Close Analysis Shmose Shmashalyshmis
This is the basic skill at the heart of close analysis: looking carefully at the specific words, images and structural choices in a passage.
What is 'close reading'?
This Victorian value is central to Jekyll’s public image and helps explain why Hyde must remain hidden.
What is respectability?
This poem begins with the line “I am silver and exact.”
What is 'Mirror'?
What is 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'?
This Emily Brontë novel sounds like an indie folk duo.
What is 'Wuthering Heights'?
If a student writes “this shows the character is sad” and stops there, they are missing this crucial next step.
What is 'analysis of how the author creates meaning'?
Students are asked to analyse this feature in places like Hyde’s Soho house, Jekyll’s home and Victorian London.
What is setting?
This poetic movement, highlighted in Area of Study 1, foregrounds personal experience and often explores taboo subjects like mental illness, trauma and domestic unease.
What is confessional poetry?
Students are repeatedly told that genre is not just “castles and swords” but this.
What is a system of expectations that carries assumptions about how the world works?
This Conrad novel sounds like a post-punk album.
What is 'Heart of Darkness'?
“Dark,” “sad,” and “good” are not analysis. They are this.
What are vague descriptors?
Stevenson imagines Hyde as the embodiment of these repressed aspects of identity.
What are base desires and impulses?
In “Tulips,” the flowers become threatening partly because their redness does this to the speaker’s wound.
What is 'intensifies the wound and its pain'?
This comic book from the 1980s reimagines the court of King Arthur in the far future.
What is 'Camelot 3000'?
This McCarthy novel sounds like a death metal band.
What is 'Blood Meridian'?
The best close analysis does not just spot techniques. It explains the relationship between language, structure, and this.
What is meaning?
This is the cardinal sin of weak Lit writing: writing what happened rather than analysing how meaning is made.
What is retelling?
This is Sylvia Plath's one and only novel.
What is 'The Bell Jar'.
Passages 7 to 14 of 'Sir Gawain' establish very clearly that the knight is this saturation and colour.
What is glowing green?
This Mary Shelley novel sounds like the world’s most dramatic garage band.
What is 'Frankenstein'?
This is what you are doing when you explain that a repeated image, tonal shift, or diction choice contributes to the whole text’s larger concerns rather than just the moment itself.
What is linking the passage to the text as a whole?
Reading literature involves both aesthetic response and this second mode.
What is analysis?
In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath turns self-destruction into this, using the unforgettable line “Dying / Is an art.”
What is performance?
This is the big conceptual shift from AoS1 to AoS2 in Unit 1 Literature.
What is moving from close analysis of individual passages to analysing broad conventions, tropes and ideas across a genre?
This Riordan series sounds like it could be the name of a very popular boy band.
What is 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians'?