A Short Note On “Close Reading” Being Applicable To Fiction As Well As Lyric Poetry

Note to a friend:

Thanks for your thoughts. 

I'm far from a theorist, but I've always had the intuition that close reading, which I take as of a piece with the New Criticism, is applicable to fiction but differs in its means from its application to poetry. 

I've always thought that there are ways to examine fiction by discussing the techniques inhering in the genre. Fiction being what it is, the analysis will be wider in a sense then that of lyric poems, as for only one example, some characters will be the antithesis of each other or might present variations on a mode of behaviour or personality type that then will have a structural or formal part to play in the work's meaning. 

It would be sterile to talk only in these ways about great books to the exclusion of their sweep, depth and breadth. But as part of the way of coming to full critical terms with them, especially in teaching them and writing about them, I'd argue for the necessity of such close reading. 

That’s not to be put to the exclusion of broader cultural readings of the kind you mention at the foot of your email. 

Now, I may just be trapped in the ways of the New Criticism as that's how literature was taught to me. But in my own way, I've kept thinking about it. 

Lastly, I'm persuaded in this by the way I did my 125  page MA thesis on the novels of Mordecai Richler, even to the occasional point of taking bits of prose and examining them closely with a view to then building them up to fit within what thematically is going on in the book. In fact my essential point was to show how overall formal changes from novel to novel—-say from picaresque comedy to satire to black humour—match the changes in each book's world view.