Assignment sheet and detailed explanation
These brief papers demonstrate active engagement with the literary text through close reading. They provide a place for you to experiment with critical inquiry and textual analysis. The goal of these papers is to help you to generate ideas for potential topics that you might explore in the longer paper.
1) Choose a short passage (likely to be about one-two stanzas, one full paragraph, or 1/2 page of text) from the reading. The passage you choose should be one that seems to jump off the page for you…that almost highlights itself. You are only choosing one paragraph or one-two stanzas to closely read; not the entire piece.
2) Decide on an interpretive focus/claim/argument for your close reading, and compose a 500-word close reading that illuminates this interpretative focus/claim/argument in detail.
