How to Do a Close Reading of a Text: Use a highlighter, but only after you've read for comprehension. The point of highlighting at this stage is to note.

How to Do a Close Reading of a Text:

Use a highlighter, but only after you've read for comprehension. The point of highlighting at this stage is to note key passages, phrases, turning points in the story.

Pitfalls:Highlighting too muchHighlighting without notes in the marginsWrite marginal notes in the text. These should be questions, comments, dialogue with the text itself. The key to truly gaining insight from your reading is to question it.

Keep a notebook for free-write summaries and response entries.Write quickly after your reading: ask questions, attempt answers and make comments about whatever catches your attention. A good question to begin with when writing response entries is "What point does the author seem to be making?”Step back.After close reading and annotating, can you now make a statement about the story's meaning? Is the author commenting on a certain type of person or situation? What is that comment?

Avoiding PitfallsThese four common assumptions about writing about fiction interfere with rather than help the writer. Learn to avoid them.Plot Summary Syndrome:Assumes that the main task is simply recalling what happened in detail. Plot summary is just one of the requirements of writing about fiction, not the intended goal. Don’t re-tell the story!

Right Answer RouletteAssumes that writing about fiction is a "no win" game in which the student writer is forced to try to guess the RIGHT ANSWER that only the professor knows.The "Everything is Subjective" ShuffleAssumes that ANY interpretation of any literary piece is purely whimsy or personal taste. It ignores the necessity of testing each part of an interpretation against the whole text, as well as the need to validate each idea by reference to specifics from the text or quotations and discussion from the text.The "How Can You Write 500 Words About One Short Story?" BluesAssumes that writing the paper is only a way of stating the answer rather than an opportunity to explore an idea or explain what your own ideas are and why you have them. This sometimes leads to "padding," repeating the same idea in different words or worse, indiscriminate "expert" quoting: using too many quotes or quotes that are too long with little or no discussion. 

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

“From childhood's hour, I have not been as others were; I have not seen as others saw. I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone--and all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s Difficult Existence • Determining the facts of Poe’s life has proven difficult, as lurid

legend became entwined with fact even before he died.• Some of these legends were spread by Poe himself in order to

enhance his “dark” (Gothic) image.• Two days after Poe’s death, his literary executor began a smear

campaign, rewriting Poe’s correspondences so as to alienate many of his friends.

• Much of what Poe is often accused of (including everything from necrophilia, debilitating drug addiction, to madness) was exaggerated and/or completely invented by literary rivals after his death.

• He was an alcoholic, however, and lived most of his life in abject poverty.

His Early Life• Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809--his parents’

second child.• His father deserted the family a year later.• In December 1811, his mother died at twenty-four; Poe

had no real memories of them. • Poe was taken in by John Allan, a successful Richmond

tobacco merchant.• Allan, however, was of questionable character, abusive,

and a womanizer, and eventually sought to rid himself of Poe who openly objected to his behaviour.

College and West Point• In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia,

where he excelled while accumulating considerable debt. Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the money he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses.

• By the end of his first term Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm.

• Humiliated by his poverty, Poe returned to Richmond and visited the home of his fiancée Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man in Poe’s absence.

• He remained in Richmond for a while, writing, and eventually attended West Point—though he was thrown out later for failure to attend classes.

• Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will. • By then Poe was living in poverty but had started publishing his

short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visitor. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

• Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the South with his sensational stories as well as with his scathing book reviews.

• Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment.

• At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one, and the family is said to have enjoyed singing together at night.

• In 1842 Poe’s wife contracted tuberculosis. 

• Always in search of better opportunities, Poe moved to New York again in 1844 and introduced himself to the city by perpetrating a hoax. His “news story” of a balloon trip across the ocean caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it—until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all.

The January 1845 publication of “The Raven” made Poe a household name. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him out of the city in 1846.

• At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847 that Virginia died at the age of twenty-four. Poe was devastated, and was unable to write for months.

• Poe only lived another two years.

Poe’s Death

• During the last two years of his life, Poe was seriously ill--perhaps with a brain lesion--and drinking steadily.• On Election Day, October 3, 1949, he was found

senseless and wandering the streets near a polling place.• Taken to a hospital, he died on October 7, “of

congestion of the brain.”• There are various theories concerning his actual cause

of death, but most scholars agree that he suffered from the effects of years of severe alcoholism.

Poe worked in a variety of genres (1827-1849)

• Criticism--he gained a national reputation as a virulently sarcastic critic, a literary hatchet-man. The bulk of his writing consists of his criticism, and his most abiding ambition was to become a powerful critic.• Poetry--He was an experimental poet.• Psychological fiction--He wanted to produce the greatest

possible horrific effects on the reader.• Detective Story--Poe created this form when he was 32,

will all its major conventions complete.

Characteristics of Poe’s Detective Stories

• Poe places veiled clues before the reader.• The writer/narrator strives to appear objective.• Poe would have liked to solve everything by

the mind.• He was disturbed by what he could not solve

by reason.• The climax of the story is the narrator’s

explanation of the crime.

Poe and the Gothic

• Poe did not want to write Gothic stories; he started his career spoofing the Gothic.• He said that he wrote, “Tales of terror…of the

soul.”• He transformed tales of terror into psychological

stories; he delved into the mysterious recesses of the human mind.

Elements of Gothic in Poe’s Fiction

• Grim setting• Landscapes are often reflections of a

character’s mind• Unusual buildings, extremes of nature,

eccentric works of art• Very few of his stories take place in America;

most take place in Europe or Never-never-land

Other elements of the Gothic• Hidden evil• Unspeakable, mysterious crimes, including incest and

parricide• Obsession with Death• Ghosts, blood, body parts

• Maniacal Laughter• The discovered manuscript• gives responsibility to someone else

• Deformity• the grotesque--people who have deformities are

capable of activity beyond the norm

An Element of Poe’s style

• Poe uses vocabulary to create setting, for rhetorical effect, rather than for information.• Modern horror films use music to create

atmosphere; Poe used vocabulary.

The Raven• Published in 1845

The Tell-Tale Heart• Published 1943• http://www.poemuseum.org/students-video.php