Doing English: Week 6 - Close Reading and Form

Weds 19th November, LT2, 11am

11.00 - Ms Martin, 'Close reading: Ideas and Ideals'

11.30 - Ms Green, 'Power and the sonnet: The case of Keats and the Elgin Marbles'

This lecture will give a detailed practical example of close reading which will ground more abstract reflection on the "ideas and ideals" of close reading. The poem that I have chosen for this case study is by John Keats, and is called "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles". I chose this poem because on a formal level it invites the closest of readings - its difficulty and its conspicuous formal qualities demand that we read it closely. At the same time, it is very possible to place this poem within a well-defined discursive context - the context of debate over the artistic and ethical status of the Elgin marbles and their removal from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin. As such, like the attempt to unite observations on the macro and the micro scale in the natural sciences, this poem challenges critics to take both a micro and a macro view, and to ask whether those distant and close views unite, disunite, disturb or explain each other. As such, I think the poem makes a great case study for close reading and its place within the practice of "doing English".

By the end of this lecture I hope that, by observing the way in which I manoeuvre between close and contextual readings in this case, you will have gained some ideas about ways in which you might negotiate the relationship between close and contextual reading in your own essays. In addition, this lecture will be useful if you are studying Romanticism for finals paper 6, describing one of the key artistic controversies of the era and directing you to some further reading for exploring this controversy further.

12.00 - Mr Tate, 'Reading poetic form'

This lecture will discuss various definitions of poetic form and will attempt to give some answers to the thorny question of what form actually is and does. Its main focus will be on the critical uses of formal analysis: it will argue that an awareness of a poem’s formal organisation, far from being an optional extra in criticism, offers a direct route to a fuller appreciation of that poem’s meaning and impact. Using examples from a number of well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century poems, this lecture will show how a close reading of the specific elements of form- metre, rhyme, lineation, stanza, and genre- can greatly improve our understanding both of specific poems and of poetry in general.