Today I'm going to talk about the literary art of close reading. Close reading is a particular type of literary interpretation that stays very closely to the words of the text. It's not the only method of interpretation, far from it. But it is an excellent skill that helps us to read actively and critically. Let's jump right in and look at a passage. This is the opening of an extremely famous American novel. We're going to approach it without any frame of reference, so that the text itself is our only source. A few of you may recognize it, but try to put that to one side for now. If you haven't printed it out yet, go ahead and print out the document version. It'll be very helpful to have it in front of you. Pay close attention to the details, word choice, sentence structure and the slow reveal of information. What information does this passage give you? What is being left out? Let's start with the first two lines and break it down slowly. Look closely at this. What type of description are we getting? What jumps out at you? There are a lot of possibilities here. Some people might notice the colors. Others might have first noticed that we're getting a lot of information about weather. Or you might have focused on the landscape, the picture of nature that we're getting. So, let's start to pull all of these different observations together to answer what information are we being given? And more importantly, what effect does that create? Some information is deliberately being left out here. We know that it's late summer of that year. What year? What village is this? What river is this? This is being given to us almost in fairy tale language. Once upon a time in a kingdom far away. What we're getting instead of precise time and place is precise image and memory. We are getting very specific memories of view of the river. Is it peaceful? Is it cheerful? Might it be both? Note how stark the language is here. We have no adverbs, we have no statements of emotion. In order to extract emotion and tone, we're going to have to read very closely and very carefully. Let's pause to ask the all important question, who is narrating this? And when is the narrator speaking from? What words here give you clues? The use of we, implies that we have a first person narrator. Now, it would be very unusual to have a plural first person narrators or rather a group of narrators speaking to us. So, it's probably safe to assume that we have a singular narrator here telling us this story. The phrase, that summer, implies a kind of distance. That this narrator is looking back probably from a period of time, perhaps from some emotional distance. Identifying these elements helps us to understand why there's so much imagery, and so little history. We're getting someone's remembrances of their time in the country, not a factual account. We could probably squeeze still more meaning out of these two sentences, but let's move on to the next two. What jumps out at you here? Take a moment. Troops, we had no warning of the mention of soldiers in the first two sentences. This tells us that this novel is probably set in a time of war. Now, we still have no definite historical markers, just troops marching down a road, so this could be anytime or any place. It could even be a fantasy world, we have no idea. Looking at the second half of this passage, how have the language and imagery shifted? There's a big change here from a broad landscape to a much smaller picture. Note the constant repetition of road and dust. This makes the image extremely powerful or perhaps you find it monotonous. We also have a new mention of leaves, might this image possibly be ominous? We know it's late summer and it shouldn't be a big surprise that the leaves are falling early. But the mention of the leaves right next to the soldiers marching down the road implies perhaps that the soldiers are also headed for an untimely death. Also note how little color we have in this section compared to the first. The only mention we have is of the road that is bare and white. In the initial mention of the color white, the pebbles and boulders in the river are dry and white in the sun. It's a pretty description contrasting nicely with the blue river, but now white is stark and bare. Some people might interpret this as a sudden switch. Others might find that it retroactively makes the first image of the river more threatening. In just four sentences, we've gone from a pleasant recollection of a summer vacation to the ominous prediction of war and death. And that indeed encapsulates the novel that we're looking at, because this is the opening passage of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms. Commonly thought to be the greatest American novel to come out of World War I. This is a first edition of A Farewell to Arms, and it's held in the Rare Book Collection of Wilson Library right on UNC's campus. We also know that A Farewell to Arms is indeed told by a single narrator, who's looking back from some distance on his experiences in the war. Hemingway's famous for his severe style. He doesn't use a lot of complicated figures or many literary allusions. This type of close reading that we've applied to Hemingway, and these narrative techniques that we see him using can be used in any type of writing in any subject. Take a look at the strikingly similar opening of a much more recent piece of writing. This is the opening paragraph of The 9/11 Report. It's the published report of the official US government commission, which was charge with the investigation of the hijackings and attacks on September 11th, 2001. The report obviously foregrounds the date. We can't pretend that we don't know it. There are several similarities to Hemingway here. Notice the set up of the day. It's temperate, it's cloudless, it's pleasants. It could not have been better and yet, it's still a typical day. People are working. People are running. They're touring the White House. Like Hemingway, this paragraph sets up a rhetorical reversal from the pleasantly ordinary to the tragically extraordinary. What kind of narrator are we working with? Unlike Hemingway, this is an omniscient narrator, all knowing. He or she overlooks the entire United States, and is a historically interested narrator, offering the significant landmarks, not random rivers and pebbles. So similar to Hemingway, this is a pleasant perhaps ironic opening to a tragic episode. Practice your close reading on the second paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. Is Hemingway doing exactly the same thing in this paragraph or might it be slightly different? Next time, I'll discuss a more contextual, what's called a historicist interpretation of the novel, which will let us bring in information outside of the text. Like World War I history and Hemingway's personal experience.
