history affects literature essay

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › The Textuality of History and the Historicity of Texts

The Textuality of History and the Historicity of Texts

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 17, 2016 • ( 1 )

Louis Montrose , in Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture claimed that New Historicism deals with the “textuality of history and the historicity of texts.” While “historicity of texts”refers to the “cultural specificity and social embedment of all modes of writing”, the rootedness of a text in the social-historical, political and cultural ambiance of its production, “textuality of history” refers to the fictionality and constructedness of history, which Foucault in his archaeological approach to history as archive, explicates, arguing that old historians erase and even out all inconsistencies, contradictions and discontinuities of actual history and develop a coherent and consistent historical narrative, complying with the dominant ideology of the state, There is no such thing as objective history, because history is a narrative, which, like language, is produced in a context and is governed by the social, economic and political interests of the ‘dominant groups/institutions. This approach of New Historicism is parallel to Derrida ‘s notion that reality is textualised and Foucault’s idea of social structures as determined by dominant discursive practices. Thus, New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature.

In the book Metahistory , Hayden White suggests that all historical “facts” come to us only in the form of narrative or language, where the historian links the facts in a cause-effect sequence. The hierarchy of the narrative is not dependent on the facts but on the historian’s interpretation and evaluation of the facts. New Historicism, following White’s formulations, proposes that history is always written with the historian’s present context and with its need in mind. All history writing is about interpreting the past for the sake of the present. New Historicism seeks to bring our attention to the “location” of the historian in construction of history. New Historicism also argues that history is made up of conflicting visions and attitudes. Rejecting all overarching narratives of history, New Historicism believes that every age has its schisms and tensions, and the task of the historian is to locate these conflicting/ struggling versions of any society/age by paying attention to subversive, anarchic and counter movements and moments in every age, which the narratives of history generally wipe out.

Share this:

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Louis Montrose , New Historicism

Related Articles

• New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Research & Collections
• Borrow & Request
• Computing & Technology

History: Historiography and Historiographical Essays/Literature Reviews

• Beginning Your Historical Research
• Primary Sources
• Historiography and Historiographical Essays/Literature Reviews
• Books and Ebooks
• Dissertations and Theses
• Review Sources (Including Book Reviews)
• Latin America
• Middle East
• United States
• History of Science
• Annotated Bibliographies and Literature Reviews

Strategy to Search for Historiographical Sources

In addition to using the sources identified below, a useful strategy to search for historiographical literature in library catalogs and article databases is to search for:

 historiograph* (historiography OR historiographical) AND particular subject area(s) 

What is Historiography

History is a classical intellectual/research discipline with roots stretching back for centuries.  As Such, History has its own, complex tradition of literature review called “historiography.”  Simply defined, Historiography is the History of History – that is, the study of the History produced and written on a given project, including:

• Approaches/angles to studying that history
• Subthemes beneath a wider historical umbrella theme
• Different historical traditions, including Social History, Cultural History, Diplomatic and Political History, the History of Science, Intellectual History, and much more
• Theoretical Frameworks used to shape that history
• Existing used and unused sources to research particular histories

There are also many books dedicated to historiography – both as a discipline (that is, books dedicate to the general theory, philosophy and practice of historiography) as well as books reviewing historiographies of scholarship in particular areas of history. 

The American Historical Review is the seminal journal published in the United States dedicated to Historiography on all (not just U.S.) historical topics.

Reference Sources to Assist with Historiography

There are several excellent sources to identify key historians and key works in particular fields (whether subject, temporal, or geographically based).  These may also be helpful in preparing for qualifying exams as they provide overviews of the historiography on given topics as well as the frameworks and theoretical orientations associated and/or applied with/to them.  Unfortunately the print works below are dated; much new history has been written since their publication!

• The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing by Kelly Boyd Call Number: Geisel Floor2W Reference D14.E58 1999 Publication Date: 1999
• A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing by D. (Daniel) R. Wolf Call Number: Geisel Floor2W Reference D13.G47 1998 Publication Date: 1999
• The AHA Guide to Historical Literature Call Number: Geisel Floor2W Reference D2.A55 1995 Publication Date: 1995 More than Historical Essays, this contains Bibliographies in Different Fields

Oxford Bibliographies :  Annotated bibliographies and Bibliographic Essays on a wide range of subjects which not only point to excellent publications, but also provide examples of bibliographic essays, which are closely related to historiographical essays and literature reviews.

