Read a poem from this week making annotations as you go. Present 3-5 annotations in outline format and construct a 200 word close reading, as exampled on pages 308-309. Be sure to cite any quotations or paraphrases, using line numbers for poetry citations.
- Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
- Jhumpa Lahiri: “Interpreter of Maladies”
- Judith Ortiz Cofer: “The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica”
- Richard Blanco: “My Father in English”
- Pat Mora: “Sonrisas”
This is a sample of Annotations and Close reading for the poem “Araby”
SAMPLE WRITING: ANNOTATION AND CLOSE READING
Close reading, with an eye toward setting or any other element, demands careful attention to detail. That process often begins with annotation—underlining significant details in a text and making notes in the margins, which you can then draw on to formulate arguments.
Below, you will find an annotation of the first paragraph of James Joyce’s ARABY, followed by a paragraph of analysis written in response to the following prompt:
The first paragraph of Joyce’s story focuses entirely on setting. What tone is established here? How do specific details of setting and the diction used to describe them create tone?
As you read and compare the annotation and the analysis, notice how the analytical paragraph both elaborates on certain aspects of the annotation and ignores others (especially the references to religion) in order to stay focused exclusively on the claim about tone with which it opens (its topic sentence).
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
The first paragraph of James Joyce’s story “Araby” is solemn and emotionless or even depressing in tone. The street is called “blind” twice, meaning that it is literally a dead-end street, a kind of prison from which there is no exit. It also seems a pretty lifeless, stifled and stifling place—“quiet” all but one “hour” of the day, when the boys are “set . . . free,” implying that they are imprisoned the rest of the time, too. The only individual house described here is “uninhabited,” without any life inside; “detached from its neighbours,” disconnected and alone; and itself trapped “in a square ground.” Though the other houses do have “lives within them,” those are only “decent”—not joyful or even sad, just “decent” or respectable. All the houses are personified: the uninhabited one has “neighbours” (which at first suggests people rather than houses), and these have “faces,” are “conscious,” and “gaz[e] at one another.” But the terms of the personification only make these houses seem more, not less, lifeless: their “imperturbable faces” lack emotion or movement, and they are “brown,” the bland color of mud or dirt rather than of the things that live and grow in it. This street is a dead end in more ways than one, as living on it must feel a little like being dead or at least deadened
