Through the Magnifying Glass

When I think of closely reading texts, I am immediately taken back to my junior and senior years in high school, when I took a two-year English class as part of the International Baccalaureate certificate program. In that class, we studied poetry and literature from international authors. Our first unit was to study the pacifist Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. I will probably never forget the hours that we spent picking apart his poems, both because I would leave class with a sore brain and because it was the first time that I really felt like I began to understand why good poetry was regarded as high art.

Our literature units were no different. From Joseph Conrad to Chinua Achebe to George Bernard Shaw, I began to understand why we must look at texts closely and what we stand to gain from doing so.

As the class progressed, I developed a sizable inventory of tools that I could use to pull meaning from literary works, and I found that there were certain elements that I preferred to analyze; figurative language, phrasing, diction. I began to value the historical context of a work’s creation and learned to read up on the personal history of the author to understand why things might be presented as they are. And, perhaps most importantly, I began to appreciate the work’s place within the history of the form; how it built off of previous works and how it has been built off of by more current works.

My teachers must have taught me well, as I still find myself falling into the same patterns of literary analysis as I consume media in its myriad forms: news articles, blogs, op-ed pieces, books, movies. I recently had a lot of fun analyzing the TV show Battlestar Galactica for its post-9/11 American society commentaries. I had selected this as the topic for my final paper for my first-year writing course and knew that there was something to be analyzed, but it wasn’t until I started digging that I realized just how much there was to be found within the science-fiction show. I found commentaries on religious extremism and terrorism, gender roles, political rule vs. military rule, subterfuge for personal agendas, and racial acceptance. It goes without saying that I would not have been able to find all this had I not learned the proper techniques for close reading or viewing media.