Writing About Literature
Generally, the essays you write in literature courses attempt to answer interesting questions about works of literature. These questions are interesting for at least two reasons: a) their answers are not obvious, and b) their answers (or at least the attempt to answer them) can enrich other readers’ understanding and experience of those works of literature. Often works of literature seem to be intentionally posing these questions to us; they require us to do some work to get them to work.
Readers have asked many different types of questions of works of literature, for example:
• What did the author want to communicate in this work?
• What does the work reveal about the author’s feelings, opinions, or psychology?
• What does the work reveal about the society in which it was written?
• What can we learn from this work about the issues or topics it deals with?
What can we learn from this work about the issues or topics it deals with?
• What motivates the characters in the work to behave as they do?
• How are literary devices used in the work?
• How does the work create emotional or intellectual experiences for its readers?
• Is this work good or bad?
• Is this work good or bad for its readers?
Some of these questions require information from outside the text itself; for example, to argue that a work reveals a writer’s psychological condition, it would be helpful to have some other evidence of that condition to corroborate your interpretation of the work of literature. Some of these questions ask about the world outside the work—about the author, his/her society, or our own society, for example—while others try to focus more on the features of the work itself.
Analyses which try to make statements about the work itself is often called formalist criticism: it attends more to the structures and strategies employed in the work. Ultimately, such arguments generally do try to move beyond the work, to claim, for instance, that it is likely to create certain effects in its readers, or that readers will understand the writer’s intent more clearly if they pay attention to its formal characteristic.
In LIT 100, we are going to be paying attention primarily to these formal features of literary
works. In fiction, some of these features include tone, point of view, setting, character, etc. We will be paying less attention to extra-textual features, such as the author’s biography or the historical contexts in which the literature was produced and/or read; these elements are not less important than formal features, but they naturally vary greatly from one work to another and often require in-depth study to truly appreciate. To understand how Shakespeare’s social situation
in London in the 1590s might have been reflected in his plays would require a whole course in Elizabethan history. On the other hand, the formal features we will be studying in this course can be found in literature of all eras and genres, though they may often be used to different effect by different writers at different times. Almost all fiction has something like a plot, a setting, a point of view, etc., whether written in 700 BCE or today.
Thus, in your essays, you will be asked to analyze the formal features of a work of literature and to use that analysis to answer an interesting question about that work.
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