Close reading
Close reading is the careful analysis of a text’s language, structure, imagery, and form, using specific details to develop interpretations.
Textual evidence: Details from a text used to support an interpretation or argument. Close reading grounds claims in specific words, patterns, and formal choices.
Literary genre: A category of writing shaped by conventions of form, style, and subject matter. Genre conventions help distinguish a text’s expected features from its departures.
Literary criticism: The interpretation, evaluation, and analysis of literary works. Close reading supplies evidence and methods used across many critical approaches.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century literary movement that emphasized analysis of a work as an autonomous verbal object. Its practice of close textual analysis helped establish the method’s modern literary prominence.
English studies: The academic study of literature, language, and writing in English. Close textual analysis became a central practice in many English literature courses.
Diction: A writer’s choices of words and their effects in a text. Examining individual word choices can reveal tone, emphasis, and ambiguity.
Poetic meter: A recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. Meter makes rhythm available for analysis as a formal choice.
Exegesis: A critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Exegesis applies sustained textual analysis to works whose wording carries doctrinal significance.
Reader-response criticism: Literary theories that examine how readers participate in producing a work’s meaning. It places interpretive activity in the reader’s encounter, rather than concentrating chiefly on textual features.
Canon formation: The historical process through which certain works gain lasting cultural or educational authority. Close reading practices have often reinforced attention to works treated as literary exemplars.