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 andPsycholinguistics: “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 Comesto 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 CriticalConversation
  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-SaxonAccentual 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 theProcess
• • Commentary
• Box 5.2: Field Notes from a Writing Teacher: Thirteen Ways ofThinking 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. (Will) Garrett-Petts is Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

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