Close Reading

What's reading?

1. Perceiving a written text in order to understand its contents. This can be down silently (silent reading).The understanding that result is called reading comprehension.
2. Saying a written text aloud (oral reading). This can be down with or without an understanding of the contents.
Different types of reading comprehension are often distinguished:
a.Literal comprehension: reading in order to understand, remember, or recall the information explicitly contained in a passage.
b. Inferential comprehension: reading in order to find information which is not explicitly stated in a passage, using the reader's experience and intuition, and by infering.
c. Critical or Evaluating comprehension: reading in order to compare inormation in a passage with the reader's own knowledge and values.
d. appreciative comprehension: reading in order to gain an emotional or other kind of valued response from a passage. (Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics)

What is close reading?
1.Close reading is the most important skill we need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close  attention to what is printed on the page.
2. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meaning of the individual printed word, it also involves making ourselves sensetive to all the nuances and connotations of language as it is used by skilled writers.
3. Close reading involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and jugement. (vocabulary, sentence construction, ...)
4. Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously.
Linguistic
Semantic
Structural
Cultural

Linguistic reading: is largely descriptive.
Semantic reading: is cognitive.
Structural reading: is analytic.
Cultural reading: is interpretive

Vladimir Nabokov: "Curiousity enough, One can not read a book: one should notice and fondle the details".