ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures.

Detailed explanation-2: -What is a close reading? A close reading is a very in-depth, careful analysis of a short text. This text can be a passage selected from a novel, a poem, an image, a short story, etc. The analysis looks carefully at what is happening in the short text, but isn’t necessarily isolated from references outside the text.

Detailed explanation-3: -Close reading, then, is about pausing, and looking at the precise techniques, dynamics, and content of the text. It’s not reading between the lines, but reading further and further into the lines and seeing the multiple meanings a turn of phrase, a description, or a word can unlock.

Detailed explanation-4: -The New Critics therefore emphasized close reading as a way of discovering the tensions and paradoxes of a text in order to find their resolution into a coherent whole; this approach de-emphasizes contextual considerations and sometimes leads to the neglect of the parts of a text that trouble its coherence.

Detailed explanation-5: -Snow and Connor (2016) define close reading as “an approach to teaching comprehension that insists students extract meaning from text by examining carefully how language is used in the passage itself” (p. 1). The main intention of close reading is to engage students in the reading of complex texts.