Teaching ‘Close Reading’
An effective excerpt illustrates:
This task was very simple as well as very hard. In every course, at every level, every semester—in every single class, multiple times every week—I taught close reading.
Let’s start by looking at the text in front of us and pointing to something very small: a single word, or punctuation mark, or even something that’s not there, a gap. Tell me, I would ask as we sat down and opened our books, what is one detail that you noticed? What snagged you? Where were you surprised? At the beginning of every semester, my students would be confused by these questions. They were smart, hardworking young people, and they very much wanted to get the answer right. They pointed to themes, identified genres and symbols, and gestured toward historical contexts.
Okay, I would respond, but now point to a detail, one that’s really on the page and small enough to fit under your finger. I sat, and smiled a little, and waited with the conviction that I wouldn’t be disappointed. And then, reliably, every time, a transformation that seemed like magic. It took a few weeks, sometimes, and it always took courage—from them more than me, but from me too—and then, one student and then another and then everyone, would point to the page in front of them. But really they would point to something in themselves: I noticed this. . . . I noticed it. And then they would suddenly lift off into an idea, climbing, striding, soaring, as in Gerald Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.”
Sometimes I would still say an even smaller detail, please, but increasingly as the weeks went on, I would say yes, and now tell me, how should we understand that? How would the poem be different if it were different? What work is that detail doing? Then they offered arguments—as if with a gasp like they were surfacing after holding their breath underwater, astonished at having done it.
