Paper I: Close Reading of a literary passage
Length: 800 words average
Assignment: choose any text from the first portion of the syllabus (up to the midterm). Focus on a single passage (portion) of the text whose meaning isn’t immediately obvious and whose placement and significance within the text seems to require close scrutiny. Analyze the passage line by line, paying minute attention to how meaning is produced.

Description: a scholarly term for close reading is explication (from the Latin term explicare, “to unfold”). Accordingly, explication “unfolds” or “unravels” the meaning or multiple meanings of the text, focusing on textual fabric itself rather than on preexisting assumptions about it. Typically some part of the text is examined line by line, paying minute attention to multiple connotations of words and key devices, relating them to each other in context of the work as a whole. In other words, explication attempts to read “from” the text rather than “into” it, showing not just what the text means but HOW it means.

The following explication of a single line from a poem may serve as an example. Note the constituent parts of the explication. First the main theme and context of the quotation are specified without too much plot summary. Then comes the ‘meat’ of the answer, a detailed analysis of the language and its effect. Finally there is conclusion about the whole meaning of the quotation.
“As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”
EXPLICATION: Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen. The speaker describes a soldier’s death by poison gas. In a simile comparing the gas to a “green sea” the word “green” suggests an eerie light coming through the thick gas, and the word “sea” connotes an almost liquid thickness as well as the volume and spread of the deadly agent. Furthermore, the assonance in “green sea” along with the contextual implications of the color green suggest an evil, sickly event, and the word “under” linked with “sea” suggests the how deeply engulfed the speaker is, and how desperate the situation is. There is also a sense of being smothered and overwhelmed in “under.” The speaker’s words, powerful in their simple, direct, monosyllables, “I saw him,” emphasize the immediate personal horror of the scene, and “drowning” stresses the terrible struggle to breathe, as well as the desperate flailing and “floundering” of the dying man. War is horrible, not glorious.