1. QUESTION

    An individual CRIT close reading for “Miss Sophia’s Diary”

   An individual CRIT close reading for “Miss Sophia’s Diary”. And more information in materials. I put the work requirements in materials. And i also upload a sample in materials.References are not allow.

   The Close Reading Interpretive Tool (CRIT)

   The Close Reading Interpretive Tool (CRIT) offers a systematic approach to literary interpretation,

   allowing students to practice the detailed, sustained, and careful analysis of text.

   Step 1-Paraphrase

   Read the passage carefully. In your own words, give a summary of the factual content of the

   passage—what the text directly states—as it proceeds from beginning to end. What situation is

   being described here and by whom? What happens in that situation? Respond to this prompt in no

   more than three complete sentences.

   Step 2-Observe

   Read the passage again, this time thinking about what it seeks to accomplish. Then, identify and list

   any potentially significant features of the passage’s language or form—that is, those textual

   elements that contribute to the passage’s overall meaning, purpose, or effect. Your list of

   observations should include specific examples of various kinds of textual elements, such as:

   descriptive details; word choice; repetition of phrases, sounds, or ideas; imagery or figurative

   language; syntactical structure; changes in vocabulary, rhythm, or tone; characteristics of the

   narrative voice or perspective. Note that these observations will have to provide the building blocks

   for your analysis in Step 4. Respond to this prompt with a list of features.

   Step 3-Contextualize

   Think about contexts for the passage. (Contexts are facts or broader circumstances external to a

   literary work that are important to its production, reception, or understanding; for instance: literary,

   biographical, political, or historical information.) From your own knowledge of any relevant

   contextual facts or circumstances, or from information provided by your instructor, identify and list

   any potentially significant contexts for the passage—that is, those contextual frames that contribute

   to the passage’s overall meaning, purpose, or effect. Note that these contextualizations may provide

   additional building blocks for your analysis in Step 4. Respond to this prompt with a list of contexts.

   CRIT was developed in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin by Professors Phillip

   Barrish, Evan Carton, Coleman Hutchison, and Frank Whigham, and Ph.D. students Sydney Bufkin, Jessica

   Goudeau, and Jennifer Sapio. CRIT is a product of a Course Transformation Grant generously funded by

   the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. CRIT is licensed under a Creative Commons

   Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

   Note to instructors: Please feel free to adapt these prompts for your own pedagogical needs. We only ask

   that you reproduce the credit above. Please direct all questions to [email protected].

   Step 4-Analyze

   Review the features and contexts that you identified in Steps 2 and 3 as making potentially

   significant contributions to the passage’s meaning, purpose, or effect. Then, select at least four of

   these textual elements and/or contextual frames and explain how each is in fact significant. These

   analyses should state clearly and forcefully what each item contributes to your understanding of the

   passage. Note that these analyses will have to be connected in Step 5, where you will argue for a

   unified interpretation of the passage as a whole. Respond to this prompt in one to two sentences per

   feature or context. Each analysis should include the phrase: “…is significant because…”

   Step 5-Argue

   Re-read the work you have produced thus far. Using your observations and analyses in the preceding

   steps, write one paragraph (at least five sentences) that conveys your interpretation of the passage.

   State the main thesis of your interpretation—that is, the central claim you are arguing for—and then

   support that thesis by presenting the evidence you gathered in Steps 1 through 4. Note that your

   paragraph should integrate and build upon your responses to the Step 4 prompt; your observations

   and analyses should also add up to an interpretive conclusion about the passage as a whole.

   Step 6-Reflect

   Now that you have advanced an argument, re-read the passage again. Then, answer the following

   questions: What aspects of the passage do you still find confusing? What elements of the passage

   does your interpretation neglect or set aside? What parts of your argument now appear to you

   debatable or dubious—that is, what objections could a reasonable person raise to your

   interpretation of the passage? Keep in mind: no interpretation is perfect or can account for every

   element of a text. Nonetheless, if these reflections have led you to think that your interpretation is

   less than compelling, you are free to revise your CRIT exercise.