• << Previous: Primary Sources
• Next: Books and Ebooks >>
• Last Updated: Jun 26, 2024 4:03 PM
• URL: https://ucsd.libguides.com/History

What Is the Connection between Literature and History?

Our promise to you.

Founded in 2002, our company has been a trusted resource for readers seeking informative and engaging content. Our dedication to quality remains unwavering—and will never change. We follow a strict editorial policy , ensuring that our content is authored by highly qualified professionals and edited by subject matter experts. This guarantees that everything we publish is objective, accurate, and trustworthy.

Over the years, we've refined our approach to cover a wide range of topics, providing readers with reliable and practical advice to enhance their knowledge and skills. That's why millions of readers turn to us each year. Join us in celebrating the joy of learning, guided by standards you can trust.

Editorial Standards

At Language & Humanities, we are committed to creating content that you can trust. Our editorial process is designed to ensure that every piece of content we publish is accurate, reliable, and informative.

Our team of experienced writers and editors follows a strict set of guidelines to ensure the highest quality content. We conduct thorough research, fact-check all information, and rely on credible sources to back up our claims. Our content is reviewed by subject-matter experts to ensure accuracy and clarity.

We believe in transparency and maintain editorial independence from our advertisers. Our team does not receive direct compensation from advertisers, allowing us to create unbiased content that prioritizes your interests.

The main connection between literature and history is that literature is used to report and represent history. The two are, therefore, intertwined with one another. The biggest difference between literature and history is that the latter posits itself as fact, while the former is taken to be an artistic form. The twin ideas of fact and entertainment intertwine often within literature and history to produce historical fiction and narrative non-fiction.

Literature takes many forms. They range from personal notes to poems and non-fiction articles. Literature can be presented in a number of mediums including online content, magazine and newspaper articles and in book form. For a work to be considered literary, it usually requires artistic merit and quality. What constitutes as literary is a subjective matter and rarely agreed upon.

History at its most basic is the story of humanity. This is divided into anthropology, archaeology and history. History is the story of man’s representation of his own story — that is to say, what people through the ages have chosen to record and write down. Literature and history both occur in numerous forms, from tax records and letters to full histories of whole nations and people.

Early reports of events wove mythology into the story with varying degrees of success. Homer makes no illusions about the literary quality of his epic poems the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” Thucydides provided a fully historical account of the Peloponnesian War, but seems to have died before the war was concluded, leaving key elements missing. Herodotus, on the other hand, tried to report full history in the manner of Thucydides, though predating him, but made no effort to separate myth from truth.

Literature and history are connected in the field of comparative literature . This analytical mode of study attempts to compare any two pieces of literature from different languages or cultures. The French school of thought examines literature for its historical and national basis. The German school of Peter Szondi, on the other hand, looks for social inspirations, while the American school looks for universal truths.

Historical fiction is a popular form of literature. It shows the deep connections between history and literature by having the writer study a particular era from the past in order to write a story. These stories may be wholly fictional or they might be fictionalized accounts of real people and real events. Popular authors of historical fiction include Bernard Cornwell who wrote books on Napoleonic Europe, the Dark Ages and the Battle of Agincourt, and Hilary Mantel, who wrote “Wolf Hall,” a book about Thomas Cromwell.

Literary fiction , on the other hand, tends to be contemporary to events or recollections of those events from someone who experienced them. These can be used as historical documents for their contexts and for studying how history inspires literature. Chinese writers such as Gao Xingjian in “Soul Mountain” and Ma Jian in “Red Dust” combine literature and history during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” explores the life of a student in the 1960s in Tokyo. Romanian-German writer Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her books depicting her life under the Ceausescu regime in Romania.

Related Articles

• What Is Involved in the Study of Literature?
• What Is Literature Analysis?
• What Is British Literature?
• What Are the Different Types of Inspirational Fiction?
• What Is Apocalyptic Fiction?

