Close Reading

1. Close Reading Word Choice

2. Types of Questions • Understanding: what is the writer saying (in your own words unless asked to quote) • Analysis: how does the writer go about saying this; identification and explanation of techniques (word choice, sentence structure, imagery, tone) • Evaluation: How well has the writer achieved their aims.

3. Word Choice • Read and highlight the question • Quote the words used. • Explain how their connotations are effective in illustrating the writer’s point.

4. Word choice • Emphasising the writer’s point of view

5. 'culling' is an emotive word suggesting extensive, possibly unnecessary, killing. • 'frenzy' suggests they're mad. • It emphasises the writer's point of view by using the word 'provoked'. This means we must not be provoked into something we should not do and also 'over-reactive' which means people must not overreact to the situation. • 'provoked' means the other people are trying to make us do something against our will; 'must not' is very strong and assertive.

6. You probably can't. But that doesn't mean that we aren't a lot better off for her, or that her videos aren't important. To dismiss Lady Gaga – and her visual spawn – as salaciously, gratuitously, unnecessarily sexual, is to miss the point. To denounce them as yet another facet of our increasingly porn-obsessed, casually misogynistic culture is just plain wrong.

7. Vocabulary • Salacious- Treating sexual matters in an indecent way. • Gratuitous- being without apparent reason, cause, or justification • Facet- One small part of many • Misogynistic- hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women

8. You probably can't. But that doesn't mean that we aren't a lot better off for her, or that her videos aren't important. To dismiss Lady Gaga – and her visual spawn – as salaciously, gratuitously, unnecessarily sexual, is to miss the point. To denounce them as yet another facet of our increasingly porn-obsessed, casually misogynistic culture is just plain wrong.

9. LG’s detractor portray her as being explicitly sexual without reason. • ‘Gratuitously’ and ‘salaciously’ suggest something unneeded, that there is no real purpose for her displays of sexuality, suggesting she chooses to be shocking for the sake of it. • ‘yet another facet’ suggests that she is just one small part amongst the mainstream pop culture and its attitudes towards sex, as opposes to being a dominant force who is subverting it.

10. Lady Gaga's video version of sexuality is extraordinary from an aesthetic perspective. She makes fashion statements out of gimp masks and gaffer tape, and orgies of vast synchronised dance segments. She turns sex into camp theatre and the end result is challenging and alarming and powerful and exciting. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have been revisited by so many other singers.

11. Aesthetic- relating to the enjoyment or study of beauty. Often used in relation to works of art.

12. Lady Gaga's video version of sexuality is extraordinary from an aesthetic perspective. She makes fashion statements out of gimp masks and gaffer tape, and orgies of vast synchronised dance segments. She turns sex into camp theatre and the end result is challenging and alarming and powerful and exciting. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have been revisited by so many other singers.

13. ‘Extraordinary’ suggests her version of sexuality is quite remarkable and striking. • ‘aesthetic perspective’ suggests that what makes it so astonishing is that it combines sex with art. • ‘Challenging’ and ‘alarming’ reinforce these notions of difficulty, of something that destabilises the norm- much like modern art.