Writing about Literature - Second Edition: A Guide for the Student Critic

by W.F. Garrett-Petts

Overview

Writing about Literature introduces students to critical reading and writing through a thorough and engaging discussion of the field, but also through exercises, interviews, exemplary student and scholarly essays, and visual material. It offers students an insider’s guide to the language, issues, approaches, styles, assumptions, and traditions that inform the writing of successful critical essays, and aims to make student writers a part of the world of professional literary criticism.

Much of the discussion is structured around ways to analyze and respond to a single work, Stephen Crane’s story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” This second edition is updated throughout and includes a new chapter on “Reading and Writing About Poetry”; the chapter uses Robert Kroetsch’s poem “This Part of the Country” as the unit of analysis and includes an interview with the poet about his process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551117430
Publisher:	Broadview Press
Publication date:	06/13/2013
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

W.F. Garrett-Petts is Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Second Edition—to the Instructor

• Initiating Students into Literary Study
  A Brief History of English Studies
  This Book’s Form and Philosophy

Preface to the Second Edition—to the Student: An Introduction to the Critical Conversation

• What Is Academic Discourse?
  A Method for Learning Academic Discourse
  How to Use This Book

CHAPTER 1

Getting Started: From Personal Response to Field Stance

• Overview
  Writing Is Rhetorical
  Documenting Your Personal Response
  How to Use Your Personal Response
  Box 1.1: Field Notes from Critical Theory and Psycholinguistics: “How We Read”
  Becoming a Literacy Researcher
  New Contexts for Reading and Writing
• The Social Stance
  The Institutional Stance
  The Textual Stance
• Box 1.2: Field Notes from Composition Studies: The Five-Paragraph Theme
• The Field Stance
• Summary: Why It Is so Important to Become Aware of All Four Stances
  Box 1.3: Field Notes from Linguistics: The Effect of Context on Reading
  An Interview with a Literary Critic
  Exercises

CHAPTER 2

Reading and Responding to Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”

• Overview
  Response Notes
  The Critical Conversation
  Box 2.1: Field Notes from Literary Criticism: How Readers Have Responded to Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
  “Fielding” Some Questions
  Exercises

CHAPTER 3

Writing the Critical Essay: Form and the Critical Process

• Overview
  Form
  Box 3.1: Field Notes from the Visual Arts: Visual Mapping Exercises
  How to Move from an “F” to an “A”: Modelling the Process
• Writing and Rewriting
  Commentary
• The Six Common Places of Literary Criticism
• Contemptus Mundi and Complexity
  Appearance/Reality
  Everywhereness
  Paradigm
  Paradox
• Critical Approaches
• Formalism: New Criticism and Deconstruction
  Reader-Response Criticism
  Cultural Criticism
• Finding a Place for Your Interpretation in the Critical Conversation
  Exercises

CHAPTER 4

Model Essays

• Student Essays
• Michelle Demers
  Ryan Miller
  Lydia Marston
• Professional Essays
• Alice Farley
  Katherine Sutherland
  Harold H. Kolb, Jr.
• Exercises

CHAPTER 5

Reading and Writing about Poetry

• Overview
  Some Opening Thoughts about Poetry
• “Poetry Should Not Mean / But Be”
• Reading a Poem
• “This Part of the Country”
  Entering into the Poem
• An Interview with a Poet
  Exercises
  A Critical Tool Kit for Writing about Poetry
• Caedmon’s Hymn
  Box 5.1: Field Notes from a Literary Critic: Anglo-Saxon Accentual Meter
  
• Re-entering into the Poem
• Parts of a Poem
  Types of Feet
  Types of Rhythm
  Types of Rhyme
  Types of Poetic Device
• Integrating Quotations
  How to Move from an “F” to an “A”: Modelling the Process
• Commentary
• Box 5.2: Field Notes from a Writing Teacher: Thirteen Ways of Thinking about a Poem
  Complete Texts for the Poems Referenced in This Chapter
• “Sonnet 116”
  “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
  “On His Blindness”
  “To His Coy Mistress”
  “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
  “My Last Duchess”
  “Come Down, O Maid”
  “O Captain! My Captain!”

CHAPTER 6

Some Final Words on Writing about Literature

• Four Critics Speak on Their Personal Approaches to Critical Writing
• Alice Farley
  Katherine Sutherland
  Michael Jarrett
  Helen Gilbert

Appendix: Language Use in English Studies

Resources for Further Study

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

I have used Writing about Literature a number of times to great success. As it progressively takes students from being uninformed readers of a literary text to becoming engaged critics in conversation with advanced scholars, it provides an invaluable framework for introducing students to the fundamental goals and techniques of critical writing, the kinds of issues that critics explore and evidence that they use, strategies for presenting and organizing critical arguments, and the necessity of revision in the writing of criticism. This new edition’s section on writing about poetry will certainly broaden the appeal of the book to students and instructors.” — Paul C. Jones, Ohio University

“Covering topics from close reading to theory, and from visually mapping drafts to final revisions, this book is ideal for introductory courses in literature or composition. But Writing about Literature does more than serve as a guide for students seeking to become careful readers and clear writers: it teaches them how to be students at university and scholars in the field. The addition of poetry in the second edition widens the scope of the book in terms of genre and methodologies, while it retains the deep conceptional framework of the first.” — Emily Kugler, Colby College

Praise for the first edition:

“For every student who has stared hopelessly at a blank screen, waiting for a literary essay miraculously to appear; and for every instructor who has looked upon a set of just-graded student essays with a sense of failure verging on despair—this book offers immediate help.” — Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University

From the Publisher

"Covering topics from close reading to theory, and from visually mapping drafts to final revisions, this book is ideal for introductory courses in literature or composition. But Writing about Literature does more than serve as a guide for students seeking to become careful readers and clear writers: it teaches them how to be students at university and scholars in the field. The addition of poetry in the second edition widens the scope of the book in terms of genre and methodologies, while it retains the deep conceptional framework of the first."

Emily Kugler

"I have used Writing about Literature a number of times to great success. As it progressively takes students from being uninformed readers of a literary text to becoming engaged critics in conversation with advanced scholars, it provides an invaluable framework for introducing students to the fundamental goals and techniques of critical writing, the kinds of issues that critics explore and evidence that they use, strategies for presenting and organizing critical arguments, and the necessity of revision in the writing of criticism. This new edition's section on writing about poetry will certainly broaden the appeal of the book to students and instructors."

Paul C. Jones