Our latest articles, guides, and more, delivered daily.

Relation Between Literature & History

Stella vale.

History and literature have been intertwined since the very beginning. Real events were recounted as stories to teach the younger generation wisdom or lessons about their origins. These stories sometimes stretched the truth to entertain the audience or make them reflect further. The main difference between history and literature is the purpose of each: History intends to record events as accurately as possible, while literature interprets historical or everyday events in an imaginative way.

Explore this article

• Historical Recording of Events
• Literary Recording of Events
• Historians' Distortion of Reality
• Literary Distortion of Reality

1 Historical Recording of Events

Historians’ responsibility is to accurately record -- as legacy for future generations -- events that produce significant changes in the lives of people living in a community, a nation or the whole world. To support their claims, they collect evidence of milestones as well as everyday life. For example, to relate World War II, historians used documents, books and media such as newspapers, photographs, audio and video recordings of the time.

2 Literary Recording of Events

Literature writers also record events. Their focus, however, even when they truthfully describe historical events, is on communicating the author’s intellectual and emotional interpretation of these events to the reader. By using the same example of World War II, a novel such as Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” presents a more personal perspective of the cannibalistic horrors of war. The novel depicts the state of mind of a soldier fighting to survive in a prisoner of war camp during the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. In writing the satirical novel, Vonnegut drew on his own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden.

3 Historians' Distortion of Reality

At times, historians have also distorted reality -- sometimes because they wanted to please their masters; at other times, their countries' dictatorial regimes forced them to bend the truth. For instance, Western countries believed for many decades the communist propaganda that the Soviet regime was setting as historical events. This institutionalized falsehood, however, started to falter with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” -- a painstakingly researched chronicle of communist forced-labor camps where millions died from executions or harsh conditions during Joseph Stalin's regime.

4 Literary Distortion of Reality

Literature authors are well known for using their imagination and creativity to describe fictitious characters, events and realms. They draw their inspiration from myths, legends and history to create a unique, altered reality for readers. For example, George R.R. Martin’s popular “A Song of Ice and Fire” is inspired by historical events in medieval England, the Wars of the Roses, but his story portrays an imaginary world of peculiar characters, customs and political games.

• 1 Difference Between: Difference between History and Literature
• 2 Gutenberg College: The Importance of History; David Crabtree
• 3 The New Yorker: Just Write It; Laura Miller

About the Author

Based in Vancouver, B.C., Stella Vale discovered her passion for writing while studying for her Bachelor of Arts in English. She has an MBA and a Master in economics and is a PhD candidate in business. Vale is a proposal writer and owner of a college in Vancouver.

Related Articles

Southern Art & Poetry From the Civil War

What Were the Causes of Nationalism in Germany?

Pre-Christian Germanic Beliefs

The Difference Between a Tall Tale and a Folktale

British Literature Comparison of Romanticism and Modernism

What Is the Narrative Argument of "The Jilting of Granny...

The Importance of Learning English Literature

How Did Hearst & Pulitzer Use Newspapers to Provoke...

The Significance of the Bull in the Minoan Religion

Religious Symbolism of the Ox and the Donkey

Details About Mordred's Death From the Arthurian Legends

Short Stories with Morals for Children in Third Grade

Apophis in Egyptian Mythology

Classroom Activities on "The Pit & the Pendulum"

Who Were the Amalekites in the Bible?

Puritan Literature Characteristics

How Did the Crusades Affect Exploration and Trade?

Who Were the Assyrians in the Bible?

What Is the American Literary Canon?

What Made Che Guevara a Leader?

Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers.

• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Copyright Policy
• Manage Preferences

© 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, All Rights Reserved. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer .

Subscription Offers

Give a Gift

History is Literature

Writing history with skill and verve is not a distasteful exercise. 

‘It is important for the historian not only to write, but to write well.’ Thus ran a particularly controversial essay title which was recently put to history students sitting their Finals at one of our most ancient universities. This question provoked what might at first glance seem a surprising level of controversy. 