   A few notes about close reading and the CRIT reading assignment:

   1. The example in the CRIT video you watched is an excellent model for what to do.
   2. However, that example analyzes poetry, and we’re analyzing prose fiction, so your CRIT

   readings could differ in certain ways:

   1. You’ll have to choose to focus on one particular thing in the story (either a small

   section of the text, anywhere from a paragraph to a page or chapter, or on a

   certain theme within the whole text). You will not be able to analyze everything,

   so focus on one feature.

   1. You’ll notice that this reading and the CRIT reading of the Walt Whitman poem

   on youtube are quite different. The poem reading focuses more on details of

   language and the feel of specific words, this “Diary of a Madman” reading

   focuses more on the surface meaning on words and contextual information. In

   both cases, the reading matches what the text demands: the poem demands

   close attention to language, the Diary demands to be read in its historical context.

   Both types of reading are valid, and they can be thought of as opposite ends of

   the spectrum of close reading.

   1. The readings you do for this class will probably be somewhere in between the

   two extremes in (b) above, with some attention to details of language (but not as

   much as poetry requires) and some attention to context (but not as much reliance

   on it as I do here).

   3. Remember to show all your work, listing all steps zero through six as I do below. Follow

   the instructions in the CRIT pdf. Step zero is extra for us, because we need to focus in

   one one particular part of the story.

   4. All of your analysis should be based on class material. Don’t introduce any outside

   information. Cite the source of contextual information from outside the story.

   5. Your analysis does not need to be definitive or objectively correct. All texts mean

   different things to different people at different times; there are always multiple possible

   meanings.

   6. Nor are the author’s intentions particularly important. What the author claims a story

   means is not necessarily how readers interpret it. Once the story is published, it has a

   life of its own, independent of the author.

   7. When reading and analyzing literature, we are interested primarily in one kind of

   meaning: social meaning, in other words, interpretations of the text that appear plausible

   to many people. If you cannot convince other people that your interpretation is plausible,

   it isn’t a very good interpretation (or, alternatively, you haven’t done an adequate job

   explaining it).

   8. Note that one does not have to accept a reading as necessarily correct to agree that it is

   plausible. Again, there are always multiple possible interpretations of any text. The ways

   we understand any given text change over time as society, culture, and language

   change.

   9. Your group will need more than the 50 minute class period to complete this assignment.

   Talk together and plan ahead.

   CRIT Reading of Diary of a Madman

   ( Text in italics is additional explanation and not part of the CRIT reading )

   Step 0 – Select passage

   Diary entries 1, 12, 13 (p.41).

   This step is necessary for us, because we’re dealing with excerpts of longer stories.

   Don’t forget to give page numbers and section numbers/titles (if applicable) for your selection,

   just as I do here. I chose these three entries because of observations that link them together,

   and because much of the story’s meaning can be gleaned from them in context. But in the end,

   I’m in a sense analyzing the entire story—simply with a stronger focus on a few passages. I also

   consider factors from the rest of the story in my analysis.

   Step 1 – Paraphrase

   In the particular case of “Diary of a Madman”, paraphrasing is almost impossible

   because there aren’t many extra or superfluous words in the selection I’ve chosen, and the

   selection is the person’s brief thoughts rather than any action, conversation, or other extended,

   detailed sequence. Nevertheless, it is important to try to paraphrase.

   Entry 1: I see the moon out tonight for the first time in thirty years and feel like a new

   man. I finally see the world clearly after three decades. I have reason to be careful. The dog

   looked at me intently

   Entry 12:

   I’ve been living for many years in this place where people have been eating each other

   for four thousand years. Maybe my elder brother fed me some of my sister’s flesh when she

   died. Now that I’m aware I have a background in cannibalism, I feel ashamed and less than

   human.

   Entry 13:

   Maybe not all children are cannibals yet and can be saved.

   Step 2 – Observe

   The writing takes the form of a diary. It is intimate, private, the subject “I” is dropped from

   the first sentences of entries 1 and 12 as one would do when writing for oneself.

   The story is written in a realist style in which the language appears transparent, as the

   actual writing of a madman rather than a fictionalized, stylized account of a madman, even

   though the madman’s thoughts that the language conveys are not necessarily reliable.

   The diary entries are written in a very colloquial, informal style, that contrasts sharply

   with the story’s introduction.

   The narrator (“I”) is very emotional and seems to be freaking out, possibly paranoid.

   The narration gives us the narrator’s thoughts, but very few facts.

