Your first paper asks you to choose a passage from Beowulf and offer a close rea

by Caaltu · June 1, 2024

Your first paper asks you to choose a passage from Beowulf and offer a close reading. Your aim is to discover something important about a character or event. Let the text lead you, rather than choosing something that you think will reveal a specific meaning or lend itself to interpretation.
Reading with an eye for passages that may work well for this paper will help you to complete this assignment.
Consider marking with a page flag or otherwise noting any passages that stand out to you as you read.
As you explore the impact that close reading has on interpretation, consider the following questions:
Why does this passage stand out to you? In other words, why did you choose it?
What symbols or themes are active in this passage?
Are there any literary devices at work in this passage?
What does this passage reveal about a character?
What does this passage reveal about an event in the text?
Why does close reading of a passage change how we interpret a text?
What do you see having completed a close reading that you didn’t see when you first read this passage?
Because you’ll be working with one text and there is no need to cite outside sources, your MLA citations can be just the line number in parentheses inside the period, like this: (325). Be sure to include a creative title and use appropriate paragraph breaks.
DETAILS 4 pages, Times New Roman, 12-point font, double spaced, with standard margins and MLA conventions.
This is the passage I have to write about:
[..] There was another chapter. An avenger lay in wait, counting sworded seconds until the latest hour, her heart full of hatred. Grendel’s mother, warrior-woman, outlaw, meditated on misery. She lived, ill-fated, sinking beneath cold currents to her kingdom under-country, her line linked to extinction since Cain crossed swords with Abel and fled, murder-marked, to make his home in wastelands, solitary and silent.