The literary merits of non-fiction are obvious and frequently rewarded. The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work documenting the Soviet Union and its latter-day emotional after-effects, which the committee called ‘a monument to suffering and courage in our time’, is testament to that. And she is not the first historian of sorts to win the prize; Winston Churchill was similarly honoured in 1953 for what was described as ‘his mastery of historical and biographical description’ (in addition to the obvious: his ‘brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’).

But though the literary and the historical can co-exist, should they? Should the writers of history make conscious decisions about their work on the basis of little more than style? I would humbly suggest that the answer to both of those questions is yes – and that the writing of history would be greatly improved – both in quality and reach – if more people thought so too. 

Take Niall Ferguson, for example. The Pity of War , his controversial reassessment of the First World War, met with both rapturous praise and protracted criticism when it was first published. Much of the negative reaction to the book could be justified on entirely scholarly grounds. Some did not care for his unorthodox conclusions, while others did not think they were adequately supported by the facts. Yet more scholars took issue with his use of the counterfactual to elucidate tricky historical questions; to them his mode of analysis was little more than a parlour game. There are legitimate historical defences of his work too, but the point I wish to make is this: a great deal of the criticism Ferguson received seemed to be based on little more than a dislike of his tone. 

Here was a young, energetic historian writing a bold, revisionist work, but all many could think to say in criticism was that he did so in an entirely unbecoming manner. His writing seemed too showy, too glib – too much like journalism. But there was something that these critics had overlooked: the effect of Ferguson’s book on those who operated outside of academic circles.

Ferguson’s book was one of the first works of ‘serious history’ I ever read, and its effect on me was electrifying. Irrespective of his arguments (which, it must be said, were dynamic and exciting in and of themselves), the book was elegantly and engagingly written; it seemed like a literary achievement – and that was true regardless of all that was said about its historical merits.

And examples of literary history are hardly new: Edward Gibbon’s magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would be the lesser without his luxurious prose style and ironic wit; and Lord Macaulay – himself a favourite of Churchill’s – would not have achieved the cultural prominence he did without the wide circulation of his literary and poetic talents.

This category could include Peter Pomerantsev, whose book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible – a beautifully written examination of modern Russia and its turbulent recent past – is on the longlist for this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize. It is not strictly history, but Pomerantsev’s narrative – which contains thoughtful, thorough examinations of Russian archetypes he met during his time in the country, as well as a brilliant exposition of the ways in which the Putin government controls domestic media and politics – is still essential for understanding Russia’s recent past. Other examples of history as literature include Sebastian Faulks’ The Fatal Englishmen , a compelling triple biography of bright young things who never made it to middle age, and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk , an emotionally raw memoir of coping with grief combined with an experimental biography of T. H. White. All of these books exhibit noteworthy literary merit; each attracts a wider audience than a more conventional historical work would; and each ought to be embraced and emulated for those very reasons.

Increased attention on writing well will not debase the nature of historical writing; it will not debase the currency. Well-written is not the same, necessarily, as popular – and certainly not equivalent to populist. (Though there do need to be elements of both within the discourse for it to function effectively. I was once posed the question of whether the world would be better if all books of a historical nature were written, at the very lowest level, for undergraduates. The point the questioner was trying to make – and it is an especially valid one – is that without popular history, soon there would be no new generations of undergraduates at all.)

Writing history with skill and verve is not a distasteful exercise. Instead it can inspire young minds, advance new and provocative ways of thinking about the world, and assist in the production of that which may approach true literature. It can reignite old memories, revitalise and revolutionise form and genre – and, as the Nobel Committee has wisely chosen to acknowledge this year, it can do great good for society at large on a truly magnificent scale.

James Snell  is a writer at Harry's Place and Left Foot Forward. .  @James_P_Snell

Popular articles

Italy’s Cult of Fascist Martyrs

A Brief History of English Numeracy

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, August 14). How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide. Scribbr. Retrieved June 25, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/literary-analysis/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to write a thesis statement | 4 steps & examples, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, how to write a narrative essay | example & tips, what is your plagiarism score.

