W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

If you have been assigned a close reading as an assignment, circle keywords or ideas that the professor uses in the guidelines. You'll want to include these words and concepts in your answer. Next, ...

Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

If you have not been assigned a passage or poem, then you must select a text and a specific passage. Limit your selection to a paragraph or two at the most. In some cases, a sentence or two (or a few ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...

Guillory (Professing Criticism), an English professor at New York University, serves up an esoteric examination of what it means to give a text a “close reading.” He notes that from the 1600s through ...

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The ...