Close Reading – The type of literary analysis most students encounter in high school and college courses. Close reading delves into the meaning of the text. Although this term has a very specific meaning coming from a specific school of thought (New Criticism was a type of literary analysis in which you would treat the text as a self-contained object without thinking about what the author intended), it sometimes gets mixed together with the type of analysis where you consider what the author meant, what symbols were used, how the story is structured, what the text means, what its message is, etc. We are often trained to think that a book has a message (a good one or a bad one), that the author put it there, and that you can find that message.

Close reading involves looking for how that message is conveyed in symbols, metaphors, objective correlatives, story structure, etc. Close reading means going beneath the surface, looking closely at the text, analyzing it from a literary perspective.

Ideological / Critical / Oppositional / Resisting Reading (same terms for the similar types of analysis) - However, most of us aren’t used to what we might call “oppositional” or “close reading,” where instead of looking for what the author meant, or what the message of the text is, you consider the deeper assumptions and ideologies that maybe the author never intended at all.

When reading children’s literature it is important to not simply be a Close Reader – that is, the sort of reader who is attentive to all of the deeper meanings that exist in a book; most high school and college Literature courses are good at training you to look for deeper meanings, whether they be the intention of the author or connected to the time period you are studying. You must also be a Resisting Reader – that is, the sort of reader who is attentive to the invisible representations that a text puts forth as normal. If we are interpellated by the texts we encounter, if every text presents to us certain attitudes, behaviors, ideas, perceptions, feelings, or values, then we have to resist accepting them as normal. We must resist that process of interpellation by attending to those things that are supposed to be invisible. That is not to say that most authors are trying to trick us or brainwash us. In fact, most authors simply reproduce the assumptions and attitudes they haven’t examined either. Therefore, we must look not only for those ideas that the author intended, but also the ideas he or she didn’t intend if we are to resist being interpellated.

Close Reading Questions

Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist?

What is the central conflict? What is in conflict with what?

Where does that conflict take place?

How is the conflict resolved?

What is the dramatic structure?

Who changes and how do they change? What are they rewarded with in the end?

What is the main line of development?

What is the character design? How are character features revealed to us?

How is exposition established?

What are the major symbols?

What are the minor symbols? How do symbols change over the course of the text?

What are some major patterns? What are some major motifs?

What is the essential theme? What is the author’s view of man, nature, civilization?

How does the author comment on history?

Lissa Paul’s Questions – Resisting Reading Questions:

- whose story is this?

- who is the reader? who is the ideal, or implied reader? (in a beer commercial)

- when and where was the reading produced? why is it produced?

- who is named? and who is not?

- who is on top?

- who gets punished? and who gets praised?

- who speaks? and who is silenced?

- what is missing in the text?

- who acts? and who is acted upon?

- who owns property? who is dependent?

- who looks? and who is observed?

- who fights for honor? and who suffers?

- how are value systems determined?

- what versions of childhood are promoted, what versions of childhood are dismissed?

- what is presumed to be true?

- what assumptions does the author bring to the text?

- where are those assumptions evident, and, just as importantly, where are they contradicted?

- if the text is progressive, where and how is it also conservative? if it seems especially conservative, what moments might also make it progressive?