We’ll begin by defining close reading—what it is, and what it can do for us. We’ll practice our skills by reading two short literary excerpts famous for their compression of meaning into few words—Herbert’s seventeenth-century devotional lyric, and the first paragraph or Jane Austen’s Emma.

George Herbert, "Love (III)"; selections from Jane Austen, Emma

We’ll spend the next few weeks discussing elements of literary craft, focusing here on narration and point of view in Eliot’s Middlemarch, a high point of nineteenth-century literary realism, and in Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway.

Selections from George Eliot, Middlemarch; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

This week we’ll think about authors sustain a sense of a character’s distinctive “voice,” with reference to twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. We’ll discuss how readers can define and find examples of “voice” in dialogue or internal monologue.

Selections from J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

In the last and most advanced week of the elements of literature series, we’ll think about description and detail, from the telling details in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, considered by some to be the first English novel, to the modernist descriptive experiments of Gertrude Stein and the theories of Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky.