Madam Bovary Close Reading
May 29th, 2022
Response Papers: They should be around 2-3 pages in length. These responses will be due after the lecture concluding the text and will be evaluated as an exercise in close reading. Each response paper should accomplish the following three things:
- Describe what is literally happening in the chosen passage (literal level).
- Analyze the passage for the literary meaning; this means paying close attention to language and imagery (literary level).
- Connect the part to the whole: how does the selected passage relate to a thematic recurrence in the work? Why is the selected passage significant to our understanding of the larger work?
- MLA format: double spaced, 12 font times roman, include passage at top of your response
- The Stages of Close-Reading
- Sumarize
- Determine WHAT the text says,
- General understanding
- Summary, central idea, and theme
- Key details, text organization
- Literal meaning of the text—No speculation
- Analyze
- Determine HOW the text says it
- Vocabulary words, syntax
- Literary devices, genre, textual structure
- Authorial intent, perspective, Point of View
- Read for inferences
- What is suggested by the passage?
- Synthesize
- Determine WHY the text matters
- Connection of the part to the whole
- Mold your inferences about the material
- Offer an assessment of the text
- PASSAGE TO ANALYZE:
- ” She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.”use this link and spark notes to find more information on the meaning https://prezi.com/jtms_dognfs7/key-passage-in-mada…
