your job is not merely to figure out what a work says, but to decode how it works. Paraphrase of a literary work is the first step in reading (even though New Critics objected to the practice, their objections concerned letting the paraphrase substitute for the close reading.). Your goal must also be to formulate the laws that a work demonstrates in its practice. For the New Critics, or formalists, a work of literature, "like a pudding or a machine" can be analyzed to determine how form creates meaning. Wimsatt writes: "A poem can be only through its meaning--since its medium is words" (4). You must examine a work of literature carefully by looking at its patterns of language, in order to develop a thesis for your formalist (e.g. Close Reading, New Critical) paper.

Take notes on these aspects, then detail such items as:

Patterns: sounds, words, phrases and clauses, types of speech, figures of speech, imagery, rhyme, rhythm, structure.

How does the work or passage begin? How does it end?

• Comparisons/ contrasts between the two?

• Is there progress or regress from the beginning to the end? If so, what?

Are there sections; if so, what defines their boundaries?

Who is speaking?

Figurative language: Abundant metaphors; similes, personification, etc.?

• Do the figures fall into one category, or many categories?

Does the author have a favorite rhetorical structure (e.g. imperative, interrogative, period, fragment, run-on, passive, etc)?

Are there systems of language, or one dominant language (language of card games, or farming, or baseball, or science, etc)?

How does the work use cadence, rhythm, rhyme, dialectic, etc., to create a structure?

After identifying these patterns, you must do two things: 1) Make sense of them. So what if the poem is in the second person? Why is this voice narrating the novel? Why does the speaker use images of decay to talk about spring? And so on. 2) Find an organizing principle for your "close-reading" essay. Not all of the patterns you identify will be relevant to the thesis or organizing principal that you devise. Your job is to select patterns that work well together. The group of questions that you ask when you first read the work, in other words, need to be organized under a general rubric and pared down to form a general thesis for you close reading. For example, you may wish to comment on a work’s vocabulary: "This poem discusses death in the diction we normally use to discuss marriage"; or its structure: "This poem begins with its climax; the rest is one long decline"; or its grammatical structures: "The poem begins with a warning, and ends with a plea." All of these statements rise to a level of generalization about the procedures of the work. The body of your essay will proceed to detail the specifics supporting your general thesis. These details must be based securely in examples from the text.