College essays, grammar, and English already sit in Jai's regular teaching rotation, so when he picks up a literary text, he's reading with a writer's eye — tracking how an author's sentence rhythms, word choices, and structural decisions create effects that go beyond the story itself. His Stanford ...

Kate approaches literary analysis the way she'd approach a research problem: identify the question, gather textual evidence, and build an argument. Whether a student is unpacking symbolism in *The Great Gatsby* or tracing narrative structure in a contemporary novel, she teaches close-reading techniq...

Reading a novel for pleasure and analyzing it for a literature class require completely different muscles — close reading, identifying rhetorical strategies, and building an argument about theme or structure. Jessica's history degree from Penn trained her to treat texts as arguments worth interrogat...

Analyzing literature means learning to ask better questions of a text — why does the narrator shift tense here, what does that recurring image actually do, how does dialogue reveal power dynamics between characters. Rhea's coursework at UChicago, where close reading is central to the curriculum, sha...

Jeffrey approaches literature the way he approaches engineering problems — by breaking a text down into its moving parts and asking what each one does. Whether a student is unpacking symbolism in a novel or building an argument about a poem's structure, he teaches close reading as a skill with concr...

Reading a novel for class is one thing; analyzing how an author uses symbolism, narrative structure, or unreliable narration to build meaning is another skill entirely. Erika's public policy background trained her to dissect complex texts for argument and evidence, and she applies that same close-re...

Reading a novel closely and writing about it persuasively are two different skills, and Quinn tackles both. Whether the assignment involves tracing symbolism in Gatsby or unpacking an unreliable narrator in a short story, he teaches students to build arguments from textual evidence — pulling specifi...

Reading literature well means knowing how to slow down at the right moments — noticing when a metaphor shifts, when a narrator becomes unreliable, or when structure itself carries meaning. Annie approaches texts analytically, breaking down passages to uncover how authors build tone and argument bene...

Reading literature well means learning to sit with ambiguity — figuring out what an unreliable narrator is hiding, or why an author chose a particular structure over a more obvious one. Tiffany connects literary analysis to the close-reading skills she developed in law school, where every word in a ...

Reading a novel closely means asking better questions — not just "what happened" but "why did the author structure it this way?" Pinelopi teaches students to analyze literary devices like unreliable narration, symbolism, and shifts in tone by grounding every observation in textual evidence. Her psyc...