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PAPER 1: AN ACADEMIC CLOSE READING

BASICSWrite a 3-to-5-page paper (at least 750 words) that closely reads and interprets small part or particular aspect of a work of popular culture. Use your close examination of that part or aspect to make a larger point about the work’s cultural function, meaning, structure, or significance. To make this larger point, you should use critical terms borrowed from other academic analyses.

This “small part or particular aspect” can be a specific scene, symbol, detail, passage, object, repeated word or image, character, theme, relationship, etc.

NOTICING Combining vivid details and critical ideas in an analytical close reading begins with the ordinary experience of “noticing” something small but intriguing functioning in a text.

We will talk about examples of academic writers’ noticing details in their subjects which suggest something that critically interesting, intriguing, odd, unexplained, "perverse," or "weird" in that work. 

This noticing can be the basis for a critical inquiry and exploration.

CLOSE READING Close reading is a kind of analytical writing that focuses on something in particular in a work to make a much larger point about the whole text. In essence, the part reveals the nature of the whole. You want to show how the part or aspect contributes to the effect, meaning, or significance of the entire work.

Doing a close reading enables you to discuss a work on both micro and macro levels. That is, you can relate big, critical ideas to a text, but you also have the time and space to dwell on a small enough part or aspect of a text to examine it in rich detail—breaking it down, noticing subtleties, observing choices made in the conception, creation, or performance of the text, or in the intended audience’s responses.

A PART OR ASPECT While a close reading can and should make references to the text overall or to its social or historical context, most of the attention in a close reading is paid to the vivid details of a part or aspect.

A part is a portion of a textfor instance, the opening scene of season 1/episode 1 of Deadwood, or the last paragraph of the first Harry Potter novel. An aspect is some very particular image or theme that winds through a work as a symbol or motifRick’s hat in The Walking Dead, for instance, or rain in Taylor Swift lyrics.

A part or aspect can be almost anything chosen from the work which is specific enough for you to thoroughly describe and analyze in detail in a few pages. You’ve probably heard the phrase “let the part stand for the whole.” In a close reading, the part illuminates the whole—or at least one insight into the whole.

A close reading analyzes and interprets how the part or aspect functions in the work as a whole through repetitions, patterns, contradictions, oppositions, parallels, tensions, etc. In this way, the significance of the component can lie in how it’s emblematic, pivotal, essential, anomalous (exceptional), or seminal in the work as a whole.

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CRITICAL TERMS & IDEAS (APPARATUS) The “larger point” about the part or aspect is expressed with the help of “critical terms”—a few interpretive words and ideas that you are free to draw from the work of other academic writers (with citations). In class, we will talk about examples of critical terms (i.e., American dream, openness to change vs. conscientiousness). Such terms and ideas can be invaluable in analytical writing, especially if you take time to understand

the terms’ or ideas’ intellectual origins (for example, if it comes from the field of psychology vs. literary analysis vs. anthropology, or from some figure in history),

what other terms and ideas help to compose and define that idea, or are frequently used with it, and how those terms and ideas have been used by other writers in (or borrowing from) that discipline or profession.

CULTURAL FUNCTION, MEANING, STRUCTURE, OR SIGNIFICANCE The “larger point” you make about your chosen text should concern issues of culture (“shared ways of thinking, feeling, and acting”), rather than focusing primarily on issues of science, law, politics, or personal taste or values. (These other kinds of issues can be mentioned or cited, but not define your central purpose or method for the paper generally.)

ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVETo take an academic perspective on popular culture means to step away from the customary or “popular” ways we have of responding to texts.

Rather than responding as the audience of a text does—or, alternatively, with dislike, un-interest, skepticism, or indifference—an academic response is energized by curiosity, inquiry, and openness. What does this work and its popularity suggest to us about society? about our moment in history? about how other such texts work in a culture or society? about the culture of the intended audience? about the culture of those who resist, reject, or dismiss the work?

Rather than being uninterested, an academic perspective is disinterested. It seeks to follow a truth or understanding wherever it leads.

We get the word academic from the ancient Greek word “Academe,” which referred to an actual grove of trees with a view of the city of Athens a short distance away. While Athens was a site of competition and partisanship—economic, political, social, or personal, just as cities are today—the Grove of Academe was, for philosophically minded Athenians, a haven of observation, discussion, reflection, debate, vision, and collective understanding.

In this admittedly idealized take on the academic enterprise, the Grove of Academe provides a space for curious individuals of the city to get away from competitive self-interest to gain a longer, more disinterested perspective on themselves, their lives, their tastes and passions, their place in the world, and their role in history.

WRIT 1102, Paper 1: An Academic Close Reading

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