College of Arts and Sciences

History and American Studies

• What courses will I take as an History major?
• What can I do with my History degree?
• History 485
• History Resources
• What will I learn from my American Studies major?
• What courses will I take as an American Studies major?
• What can I do with my American Studies degree?
• American Studies 485
• For Prospective Students
• Student Research Grants
• Honors and Award Recipients
• Phi Alpha Theta

Alumni Intros

• Internships

Literature Review Guidelines

Literature review (historiographic essay): making sense of what has been written on your topic., goals of a literature review:.

Before doing work in primary sources, historians must know what has been written on their topic.  They must be familiar with theories and arguments–as well as facts–that appear in secondary sources.

Before you proceed with your research project, you too must be familiar with the literature: you do not want to waste time on theories that others have disproved and you want to take full advantage of what others have argued.  You want to be able to discuss and analyze your topic.

Your literature review will demonstrate your familiarity with your topic’s secondary literature.

GUIDELINES FOR A LITERATURE REVIEW:

1) LENGTH:  8-10 pages of text for Senior Theses (485) (consult with your professor for other classes), with either footnotes or endnotes and with a works-consulted bibliography. [See also the  citation guide  on this site.]

2) NUMBER OF WORKS REVIEWED: Depends on the assignment, but for Senior Theses (485), at least ten is typical.

3) CHOOSING WORKS:

Your literature review must include enough works to provide evidence of both the breadth and the depth of the research on your topic or, at least, one important angle of it.  The number of works necessary to do this will depend on your topic. For most topics, AT LEAST TEN works (mostly books but also significant scholarly articles) are necessary, although you will not necessarily give all of them equal treatment in your paper (e.g., some might appear in notes rather than the essay). 4) ORGANIZING/ARRANGING THE LITERATURE:

As you uncover the literature (i.e., secondary writing) on your topic, you should determine how the various pieces relate to each other.  Your ability to do so will demonstrate your understanding of the evolution of literature.

You might determine that the literature makes sense when divided by time period, by methodology, by sources, by discipline, by thematic focus, by race, ethnicity, and/or gender of author, or by political ideology.  This list is not exhaustive.  You might also decide to subdivide categories based on other criteria.  There is no “rule” on divisions—historians wrote the literature without consulting each other and without regard to the goal of fitting into a neat, obvious organization useful to students.

The key step is to FIGURE OUT the most logical, clarifying angle.  Do not arbitrarily choose a categorization; use the one that the literature seems to fall into.  How do you do that?  For every source, you should note its thesis, date, author background, methodology, and sources.  Does a pattern appear when you consider such information from each of your sources?  If so, you have a possible thesis about the literature.  If not, you might still have a thesis.

Consider: Are there missing elements in the literature?  For example, no works published during a particular (usually fairly lengthy) time period?  Or do studies appear after long neglect of a topic?  Do interpretations change at some point?  Does the major methodology being used change?  Do interpretations vary based on sources used?

Follow these links for more help on analyzing  historiography  and  historical perspective .

5) CONTENTS OF LITERATURE REVIEW:

The literature review is a research paper with three ingredients:

a) A brief discussion of the issue (the person, event, idea). [While this section should be brief, it needs to set up the thesis and literature that follow.] b) Your thesis about the literature c) A clear argument, using the works on topic as evidence, i.e., you discuss the sources in relation to your thesis, not as a separate topic.

These ingredients must be presented in an essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion.

6) ARGUING YOUR THESIS:

The thesis of a literature review should not only describe how the literature has evolved, but also provide a clear evaluation of that literature.  You should assess the literature in terms of the quality of either individual works or categories of works.  For instance, you might argue that a certain approach (e.g. social history, cultural history, or another) is better because it deals with a more complex view of the issue or because they use a wider array of source materials more effectively. You should also ensure that you integrate that evaluation throughout your argument.  Doing so might include negative assessments of some works in order to reinforce your argument regarding the positive qualities of other works and approaches to the topic.

Within each group, you should provide essential information about each work: the author’s thesis, the work’s title and date, the author’s supporting arguments and major evidence.

In most cases, arranging the sources chronologically by publication date within each section makes the most sense because earlier works influenced later ones in one way or another.  Reference to publication date also indicates that you are aware of this significant historiographical element.

