Close Reading

In this essay, you will be asked to perform a specific type of literary analysis called close reading. This technique is traditionally deployed in essays about literature, but can be helpful in any situation in which you’re trying to show how an author’s presentation molds his or her message. We close read political speeches, text messages and commercials—to name just a few examples—all the time, often without even noticing it.

In four to five pages, make an argument about one aspect of Jay McInerney’s New York classic Bright Lights, Big City using the technique of close reading. Your paper should focus on a close reading of one to three passages, but you may bring in other parts of the text as they are relevant to your thesis. Keep in mind that you are not trying to reiterate ideas we have discussed in class or summarize the text; rather, you are endeavoring to express your own, original idea about the text. You might, for example, show how one or a few passages illuminate something about the text we might not see on first reading, or you might use them to agree or disagree with one of the characters’ appraisal of another character or a situation.

Some questions to guide your inquiry include:

• How do the army allusions/ imagery function in the text?
• How is Amanda’s modeling career figured?
• How does Amanda continue to surface in the text without her physical presence?
• What is the relationship between Amanda and the protagonist about, if not love?
• How do the chapter titles function?
• Why use the second person? How does that choice change our reading of the text?
• How does the text differentiate between fantasy and reality? How do those two realms relate to one another?
• How is time figured in the text?
• How is truth (or facts) figured in the text?
• How does the protagonist construct his identity? Who are the main figures in this construction?
• What do the narrator’s descriptions of New York locations reveal about his views and attitudes?
• What are Tad Allagash’s views on Amanda and how does that effect the narrator and Amanda’s relationship?
• What role does Megan play in the narrator’s life?
• Based on how the narrator reacts towards all models and mannequins, what can we tell about his relationship with Amanda, or his vision of her?
• What does cocaine do for the narrator? How does it make him feel? What kind of person does he turn into when he abuses it?
• How is Tad Allagash a reflection of the narrator’s identity or personality?
• How does humor function in this text?
• Does the novel have a climax?

Nuts and Bolts:

• The assigned length for this essay is 1400-1750 words—approximately four to five pages, not including the bibliography.
• As with all papers for this class, this one should be written using MLA formatting: Times New Roman, 12 point font, double spaced. Refer to the Purdue OWL website or my MLA Mini-guide if you have any questions.
• Here is the rubric by which you will be graded.
• Here is a handout on the basics of integrating quotations into your essay. The Purdue OWL is a helpful resource for questions along these lines as well.
• The Draft Workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 5^th. Papers should be circulated by Monday, March 3^rd.
• The final draft is due on Wednesday, March 12^th by the beginning of class. Please submit it to turnitin.com as a word document, if possible.

What is a “close reading”? This kind of assignment, so often used in college courses, involves looking at just a single text in isolation from contextual sources such as biography, sociology, or history. In a close reading, you should seek out patterns within the work itself, and suggest why those patterns are significant. In addition, you might show how these patterns are sometimes violated or varied. A close reading searches for some meaning behind the words themselves, some meaning that is perhaps not on the surface of the text itself but is implied, hinted at, or perhaps even inadvertently conveyed by the work. Your job is to show how your interpretation, your explanation of the work’s meaning, can be supported by details of the text itself. Don’t arrive at a meaning that everyone will see immediately (this would be so obvious as to be not worth discussing), but a meaning or an interpretation that you, having taken great care analyzing the work, have arrived at and need to convince your readers of.