Writing About Literature: A Guide for the Student Critic

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

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

Review :
“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