Shelley, Dickens, and Rossetti

What is “close reading?”

• Close reading has been the predominant method of literary studies since the twentieth century.
• Definitions and practices vary over time.¹
• A useful recent account defines it as a series of actions taken by a reader:

You read a poem, play, essay, story, or novel; you start with someone else’s words; you see something in those words that means something to you, though you probably don’t know what yet. Maybe what you see confuses you or riles you up, maybe it surprises you, maybe it charms or delights you. You pause; you reread; suddenly the thing you noticed starts to feel central, or even crucial, like a hidden center of gravity that draws in and changes everything around it. The work of literature becomes clearer, or more complicated, or both, and is slightly or maybe tremendously reshaped. No longer just something to read, the work becomes something to study. It becomes what literary scholars call “a text”—that large category including poems, plays, essays, stories, novels, and much besides—objects of special interest and attention, things to discuss, analyze, and interpret. And now you might look up from the text because you want to show what’s happened to someone else. You want to explain something to another person: your own reader. You want to persuade, to teach. You want to say, you should understand this poem, play, essay, novel, or story in light of this detail, you should understand it this way. You want to say, it matters not to miss or misunderstand this.²

Fantasy depends on reality

Fantasy deals in “the juxtaposition of competing worlds, wherein one world, purportedly representing ‘reality,’ is left behind in preference for another which is unknown and ‘foreign’ in the sense of being strange, fabulous, or grotesque,” and in which “the laws of physics, logic, time, physiognomy, life and death and/or geography are usually subverted.”³