Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Instructor:

1. Initiating Students into Literary Study

2. A Brief History of English Studies

3. This Book’s Form and Philosophy

Preface to the Student:

1. An Introduction to the Critical Conversation

2. What is Academic Discourse?

3. A Method for Learning Academic Discourse

4. How to Use this Book

I. Getting Started: From Personal Response to Field Stance

1. Overview

2. Writing is Rhetorical

3. Documenting Your Personal Response

4. How To Use Your Personal Response

5. Field Notes from Critical Theory and Psycholinguistics: “How We Read”

6. Becoming a Literacy Researcher

7. New Contexts for Reading and Writing

1. The Social Stance

2. The Institutional Stance

3. The Textual Stance

8. Field Notes from Composition Studies: The Five-Paragraph Theme

1. The Field Stance

9. Summary: Why It Is So Important to Become Aware of All Four Stances

10. Field Notes from Linguistics: The Effect of Context on Reading

11. An Interview with a Literary Critic

12. Exercises

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

1. Overview

2. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” by Stephen Crane (as first published in 1898)

3. Response Notes

4. The Critical Conversation

5. Field Notes from Literary Criticism: How Readers Have Responded to Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”

6. “Fielding” Some Questions

7. Exercises

III. Writing the Critical Essay: Form and the Critical Process

1. Overview

2. Form

3. Field Notes from the Visual Arts: “Visual Mapping”

4. Exercises

5. How to Move from an “F” to an “A”: Modelling the Process

6. Writing and Rewriting

7. Commentary

8. The Six Common Places of Literary Criticsm

1. Contemptus Mundi and Complexity

2. Appearance/Reality

3. Everywhereness

4. Paradigm

5. Paradox

9. Critical Approaches

1. New Criticism and Deconstruction

2. Reader-Response Criticism

3. Cultural Criticism

10. Finding a Place for Your Interpretation in the Critical Conversation

11. Exercises

IV. Model Essays

1. Student Essays

1. Michelle Demers

2. Ryan Miller

3. Lydia Marston

2. Professional Essays

1. Alice Farley

2. Katherine Sutherland

3. Harold Kolb, Jr.

3. Exercises

V. Some Final Words on Writing about Literature

1. Four Critics Speak on Their Personal Approaches to Writing

1. Alice Farley

2. Katherine Sutherland

3. Michael Jarrett

4. Helen Gilbert

Appendix: Language Use in English Studies

Resources for Further Reading

Works Cited in Writing About Literature

Index