Close Reading I

Assignment 1

Close Reading Essay – Cosmogonies

Due Tuesday February 14, at the start of class (hardcopy)

Goals

  • To practice close reading, paying attention to detail, form, vocabulary, and tone.
  • To develop insight into the way ancient cultures saw the world around them, its creation, and its gods.
  • To practice writing a coherent analysis that incorporates textual citations and draws heavily on your own critical reading of the text.

Description

Write a short essay (500-700 words) that is a close reading of one or a comparative close reading of two of the creation stories we’ve read. You can choose from the following:

  • Hymn to the Aten
  • Enuma Elish
  • Theogony
  • Popol Vuh

You don’t have to discuss the entire text; in fact, it is better to zoom in on a section that you find striking or shows remarkable parallels (or differences) with another story. Also, keep in mind that this is not so much about context as it is about your reading of the text. You want to find out how these ancient cultures saw the world around them and understood the creation of the world. You may want to look up certain references in the text, but it is not necessary to bring in the entire civilization’s history.

We’ll practice with different close reading strategies in class (dialogic journal, table, annotations). I suggest you use one of these strategies to do a close reading, then make inferences and finally formulate your conclusions. Though having a thesis statement or overarching argument at the start of the essay certainly improves the clarity of your work, I find your essay’s structure less important here than your ability to take your reader through your close reading/analysis step by step with a lot of emphasis on detail. So, try to focus on this first.

Assessment

When assessing this essay, I will particularly look at the following:

  • Attention to detail.
  • Ability to make inferences and draw conclusions based on close reading of the text.
  • Incorporation of textual citations and thorough discussion of these textual references (don’t just drop in quotations without discussing them!).
  • Clarity of writing
  • Syntax, vocabulary, spelling, and grammar.

Tips

Remember, how we see the world right now also stems from the cultures we live in, so try to completely open up or temporarily erase what you think is natural or normal when you read these stories. After you’ve done this, you can bring back your own “normal” and compare the text with our contemporary worldviews to find out what’s striking about these ancient texts.  

When reading these stories, try to keep in mind the following questions. These might help you tease out the nuances about how these ancient people saw the world around them, its creation, and its gods:

  • Where does the world come from?
  • What is it made of?
  • Is there an order or pattern or purpose in the universe, or do things happen at random?
  • Was there a god or gods who created or arranged the world? Did these gods create the world ex nihilo (from nothing) or was there something before them?
  • How did life on earth begin?
  • How did human beings come into existence?
  • Has there always been evil? If not, how did wickedness and conflict first begin? Why is there suffering?
  • What is the relation of the gods to humans? And to the king? How do gods differ from humans?

Good luck and don’t be shy to reach out if you need help!