As you discuss each work, DO NOT FORGET WHY YOU ARE DISCUSSING IT.  YOU ARE PRESENTING AND SUPPORTING A THESIS ABOUT THE LITERATURE.

When discussing a particular work for the first time, you should refer to it by the author’s full name, the work’s title, and year of publication (either in parentheses after the title or worked into the sentence).

For example, “The field of slavery studies has recently been transformed by Ben Johnson’s The New Slave (2001)” and “Joe Doe argues in his 1997 study, Slavery in America, that . . . .”

Your paper should always note secondary sources’ relationship to each other, particularly in terms of your thesis about the literature (e.g., “Unlike Smith’s work, Mary Brown’s analysis reaches the conclusion that . . . .” and “Because of Anderson’s reliance on the president’s personal papers, his interpretation differs from Barry’s”). The various pieces of the literature are “related” to each other, so you need to indicate to the reader some of that relationship.  (It helps the reader follow your thesis, and it convinces the reader that you know what you are talking about.)

7) DOCUMENTATION:

Each source you discuss in your paper must be documented using footnotes/endnotes and a bibliography.  Providing author and title and date in the paper is not sufficient.  Use correct Turabian/Chicago Manual of Style form.  [See  Bibliography  and  Footnotes/Endnotes  pages.]

In addition, further supporting, but less significant, sources should be included in  content foot or endnotes .  (e.g., “For a similar argument to Ben Johnson’s, see John Terry, The Slave Who Was New (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 3-45.”)

8 ) CONCLUSION OF LITERATURE REVIEW:

Your conclusion should not only reiterate your argument (thesis), but also discuss questions that remain unanswered by the literature.  What has the literature accomplished?  What has not been studied?  What debates need to be settled?

Additional writing guidelines

How have History & American Studies majors built careers after earning their degrees? Learn more by clicking the image above.  

Recent Posts

• History and American Studies Symposium–April 26, 2024
• Fall 2024 Courses
• Fall 2023 Symposium – 12/8 – All Welcome!
• Spring ’24 Course Flyers
• Internship Opportunity – Chesapeake Gateways Ambassador
• Congratulations to our Graduates!
• History and American Studies Symposium–April 21, 2023
• View umwhistory’s profile on Facebook
• View umwhistory’s profile on Twitter

The Essay: History and Definition

Attempts at Defining Slippery Literary Form

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

"One damned thing after another" is how Aldous Huxley described the essay: "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind" or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig."

Since Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal in prose , this slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't an attempt to define the term in this brief article.

In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction  -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book. However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier.

One way to start is to draw a distinction between articles , which are read primarily for the information they contain, and essays, in which the pleasure of reading takes precedence over the information in the text . Although handy, this loose division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts. So here are some other ways that the essay might be defined.

Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay. Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance."

True, the writings of several well-known essayists ( William Hazlitt and Ralph Waldo Emerson , for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings." But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own.

Oddly enough, critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists. These principles are rarely formal patterns of organization , that is, the "modes of exposition" found in many composition textbooks. Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought -- progressions of a mind working out an idea.

Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types --  formal and informal, impersonal and familiar  -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:

Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: One remained informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository .

The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.

But as fuzzy as these terms might be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind. 

Many of the terms used to characterize the essay -- personal, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly, conversational -- represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical voice or projected character (or persona ) of the essayist.

In his study of Charles Lamb , Fred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is to "the experience of the essayistic voice." Similarly, British author Virginia Woolf has described this textual quality of personality or voice as "the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool."

Similarly, at the beginning of "Walden, "  Henry David Thoreau reminds the reader that "it is ... always the first person that is speaking." Whether expressed directly or not, there's always an "I" in the essay -- a voice shaping the text and fashioning a role for the reader.

Fictional Qualities

The terms "voice" and "persona" are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as E.B. White confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter." 

In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction." Similar considerations of voice and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":

It seems to convey the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self -- an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others.

But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction.

Reader's Role

A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer (or a writer's persona) and a reader (the implied audience ) is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true. The difference between a short story, say, and an autobiographical essay  lies less in the narrative structure or the nature of the material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered.

Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred -- as it occurred, that is, in the version by the essayist. The narrator of an essay, the editor George Dillon says, "attempts to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid." 

