Exploration & Analysis: Close Reading & Point of View (POV)

1. Exploration & Analysis:Close Reading & Point of View (POV)

2. Close Reading: Analysis requires close reading. In a way, the term close reading means the opposite of what it sounds like. When we read closely, we step back. We move from participating to observing. Exploration & Analysis

3. Close Reading: A close reading is not a first reading, it is a rereading. When you return to read the literature or your notes again after discussion in class, you are doing a close reading. —You are stepping back from your own views to hear the responses of others. Exploration & Analysis

4. Annotating the Text: Underline. Circle. Highlight. Note the Margins. Mark it up! Or use post-its. Note words you don’t understand. Ask Questions. Exploration & Analysis

5. Telling and listening to stories is a natural part of our lives. When we meet with friends to hear about an experience, “just the facts” won’t do. We want to hear the stories that give meaning to those facts. Exploration & Analysis

6. What kind of experience do we want to have while reading? To “escape” stress? (But there are lots of means to escape in life.) Beyond an escape, reading a story brings us to a place in our imaginations where we can live through the experience of others. Exploration & Analysis

7. Exploration & Analysis We take the chances, feel the emotions, and share the insights—but without suffering the risks or consequences that living through them ourselves might bring.

8. The most important quality of good fiction is the truth or truth it tells—about being human and struggling to make sense of a complex world. The truth in fiction transcends fact. In it, we see a model of our own struggle, a model not limited by the daily news of specific time and place and fact. Fiction & Truth

9. The narrator is the storyteller, the intermediary who shapes and flavors the story for us. Trying to distinguish between the author of the story and the narrator, or speaker: The narrator has been created by the author with a particular effect in mind. The same story told from a different point of view or with a different voice affects everything we experience as we read. Narration

10. First Person: uses the pronoun I and places the narrator in the story. We see through that character (as an announcer and camera might limit what we see to the view of one performer). As readers, we will only know what this one person experiences. Point of View (POV)

11. Point of View (POV) Third-person limited: uses the pronouns he or she, but usually limits us to one character’s view. The narrator does not see through the character’s eyes but focuses on the character and what he or she sees and thinks.

12. Point of View (POV) Third-person omniscient: also uses the pronouns he, she, and they, but the narrator is “all knowing” and able to move in and out of the mind of more than one character, choosing what and when to share.

13. Point of View (POV) Third-person objective: minimizes the intervention of the narrator. The setting and the action are described, and we “listen in” on the dialogue, but the narrator does not interpret for us. e.g. “Hills Like White Elephants”

14. Second-person:the main character is referred to by second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms such as you or your. e.g. “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.” —Opening lines of Jay McInerney'sBright Lights, Big City (1984) Point of View (POV)

15. Point of View (POV) Shifting Point of View: may shift from the narrowly focused first person or third-person limited to the broad spectrum of omniscient narration.

16. Point of View (POV) Voice: refers to the narrator’s persona, the personality that seems to come alive in the words. It is quite possible to have the same point of view but very different voices.