A Course in Literary Criticism & Close Reading

Learn to Read
Like a Critic. Write Like One Too.

Eight weeks of close reading, critical theory, and writing workshops that turn your love of books into an argument worth publishing.

Next cohort opens March 2026 · 8 weeks · Self-paced with live workshops

The Problem

Most book reviews fail before the first sentence ends.

Not because the writer doesn't love books — they do, more than most. But loving a book and reading it are different acts. The first is passive; the second requires a vocabulary, a method, a willingness to argue. Most of us were never taught the second.

The result is a genre of writing that circles its subject without landing — that confesses feeling without examining it, that summarises plot where it should be interrogating structure. The reader finishes the review knowing only that the writer liked the book. That is not criticism. That is a mood.

"The difference between a reaction and a reading is the difference between saying the light was beautiful and explaining why Fitzgerald placed that green light at the end of Daisy's dock."

The same student. Eight weeks apart.

The second paragraph is not smarter. It is better equipped. That equipment is what this course provides.

Course Philosophy

A manifesto for the reader who suspects there is more.

Marginalia takes its name from the practice of writing in the margins — that private conversation between reader and text that has produced some of the finest criticism ever written. Coleridge's annotations to his own copies of Shakespeare run to five published volumes. Voltaire argued with Rousseau in the white space of borrowed books. The margin is where thinking happens before it becomes a sentence.

This course is built on a single conviction: that close reading is not an academic exercise but a way of paying attention. It is the skill that separates the reader who finishes a novel and the reader who understands one. The tools — New Criticism, narratology, the interrogation of imagery and form — are not jargon. They are instruments of precision, and precision is what makes criticism matter beyond the self.

"A critic is not someone who judges a book from the outside. A critic is someone who has lived inside it long enough to draw a map."

The course is structured as a progression of critical lenses — beginning with the text itself (New Criticism, close reading of imagery and structure), moving outward to context (historical, biographical, ideological), and arriving at a synthesis the student can call their own critical voice. Each week's reading is not about the texts assigned; it is about what those texts reveal about the act of reading itself.

The model for every piece of writing produced in this course is the same: the paragraph as argument. Not summary. Not impression. Argument — the kind that could be wrong, that takes a position, that earns its claim through the evidence of the text itself.

Free Sample Lesson — 90 seconds

What one sentence can hold.

Every week of Marginalia works this way: a passage, a close reading that models the method, and a writing exercise that forces you to apply it. The skills compound. By week four, you will do this automatically. By week eight, you will do it better than this.

Curriculum

Eight weeks. One critical voice.

The course moves from the sentence outward — from the granular work of close reading toward the broader practice of critical writing. Each module builds the vocabulary of the next.

Your Instructor

Dr. Eleanor Marsh

Literary critic · University of Edinburgh, PhD · Former editor, The Literary Review

The GuardianThe TLSn+1The Paris Review

Eleanor Marsh has spent twenty years writing about books for the publications that shape literary culture — and another decade teaching the critics who now write for them. Her doctoral work on I.A. Richards and the pedagogy of close reading is the theoretical spine of this course; her journalism is its practical model.

"I built this course because the question I am asked most often — by students, by aspiring critics, by readers who write — is not 'what should I read?' It is 'how do I say what I mean about what I read?' That is a learnable skill. It is, in fact, the skill."

"Eleanor's feedback changed the way I read. Not just the way I write — the way I read. I didn't know those were the same thing."— James Okafor, book critic, The Atlantic

The margin is where
thinking begins.

You have been reading all your life. You have been writing about books for years. The only thing missing is the method — and the method is what we teach.

Join the March 2026 cohort. Forty places. Eight weeks. One publishable piece of criticism at the end.