English Department Portfolio
Close Textual Analysis Essay
Your portfolio should include a close textual analysis: an essay in which you analyze closely a short work of literature (e.g., a sonnet) or an excerpt from a longer work. Your required 3000-level survey courses will include the option of writing this kind of assignment. A close textual analysis (also known as a close reading or Explication de texte) is a finely detailed, very specific interpretation of a short poem or short selected passage from a longer work, showing how the details of the text—the nuances of language, allusions, images and/or rhetorical figures (symbols, metaphors, etc.), the fictional situation, narrative technique—relate to the central themes of the poem, story, or novel. This essay should demonstrate your ability to read sensitively, deliberately and carefully and to use critical terminology appropriately.
Your essay should be at least 3 double-spaced pages (750-1000 words) long. It should explore a poem or part of a poem of no more than 50 lines or a passage of prose (e.g., an excerpt from a short story, novel, play, etc.) of no more than 2 pages.
Your essay should interpret the text in depth and detail, paying close attention to the words on the page and giving your sense of what they mean and why they are significant. The essay should point out specific themes, character traits, ideas, images, concerns, stylistic features, etc. that you find important. It should pay some attention to expression and rhetorical strategy as well as to content. In other words, a close textual analysis either looks closely at a very short work in its entirety, or at a specific scene or moment in a longer work in order to make an argument about how a specific “part” of the poem or narrative contributes and relates to the “whole.” You must decide what total effect the writer achieves in a selected poem or passage and support your argument with quotes from the text. The argument you make should be about how the text you've chosen works (its internal functions, dynamics, and structures). It should not use the text to argue about an external generality (e.g. about the way life is) or an internal generality (e.g. about the nature of a certain character), nor should it use the text to "explain" the the historical context.
Close reading is used by many kinds of critics, from New Critical formalists to structuralists, deconstructionists, and members of various social, political, historical and reader-response schools. For a wide-ranging study of various methodologies that employ careful attention to the text, see Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois, eds., Close Reading: The Reader (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003).
Requirements: What does a Close Textual Analysis Essay Usually Have?
General guidelines for doing close-readings:
1. Briefly identify some of the major issues, conflicts, ideas, and ideologies reflected in the passage. You might begin by rereading the passage you've chosen with a pencil in hand, annotating the text as you read. "Annotating" means underlining or highlighting key words and phrases--anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions--as well as making notes in the margins. When we respond to a text in this way, we not only force ourselves to pay close attention, but we also begin to think with the author about the evidence--the first step in moving from reader to writer.
2. If you are explicating part of a longer work, be sure to make clear in the opening paragraph of your essay where your selected passage begins and ends (page number in the text, which paragraph(s), and opening and closing lines). Identify the context in which the passage appears and analyze its significance. In other words, where exactly does the passage appear in the piece (in the beginning, after an important scene, at the end, etc.) and why is its placement important?
3. Who is doing the speaking in the passage (or about whom is the passage) and how is that significant? Any allusions to other literary characters? To other literary works that might suggest a perspective? Look for a pattern of metaphoric language to give added insight into motives and feelings which are not verbalized.
4. Look for patterns in the details (words, images, metaphors) you've noticed about the text--repetitions, contradictions, similarities. If the work is a poem, identify the poetic structure and note the variations within that structure.
5. Analyze the implications of the language in the poem or prose passage. Without worrying about authorial intention, ask yourself why the writer might have chosen those particular words or that style in that particular excerpt. Explore the subtler connotations of the words, allusions, expressions used. What kinds of metaphors and other figures of speech does the passage employ? Is that passage similar to or different from others, if so, how? Look for alliteration, internal rhymes and other such poetic devices which are often used in prose as well as in poetry. A caesura? Enjambment? Anaphora? Polysyndeton? You need to look closely here for meanings that are connected to these rhyme schemes. How do the style and words choice tie into larger issues in the novel, story, or poem? This is a very key step in close-reading.
6. Draw some comparisons and conclusions about the poem or prose passage in terms of its relevance to the rest of the piece: how is it specifically related to other parts? What does it reveal about a character or an issue that you see earlier or later in the piece? Offer a brief example. Why is this particular passage (as compared to others) important?
7. Support your analysis with evidence from the text (that is, textual specifics, description, and quoted details). Always include particular details to support your readings.Need More Help?
Edgar Roberts provides the following useful questions for close readings of passages based on their location in a narrative:
- For an Early Passage: Does the passages occur early in the work? If it does, you may reasonably expect that the author is using the passage to set things in motion. Thus you should try to determine how ideas, themes, characterizations, and arguments that you find in the passage are related to these matters as they appear later in the work. You may assume that everything in the passage is there for a purpose. Try to find that purpose.
- For a Later, Midpoint Passage: Does the passage come later in the work, at a time that you might characterize as a "pivot" or "turning point"? In such a passage a character's fortunes take either an expected or unexpected turn. If the change is expected, you should explain how the passage focuses the various themes or ideas and then propels them toward the climax. If the change is unexpected, however, it is necessary to show how the contrast is made in the passage. It may be that the work is one that features surprises, and that the passage thus is read one way at first but on second reading may be seen to have a double meaning. Or it may be that the speaker has had one set of assumptions while the readers have had others, and that the passage marks a point of increasing self-awareness on the part of the speaker. Many of the part of works are not what they seem at first reading, and it is your task here to determine how the passage is affected by events at or near the end of the work.
- For a Concluding Passage: If the passage occurs at or near the end of the work, you may assume that it is designed to solve problems or to be a focal point or climax for all the situations and ideas that have been building up in the work. You may need to show how the passage brings together all themes, ideas, and details. What is happening? Is any action described in the passage a major action, or a step leading to the major action? Has everything in the passage been prepared for earlier in the work?
(Edgar Roberts. Writing Themes About Literature, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983: 187-88.)
For more detailed suggestions, see Steps for Close Reading or Explication de texte: Patterns, polarities, problems, paradigm, puzzles, perception or How to Do a Close Reading. You can also look over two sample essays: a close textual analysis of a prose passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and a sample close textual analysis of a short poem by Walt Whitman.