What is close reading?

Close reading is the giving of careful attention to a passage of text. We close read in order to attempt to establish some of the features and mechanics of a piece of writing. In that sense it is both a careful reflection upon a given text, but also its effects and its working upon you. What happens when you read the text? What does or did it make you think about? How did that happen? And importantly, how might it have been different for someone else? These questions, which are always a part of thinking about literary texts, ask us to think carefully about writing and ourselves: about the details of a text and its moment-to-moment progression; what a text attempts, what it risks, what it's style gives away or conceals, so that close reading is an exercise in writing what is knowable but also what is hard to know about a given piece of writing. This is what makes close reading exciting, but also difficult, and a necessarily open-ended task.