CRITERION 1: SPECIFICITY (typical feedback: close reading issues, mind the details, too general/obvious/thematic/broad)
To download my handout on Specificity in pdf, click here.
This entry assumes you know how to use scholarly dictionaries (and which scholarly dictionaries to use) — take a look at my On Dictionaries guide just to be sure.
From there, before we do anything else, let’s read this passage on specificity (albeit from the perspective of a not-very-chill prof), from Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
[T]his first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase. He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say. One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman. When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say. He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper-left-hand brick.”
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and then the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
Your job as a humanities scholar is to communicate convincingly, rigorously, and clearly some previously unseen depth, complexity, meaning, or beauty in a cultural artifact. It is certainly possible to do so with respect to a theme or generality in a given text, but you’d usually need to write an entire book, informed by years of experience with and examination of the subject, to do it in any substantial way. For an undergraduate paper to be substantial, its subject must be much smaller in scope: essays under twelve pages simply do not have the room; an undergraduate writer simply does not have the time, nor the experience. If you can imagine a professor writing a monograph, or even a scholarly article, about the same topic you’ve chosen as your essay subject, then you’ve chosen the wrong topic. If you think your paper prompt requires a general, thematic overview, you’re probably reading the prompt wrong (or you’re not reading the prompt thoughtfully enough). Your primary subject—the thing you are primarily trying to analyze, understand, and form an argument about—must be one small thing. Start your process by digging deep into a small, specific detail: a sure-fire way to see something neither your classmates nor your professor might have seen before.
ISOLATE ONE AMBIGUITY. In contrast to generalities, it might help to think of ambiguities as the atomic particles of literature: there are countless such atoms in a literary work; your job is to isolate, examine, and pull apart one atom(releasing massive energy!). As William Empson might put it, there are at least seven types of ambiguity: (1) any word or phrase in which “two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one”; (2) “apparently unconnected meanings… given simultaneously [puns, allegorical figures, etc.]”; any verbal construction in which “alternate meanings combine” to manifest a (3) “complicated state,” a (4) “confusion,” or something (5) “contradictory,” even when unintentionally so; a (6) “full contradiction, marking a division” within underlying concepts; or (7) any single “detail that is effective in several ways at once, e.g. by comparisons with several points of likeness, antitheses with several points of difference… and extra meanings suggested by rhythm.”
CLOSE READING is in many ways as accessible to the novice as it is to the expert (hence its prevalence in undergraduate classes!), and can often empower the novice to see details that the expert cannot. It can (and usually should) be used to form the basis of analysis of any subject in the humanities, in all methodologies. It aims for the desirable opposite of what Cleanth Brooks calls the “heresy of paraphrase” (click here to read the Brooks in full). It is:
[A] method of analysis involving careful step-by-step explication of a poem in order to understand how various elements work together. A common practice of formalist criticism in the study of a text, close reading assumes that literature is a dense, multifaceted discourse that contains ambiguous, connotative, metaphorical language, and that only a detailed inventory of its verbal features can account for its full significance. Broaching lines of verse or a passage of prose, close reading begins with the verbal surface, identifying the diction, grammar, figures of speech, and images. Then, it builds those elements into larger judgments about the work — its themes, motifs, ironies, etc. — taking care to reach no generalization without ample evidence provided by the close reading (Kennedy, Gioia and Bauerlein, The Longman Dictionary of Literary Terms, 23-4).
Unless (or until) you are Stephen Booth, you must eventually weave the data you’ve gleaned into a thoroughly organized argument (taking care, when you do, not to offer “comforting illumination by temporarily darkening all but a selected few of the lights” — click here to read some of Booth’s work). To generate the basis of an essay from a close reading “inventory,” I recommend the following five steps:
1. Translation. Go through the passage once to make sure you at least understand everything that is going on. A basic, diegetic, rational denotation (if one exists) for every datum (each word, sentence, punctuation, line break, gesture, bit of dialogue) should be clear. Look up what you don’t recognize.
2. Data Collection. Search for complex, hidden, subtle, double meanings, resonances, ambiguities, etc.; be daring and comprehensive. Note anything of interest, consider various meanings of everything you can. Don’t censor anything. Keep an open mind. Don’t judge, just collect. The OED will help you here.
3. Hypothesis-based Reading. Step back and look at the mass of data collected in #2. Do any patterns become clear? Is anything particularly interesting? If not (and this part requires the most patience), return to #2 and dig again. If so, form one or more possible lines of inquiry, and return to the text for data collection again, but this time with your inquiry (or inquiries) in mind.
4. Filter: Stretches. Only now should you go back over your data and filter out especially weak or obviously subjective observations. Has the picture changed at all? If so, adjust.
5. Filter: Relevance. Choose the line of inquiry that is strongest or most compelling. Remove anything not truly relevant to that line of inquiry . Much of what you discover in close reading, precious as it may feel, must finally wind up on the cutting-room floor. Gather widely and deeply, so that you can choose and hone down wisely.