   The emotions and possible paranoia lead us to doubt the objectivity of what the narrator

   presents as facts, such as the Zhao’s family dog giving him dirty looks. Maybe he thinks the

   looks are dirty, but would an impartial observer agree?

   We aren’t given any reliable information in the passage, only narrator’s questionable

   thoughts, emotional state, and guesses about the world.

   Change in the madman’s sense of self from “feel like a new man” (1) to “ hard… to look

   real human beings in the eye!” (12)

   Entry one implies that the narrator might have seen clearly, briefly, before the “more than

   three decades” of not seeing the world clearly.

   Entry thirteen seems to corroborate this by implying that young children might also be

   able to see clearly.

   Step 3 – Contextualize

   The vernacular, casual language of the entries contrasts with the story introduction

   written in classical Chinese.

   The story introduction tells us the narrator has recovered from the madness and titled his

   diary “Diary of a Madman”

   The diary form and first-person, unreliable narration are uncommon in traditional

   Chinese fiction.

   The author Lu Xun was born in 1881.

   Lu Xun was educated in the classical Confucian tradition and has written many things in

   classical Chinese

   The story is published in 1918 in New Youth, a magazine run by people who are

   interested in modernizing China.

   (This information is all from the story and the book introduction)

   Step 4 – Analyze (at least four elements from steps 2 and 3), using the phrase “is significant

   because”

   The vernacular language used in the diary, and the diary form itself, are significant

   because they are both new and modern, and also have a close, intimate feel, forming a sharp

   contrast with the remote, objective-feeling classical language of the introduction.

   The narrator’s emotional state and paranoia, the dog’s stare, and the narrator’s

   vacillation between feeling like a new person and feeling ashamed and less than human are

   significant because not only do they make the narrator seem mad, they also are plausibly

   feelings shared by Lu Xun and others around him at the time as they try to forge a new culture

   and do away with the old culture and hierarchy.

   The diary reveals a progression in the madman’s awareness and thoughts. Even though

   he supposedly sees clearly in the first entry, he continues to acquire new insights through the

   final entry.

   The vernacular/classical language contrast is further significant because the author was

   fighting for use of the vernacular.

   The “more than three decades” is significant because the author was in his mid-thirties

   when he wrote this story.

   Step 5 – Argue (one paragraph of at least five sentences, beginning with a thesis sentence.

   Integrates information from step 4)

   “Diary of a Madman” can be understood as an extended metaphor for the intellectual

   and emotional struggle faced by the would-be reformers at the beginning of China’s modern era.

   Through its formal juxtaposition of cold preface in classical language and emotional diary in

   colloquial language that would be familiar to readers from their everyday lives, the story

   cultivates the reader’s sympathies for the madman and his view of society, and against the

   traditional culture he criticizes. The realist mode of writing that leaves very little to the

   imagination also directs us to read the story as directly related to social events at the time. The

   emotions and uncertainty paint a dark picture of society, but the hopeful note of the last entry

   that humans are born uncorrupted (reinforced by the implication of the first entry), leaves room

   for optimism that the next generation(s) could ultimately change society for the better. The

   madman’s story is at least partially autobiographical, as the span of time from when the

   madman lost himself in tradition (here, the “sane” world) to when he writes the diary parallels the

   time from when Lu Xun first began to receive a classical education as a small child to the time

   when Lu Xun wrote this story. Lu Xun’s intellectual journey as partially chronicled in “Preface”

   also has a rough parallel to the madman’s intellectual journey in his diary. If read

   autobiographically or as a metaphor for the time generally, entry 12 implies that intellectuals,

   even as they began to attack tradition and forge a new modern culture, continued to struggle

   with their own moral complicity as the traditional bearers of culture and the classical language.

   Step 6 – Reflect

   What does the moonlight signify, if anything? It reappears throughout story (in other

   entries) and might be significant, but I didn’t account for it in this analysis.

   What is the significance of the madman saying the dog gives him dirty looks? Is it

   possible that animals are tainted by traditional culture as well, learning from their masters to eat

   human flesh also? Or does the dog signify something else, or nothing at all? Could it be just an

   incidental detail to add to the atmosphere of the story and add some realism to the depiction of

   the madman’s madness?

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