Preface Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis and Writing presents an innovative approach to analyzing literary and other kinds of texts. The approach is built around eight research-proven strategies that help students interpret texts and write persuasive arguments about their interpretations. In fifteen chapters, students are taken from the basic strategies for performing close readings to increasingly sophisticated interpretive techniques that enable them to involve historical and literary context, engage with literary theory, and situate themselves in ongoing critical conversations about texts. Digging into Literature demystifies these methods of interpretation, making the goals and practices of literary analysis available to students who have trouble “getting” what their literature instructors expect. Moreover, it empowers students beyond literature courses, extending their abilities to practice advanced forms of analytic argument. The frustration we experienced when we first taught introductory college literature classes motivated us to write this book. We found that while most writing-aboutliterature textbooks provide students with an extensive vocabulary for describing and categorizing texts and their formal elements, the vocabulary did not help students understand what we meant when we asked them to make an interpretive argument about a text. Many students struggled to understand the difference between literary analysis and plot summary, and even the students who did grasp the difference often had trouble understanding why we preferred a rich, complex analysis over a simpler one. We also felt that there was a disturbing disconnect between the types of student writing encouraged by traditional approaches to writing about literature and the kind of writing that we wanted students to try. For instance, most traditional textbooks invite students to write a “character analysis” or to explicate a single formal feature of a text, such as its plot or use of metaphor. Such student writing differs sharply from the rich and lively arguments that literary critics and English professors publish—or that we ask of our more advanced students. While advanced literary criticism investigates these formal features, it does so to extend and deepen our understanding of a text’s cultural meaning and significance. Why shouldn’t students experience the kind of excitement expert literary critics feel when they read or produce an interpretation that takes risks and offers a new, thought-provoking analysis of a text? Moreover, we found that our most successful students were those who seemed to recognize intuitively the need to move beyond straightforward explication and make the types of arguments that we valued in our own writing. Thus, we found ourselves rewarding interpretive skills that differed from the more traditional approaches that we explicitly taught and required.
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