Close Reading

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past.  This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

Start close-reading on day one by using YouTube videos and considering their archives.

Students use an online resource to learn some common ways that writers use a few "hard words". Then, with the children's game Madlibs serving as a model, students generate a template for a game in which they learn new words and collocations from their partners.

The assignment allows students to discuss their literary close-reading essays with each other, while also attempting to coordinate those close-readings with larger thematic issues discussed in class. The idea is to use individual words to learn more about global concerns in a literary text.

This assignment asks students to engage in an uncommon form of literary analysis, where the goal is to determine the significance of location and travel in the novel. The entire class collaborates in creating a Google map of all of the places that Humbert Humbert travels to in Lolita.

Through this assignment, students learn to close-read (critique) monuments on campus and consider the rhetorical nature of memory.

Students work on transcribing an Emily Dickenson poem from manuscript form into print. Their transcriptions are then compared with each other and with several printed editions of the same poem and used to discuss editorial decisions.

In this assignment, my students used a game-authoring platform called ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) to create augmented reality games based on scenes or passages from novels studied in our course.

Students are given a passage to close read and asked to compose a short analysis paper.  After submitting the paper, all claims/thesis statements are compiled anonymously and discussed in an in-class workshop.

Students read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," discuss it in class, and then demonstrate their understanding of Orwell's chief style points through an activity using CritiqueIt, a tool for collaborative composition and peer review. 

For one class, student groups analyze the use of “utopian” themes in a 1937 Ford Motor Company commercial, then compare this to specific elements of Huxley’s dystopian satire.

By doubling a class text video with another seemingly unrelated video, students learn about how context (or juxtaposition) can affect a text's meaning. 

Once students in my literature class achieve a basic skill set in textual analysis, I require them to take the reins of the course by providing the class with a blog post on the upcoming reading and presenting their findings to the class.