Close Reading (How to use the Four Ways handout for your essay)

Your handout says that "ideally, every close-reading would involve each of these methods." As you construct your midterm essays, you will probably want to focus most closely on the first three. Although you don't have to follow this trajectory, I recommend approaching close reading in this essay something like this:

1. Start With Backwards

Because you are responding to a prompt, it makes sense for you to begin by looking for passages that deal with the topic you chose and then considering how it is dealt with in those passages.

2. Linger in Instinct

This is frequently where the most interesting questions will arise. Look back at passages that caught your eye when you started with Backwards. Think about the implications any peculiar images, contradictions or ambiguities you find might have for thinking about your topic.

3. Back it up with Brute Force

You usually don't want this kind of close reading to be the entire content of your paper because, like the handout says, it can get overly formulaic. That said, you will probably need this kind of reading to fully articulate what you found in Instinct. If a passage has a "strange" tone or a "haunting" sound, you'll have to pay close attention to the sounds, rhythms and structures that are creating that effect. If you want to say that a speaker's blithe tone seems at odds with her weighty subject matter, you'll want to show your reader what makes the tone blithe.

4. Be sparing with Comparatively

Once you have a clear idea of how your topic is working in the text you chose, you may want to bring in some of the ideas from Hale or Fern. Be careful though - don't let these texts distract you from engagement with the text you're working on. A discussion of friendship, motherhood or space in Hale and Fern cannot replace a solid understanding of each of these as they are dealt with in the text you're working on. Don't look to Hale and Fern for definitive pronouncements on your topic that you can insert seamlessly into your text. If you do bring in Hale or Fern, consider their ideas in dialogue with the ones you find in your text.


these suggestions refer to and should be used in conjunction with your handout "Four Ways to Close Read" by Katherine Isokawa

Conclusions

Some things to try in your conclusion:

- revisit your key insights (do NOT attempt to prove each part of your argument all over again, simply remind your reader of the trajectory of your argument as it is relevant to your conclusion)
- restate your thesis IN A NEW WAY
- refer to something you mentioned in your introduction - an idea or image on which your argument may shed new light
- end on a strong note - suggest some further implication or avenue of inquiry your essay opens up

Thesis Checklist

A successful thesis is specific, arguable, important and intellectually daring.

Take a look at your thesis.

- is it specific?
- is it arguable? (can you come up with a counter-argument?)
- is it significant? (can you answer the question "so what"?)
- is it interesting and intellectually daring? (does it bring out an aspect of the text that is not immediately evident? does it offer insight you wouldn't expect to find in Cliff Notes or a book review? would you enjoy discussing it with a friend?)

Two for one! The close-reading introduction

One excellent way to "hook" your reader in your introduction is with a short close-reading that opens onto your larger argument.

In the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice , the narrator declares, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The narrator pronounces this sentence from an "objective" point of view, stating a fact that holds true for all humankind, and then honing in on the wants and desires of a male person. Yet the novel itself is not about humankind; it is about women. Nor does it take place from an objective "outside," but instead moves in and out of the minds of its female characters, illuminating their perspective on the problem of marriage. Finally, the "wants" that the novel is concerned with are those of women: Elizabeth, Jane, Lydia, and even more Kitty have hopes and desires that cannot be realized because they can neither inherit land nor survive alone. Indeed, the chapter that follows this opening paragraph goes on to describe Mrs. Bennet's obsession with a wealthy neighbor who has jus moved in: it is a truth hardly acklowledged at all in Austen's time that a women in possession of no fortune at all must be in desperate want of a husband. Pride and Prejudice, then, is a devastating critique of marriage disguised as a lively comedy of manners.

excerpted from Prof. Elizabeth Freeman's English 144 Course Reader (UC Davis, Winter 2004)

Sample Close Reading A

Child's introduction performs the function conventional to the slave narrative of establishing the reliability of the accompanying narrative and the narrator's veracity. What is unusual about her introduction, however, is the basis of her authenticating statement; she establishes her faith in Jacob's story upon the correctness and delicacy of her author's manner:

The author of the following autobiography is personally known to me, and her conversation and manners inspire me with confidence. During the last seventeen years, she has lived the greater part of the time with a distinguished family in New York, and has so deported herself as to be highly esteemed by them. This fact is sufficient, without further credentials of her character. I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction (xi).

