Reading and Writing about Literature

Reading Strategies: Since critical and active reading is the most useful method of understanding and analyzing a text, the following tools can greatly help a student in understanding and getting at the subtle shades of meaning in a work of Literature.

Reading Strategies: Previewing: With previewing, you scan the text looking for major obvious elements. For example, our book lists some questions and elements to consider to get us started: How long is the story? How many acts and scenes does the play have? Is the poem divided into stanzas? What is the work’s title? How might it relate to the work and reveal something about the work? Look at paragraphing, non-standard capitalization, or punctuation. Look at the point of view. The number of characters in a play. Setting. Repetition of words in a poem.

Highlighting and Annotating: Use a highlighter to highlight specific words or sentences that appear important or useful to analyzing the work. Annotate by making marginal notes about observations you make about the work and its specific features.

Reading Strategies: Reread the work: Reread the work paying careful attention to the elements you’ve noticed in your first reading, making notes on any additional important features you notice. Also, during rereading is the time to revisit passages you’ve had difficulty with.

Writing about Literature: When writing about literature for a class, one of the most important aspects of this process is understanding the assignment and being able to respond to it correctly. Part of this involves understanding how open-ended the assignment is. The assignment could range from answering a narrow direct question to an entirely open-ended assignment where the student picks the works to analyze, the approach he or she wishes to use, and even the specific question he or she will answer in the paper. For our class, we will be writing papers and exams that touch on both ends of this spectrum.

Writing about Literature: The first end of the spectrum is the narrow, direct essay question. Consider the following prompt: What is the overall main theme of “All about Suicide” by Luisa Valenzuela? Support your answer with evidence from the text. From this prompt, it is clear that the sole purpose of the student’s essay is to answer the question and support that answer. In writing an essay in response to this, the student would construct a thesis statement that answers the essay question and use evidence from the text to support it.

Writing about Literature: Beyond the direct question assignment, is a prompt that is slightly more open ended. Consider the following prompt: Select two short stories from the text that deal with the same subject matter and write an argumentative essay that the two texts deal with the subject in either a largely similar or a largely dissimilar manner. Here the student must select the texts and examine the subject matter of each text. While it is clear and direct what the student must argue, it is up to the student what elements to examine to determine if the treatment of the subject matter is similar or dissimilar.

Writing About Literature: At the far end of the spectrum, then, is the entirely open-ended prompt. Here the student may be given a little bit of focus, but many of the elements of the assignment must be decided on by the student. Consider the following prompt: Choose one of the short stories that we’ve examined so far in class. Then choose one of the forms of literary criticism we’ve been exploring in class. Choose an aspect of the short story and an aspect of this form of criticism to use and then write an essay in which you apply this form of criticism to the work. An assignment like this leaves the work, the approach, and the essay question the student must answer up to the student and requires the student to do a lot more thinking and planning before he or she starts writing the paper.

Preparing for Open-Ended Prompts The third example prompt is often one of the most difficult types assignment for some students because they can often get lost in the assignment. However, developing a systematic approach to this is often very useful to students.

Preparing for Open-Ended Prompts The first step of getting ready for an open-ended assignment like the one listed above is to choose the work the essay will focus on. This is fairly easy to do, but keep in mind as you develop an assignment like this, you will need to be open to changing the work you will focus on if the direction of your argument warrants it.

Preparing for Open-Ended Prompts The second step in the example open-ended prompt is to choose a form of criticism. This requires that you understand the forms of criticism that are being studied and choosing one of the forms of criticism that seems to be appropriate to the work you are writing about. Note that this step may involve doing some research to see if anyone else successfully applied this form of criticism to this work. Also note that there are many aspects of each form of criticism and you will need to narrow it down to one specific element. For example, if you are applying psychological criticism to “Cask of Amontillado” by Poe, you may want to narrow your project to examining whether the narrator of the story is acting almost entirely based on his ID (an element of human psychology that he argues exists along with the Ego and Super Ego).

Preparing for Open-Ended Prompts: The final part of preparing for the example open-ended prompt would be to create what is called a research question. In essence, you will be creating the essay question you wish your paper to answer. In the example above where the student wishes to create a paper that analyzes “Cask of Amontillado” using psychological criticism, the student’s research question might read as follows: Is the narrator in Poe’s story operating largely based on his ID? The student would then have a definite place to start with his or her paper.

Other Necessities: While this prep work for various types of prompts is important, other factors also play into the assignments, including the amount of research available on a topic and insights the student may gain as he or she is writing the paper. One of the biggest necessities, then, is the flexibility to change the plan for the paper if circumstances warrant it.