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This article is an application of New Formalist criticism to the study of W. B. Yeats's poem "Nineteen Hundred Nineteen." It is written in the conviction that now more than ever, it is important to recognize the historicity of literary form as a rudimentary paradigm in any theorized or illustrative account of literature. Within the domain of literary criticism, debates about form have broadly been orchestrated by two polarized views: one is textualist and is largely concerned with the form and language of the literary artifact; the other is historicist, referential, or contextual and is largely concerned with the thematics and historicity of the literary text. Less polarized positions that address form while championing historicity--like new historicism and late twentieth-century Marxism--have not been explicit or systematic enough to anchor form in its socio-historical grounding. We had to wait until the first decade of the third millennium to witness a methodical attempt to re-inscribe literary form in its socio-historical determinants at the hands of New Formalists, whose critical approach are explicated and illustrated in this article. After reviewing the available literature, defining New Formalism, and sorting out the New Formalist analytical paradigms, the author uses these paradigms to study Yeats's "Nineteen Hundred Nineteen" by conducting a close reading of this poem with a focus on the relationship between rhetoric and reference, aesthetics and politics, form and history, form and reader, as well as literary text and literary tradition in this lyrical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that developing deep understanding of text requires sustained emphasis on reading comprehension instruction and scaffolded strategy practices. However, although research has shown explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies to be effective, we know little about whether strategy instruction and use are part of "daily life" in classrooms (Pearson, & Cervetti, 2017). The present study analyses 60 video recorded English as a second language (L2) lessons in seven lower secondary schools in Norway, across two school years (9th and 10th grade) based on The Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation. The article investigates the types of text-based reading comprehension instruction and strategy use that goes on in these classrooms. Key findings show that teachers engage their students in reading comprehension instruction of narrative and expository texts more than half the time, offering guided strategy practice based on student needs, and encouraging daily use of known reading comprehension strategies, instead of explicitly teaching new ones. These are powerful examples of successful reading comprehension instruction, and show that when English teachers prioritise reading comprehension instruction, they use authentic L2 texts to develop and scaffold critical literacy and metadiscursive awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a simple in-class exercise in reading and writing that, by asking participants to write their own endings for a short narrative taken from the Journal of the American Medical Association, prompts them to reflect on the problem of uncertainty in medicine and to apply the literary-critical techniques of close reading both to the content and the form of a story that describes and enacts the challenges of making decisions in the face of uncertain knowledge.

This article outlines the objectives of Critical Love Studies, their grounding in a wide range of critical theory, a multi-disciplinary methodology linking narrative approaches from literary studies, linguistics, social sciences and psychology, and gives an example of practical application in literary scholarship and participatory community research into experiences of love in the human lifespan. It introduces the concept of “love acts” which are likened to performative speech acts in the ways in which they create social reality. The relationship between an occurrence of love (a set of interrelated love acts) and its social context may be affirmative or constitute some form of deviation from the norm. In some cases, love acts which deviate from the norm achieve “critical mass” and have a transformative effect on their social world. Finally, this article discusses the love dispositif. A dispositif or apparatus is constituted by the dynamic and productive interplay of discourses, practices, and the material conditions for their existence. The love dispositif hence encompasses love norms, love institutions, love theory, all speech acts and practices generated by and in the name of love, as well as the material conditions, such as the gendered division of reproductive labour, and even oxytocin levels in people who experience love. None of these in isolation suffice to understand or explain “love”. Together they produce and reproduce everything we experience or represent as love.

The Harry Potter fan fiction "The Source," by Luckyducky7, centers on Ginny Weasley. This fan fic attempts to carve out a narrative for Ginny Weasley that allows her to be a heroine. This close reading of "The Source" attempts to highlight how it succeeds and how it fails in completing this task.

In this essay, we reflect on distant reading as one of the various takes on reading that currently prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. We focus on three concepts of reading which for various reasons can be considered inter-related: close reading, surface reading and distant reading. We offer a theoretical treatment of distant reading and demonstrate why it is closely related to the concept of machine reading (part of artificial intelligence). Throughout, we focus on the role of the individual reader in all this and argue that Digital Literary Studies have much to gain from paying closer attention to the so-called “natural” reading process of individual humans.

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's 'literary criticism' became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional 'maturity', belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the 'stock response' promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the practice of close reading within a cross-disciplinary context that moves beyond literary criticism and linguistic analysis to sociology and the history of science. A comparative approach to the practice of close reading adds to the toolbox of literary critics, who often focus on meaning rather than material. After a review of close reading from a literary point of view, I introduce Latour and Woolgar's (1986) concept of microprocessing and Rheinberger's (1997) concept of pragmatogony as equally valid forms of close reading from the disciplines of sociology and history of science. If a combination of these techniques can be applied to literary works, literary critics can analyze the epistemic value of literature, which requires experimentation with the material of a literary artefact, which in turn affects the author and critic. Through examples of engaging literary material in addition to representations, literary critics can experiment with and redefine the literary object as an epistemic object and the practice of close reading as undefined at the time of creation and interpretation. By way of metaphors and folklore about rabbits, a novel with a white rabbit, and genetically modified rabbits, this article offers three conclusions that appear when the practices of microprocessing and pragmatogony are applied to literary works. The reconceptualization of the practice of close reading, 1) transforms the author and reader into hybrid scientists-artists, rather than prophets, geniuses, or intellectuals; 2) transforms the literary object of study from a book to any material object; and 3) transports the practice of close reading from the library to the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]