Close Reading and Pattern Recognition
Grade Weight: 20% of Overall Course Grade
Length: 5 pages
Goals: To establish how small textual details can help us better understand a particular story or novel as a whole. Your argument must be targeted and specific. Generic claims not based on specific textual references will undermine the success of this essay.
Object of Analysis: Any literary text that we’ve read for class prior to the due date.
METHOD/STRUCTURE:
You will structure your paper in there parts:
PART I: ARGUMENT. In 1-2 paragraphs, identify the pattern or patterns you found and state the conclusions you have drawn. In the case of the latter, you should argue that recognizing this pattern (or these patterns) help us better understand something about the literary work as a whole. This is the first section that will appear in your finished paper, but it actually should be the last section you write.
PART II: PATTERN IDENTIFICATION. In this section, outline what pattern or patterns you found in the text. By “pattern” I mean any recurrent phenomena you can find in the text: motifs, themes, metaphors or other tropes, settings, character traits, cultural allusions, etc. You must present textual evidence that the trait you have identified recurs more than once in the text. You may quote the text at length, but never assume what you cite obviously illustrates the pattern. Any time you present a piece of evidence, explain why you see it as indicative of that given pattern. This section should be 2 -3 pages long, so you may need to identify a set of related patterns rather than focusing on a single pattern, depending on how much evidence you have to work with.
PART III: PATTERN ANALYSIS. In this final 2-3-page section, establish what the pattern or patterns you identified mean for our understanding of the text as a whole. You are encouraged–but are not required–to draw upon the “non-literary” readings for the course (e.g. the prefaces, Poe’s literary criticism, Freud’s uncanny, etc.) or upon any other literary terms you already know (e.g. picaresque). Only enlist that vocabulary, however, if it helps you make a larger point about the text. In other words, don’t use those terms just for the sake of using them. You may quote the text again in this section, but you should do so sparingly because you’ve already provided your reader with evidence of the pattern’s existence in the previous section.
EVALUATIVE CRITERIA:
Part I (Argument): 4 points. How clear, concise, and forceful is your
argument?
Part II (Pattern ID): 8 points. How much direct evidence do you provide, and
do you prove the evidence demonstrates what you claim it demonstrates?
Part III (Analysis): 6 points. Are you able establish the pattern or patterns you
identified in the text can help us better understand the text as a whole. Here you can make aesthetic/literary (genre, form, etc.), cultural (race, class, gender), or political claims.
Proofreading: 2 points. Is the document clearly written and well
organized? Is it free of typographical and syntactical errors?
