Name: _____________________________________________
Grade 9 Gifted
A CLOSE READING is an in-depth analysis and interpretation of a singular passage or
piece of a work. Usually, we will stop in the middle of a text to “close read” a part of it.
However, to get you started on deconstructing meaning from small passages, here is an
introduction to the art of close reading:
What to look for:
Word choices (why THAT particular word?)
Symbolism and Structure
Potential Meanings
*Different ways to read the text (literary lenses)
Directions: Here are several famous lines from literature. Practice close reading each one
by evaluating and analyzing each one in an intelligent, clear and well-thought out
manner.
1. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the
balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
2. “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to
show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that
once our eyes watered.”
—Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead
3. “At the still point, there the dance is.”
—T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
4. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
5. “How wild it was, to let it be.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild
Now, read the passage below from TEXT and perform a close reading of its meaning,
intention, etc. on YOUR OWN in the space below!!!!
From William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!):
"'Yes,' Judith said. 'Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or don’t read it if you
like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this
and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same
time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to,
move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the
other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except
that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make
a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug;
and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have
arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or
having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over all you have left is a
block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have
the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines
on it and after a while they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches
were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.
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Name: _____________________________________________
Grade 9 Honors and College Prep.
A CLOSE READING is an in-depth analysis and interpretation of a singular passage or
piece of a work. Usually, we will stop in the middle of a text to “close read” a part of it.
However, to get you started on deconstructing meaning from small passages, here is an
introduction to the art of close reading:
What to look for:
Word choices (why THAT particular word?)
Symbolism and Structure
Potential Meanings
Different ways to read the text (literary lenses)
Directions: Here are several famous lines from literature. Practice close reading each one
by evaluating and analyzing each one in an intelligent, clear and well-thought out
manner.
1. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
2. “Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
—Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
3. There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences. –Wallace Stegner, All
the Little Live Things
4. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not
living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. “How wild it was, to let it be.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild
Now, read the passage below from TEXT and perform a close reading of its meaning,
intention, etc. on YOUR OWN!!!!
“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head
that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not
always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic
desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about
the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into
green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And
the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” – John
Steinbeck, East of Eden
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