This paragraph attempts to equate contradictory notions; Child implies not only that Jacobs is both truthful and a model of decorous behavior, but also that her propriety ensures her veracity. Child's assumption is troublesome, since ordinarily, decorousness connotes the opposite of candor--one equates propriety not with openness, but with concealment in the interest of taste.

Indeed, later in her introduction Child seems to recognize that an explicit political imperative may well be completely incompatible with bourgeois notions of propriety. While in the first paragraph she suggests that Jacob's manner guarantees her veracity, bu the last she has begun to ask if questions of delicacy have any place at all in discussions of human injustice. In the last paragraph, for example, she writes, "I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public." Here, rather than equating truthfulness with propriety, she acknowledges somewhat apologetically that candor about her chosen subject may well violate common rules of decorum. From this point, she proceeds tactfully but firmly to dismantle the usefulness of delicacy as a category where subjects of urgency are concerned. She remarks, for instance, that "the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate." By pointing to the fact that one might identify Jacobs's story as either delicate or its opposite, she acknowledges the superfluity of this particular label.

In the third and fourth sentences of this paragraph, Child offers her most substantive critique of delicacy, for she suggests that it allows the reader an excuse for insensitivity and self-involvement. The third sentence reads as follows: "This peculiar phase of slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn." Here, she invokes and reverses the traditional symbol of feminine modesty. A veil (read euphemism) is ordinarily understood to protect the wearer (read reader) from the ravages of a threatening world. Child suggests, however, that a veil (or euphemism) may also work the other way, to conceal the hideous countenance of truth from those who choose ignorance above discomfort.

In the fourth sentence, she pursues further the implication that considerations of decorum may well excuse the reader's self-involvement. She writes, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them." The structure of this sentence is especially revealing, for it provides a figure for the narcissism of which she implicitly accuses the reader. A sentence that begins, as Child's does, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul that . . ." would ordinarily conclude with some reference to the "sisters" or wrongs they endure. We would thus expect the sentence to read something like, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul that they must soon take up arms against their master," or "that they no longer believe in a moral order." Instead, Child's sentence rather awkwardly imposes the reader in the precise grammatical location where the slave woman ought to be. This usurpation of linguistic space parallels the potential for narcissism of which Child suggests her reader is guilty.

Smith, Valerie. "Loopholes of Retreat: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology.

Sample Introduction A

One way to begin an introduction is with a startlng or surprising statement. Open on to your larger argument by complicating or explaining that initial claim.


In the warm and sun-filled days
I remember in the haze
The happy sounds of children laughing,
The rustle of the cottonwoods.
Now all is old and cold and dark
Underneath Presidio Park.
- Patricia Preciado Martin
"The Journey"

Arizona began as a mistake. The United States government used a mistake on a map to take what is now called southern Arizona from Sonora, Mexico - to abscond with it. This far-from-innocent (mis)taking emerged out of contradictions and shifting interpretations; the mistake showcases the seeming aporia structuring the distinction between the metaphorical and the material, the real and the mapped. Consideration of this particular (mis)take also exposes the politicality of space, revealing a battle over how to characterize space and how to produce places that then almost magically become background or setting, and thereby hide space as a formative, intimate participant in the pleasures and work of sociality and subject formation. Unpacking that mistake, resignifying a dibious nineteenth-century error, requires beginning with contrasting accounts, not of the mistake exactly, but of the spatial work that evolved from it.
Patricia Preciado Martin's short story "The Journey" (1980) offers a layered excavation of spatial memories that function as tstimonio, narraive monument, critique, and reportage of the production of Arizona and the lengthy struggle to remember Mexicano culture and life that such production seemed to pave over. The story begins with the poem quoted above, which invokes memories of a community and place that through the "haze" of dust, smog, memory, and years now lies "old and cold and dark / Underneath Presidio Park." The six-line poem works almost as a chan, conjuring the "disappeared" community and, with reference to Presidio Park, locating it in Tucson, Arizona - a bit northwest of the originary site of the "mistake" but very much germane to the ultimate (mis)taking.

Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.