In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay might lie in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the essayist tries to arouse.

At Last, a Definition—of Sorts

With these thoughts in mind, the essay might be defined as a short work of nonfiction, often artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as authentic a certain textual mode of experience.

Sure. But it's still a greased pig.

Sometimes the best way to learn exactly what an essay is -- is to read some great ones. You'll find more than 300 of them in this collection of  Classic British and American Essays and Speeches .

• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• What Does "Persona" Mean?
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
• What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
• Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples
• The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• What Is Colloquial Style or Language?
• Definition and Examples of Formal Essays
• What Is Expository Writing?
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• exploratory essay
• What Is Tone In Writing?
• The Difference Between an Article and an Essay

Literature and Culture

• First Online: 11 April 2019

Cite this chapter

• Jeneen Naji 4 ,
• Ganakumaran Subramaniam 5 &
• Goodith White 6  

725 Accesses

1 Citations

Many theoretical approaches to literary studies assume that the relationship between literature and culture is an important one, in the sense that literature both reflects and is a means of reflecting on the culture in which it is produced. In defining culture, the writers describe the effects of global culture on what is read, and the notion that any literary text cannot help being a partial and biased representation of the culture it portrays. Students need to be supported in questioning the cultural assumptions made in texts and questioning stereotypes. The components of cultural awareness are explored and illustrated, and the chapter ends with a discussion of high and low culture as they apply to the texts students read.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Google Scholar  

Arnold, M. (1869). Culture and Anarchy . London: Smith, Elder.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture . London and New York: Routledge.

Brighton, T. (2004). Hell Riders: The Truth About the Charge of the Light Brigade . New York: Viking.

Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duffy, C. A. (2010). ‘Deportation’. In Love Poems . Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador.

Greenblatt, S. (1990). Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture . New York and London: Routledge.

Hall, G. (2015). Literature in Language Education . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Book   Google Scholar  

Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and Culture . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramsch, C. (2014). The Challenge of Globalization for the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Cultures. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 11 (2), 249–254. Available at http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v11n22014/kramsch.pdf .

Lazar, G. (1993). Literature and Language Teaching: A Guide for Teachers and Trainers . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levy, A. (2004). Small Island . London: Hachette UK.

Lim, C. (1998). The Teardrop Story Woman . New York, NJ: Overlook Press.

Maitland, S. (2013). Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales . London: Granta.

Toibin, C. (2010). Brooklyn . New York: Scribner.

Tomalin, B., & Stempleski, S. (1993). Cultural Awareness . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Media Studies, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

Jeneen Naji

School of Education, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia

Ganakumaran Subramaniam

Goodith White

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Goodith White .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Naji, J., Subramaniam, G., White, G. (2019). Literature and Culture. In: New Approaches to Literature for Language Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15256-7_4

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15256-7_4

Published : 11 April 2019

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-15255-0

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-15256-7

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Home ›
• Reviews ›

How Literature Changes the Way We Think

Michael Mack,  How Literature Changes the Way We Think , Continuum, 2012, 194pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781441119148.

Reviewed by Anders Pettersson, Umeå University, Sweden

Michael Mack maintains that we are accustomed to thinking of literature as mimetic, as a representation of reality such as it exists, while literature is in fact, according to him, a disruptive force, breaking up our fictions about the world we live in and showing us new possibilities for the future. For example, literature has the capacity to change our thinking about ageing by undermining the opposition between birth and ageing.

As an introduction to the main themes of Mack's book, let me quote him directly:

How Literature Changes the Way we Think attempts to illuminate literature's ethics of resilience by re-conceptualising our understanding of representation. Literature not only represents to us our world but it also shows us ways in which we can change the world or adapt to changes which have already taken place without our realization. Literature's cognitive dimension helps us cope with the current as well as future challenges by changing the way we think about ourselves, our society and those who are excluded from or marginalized within our society. . . . The literary discussion of the book attends to the ways in which contemporary novels (by Philip Roth and Kazuo Ishiguro amongst others) question the traditional opposition between birth (youth) and aging. By rendering these seemingly oppositional terms, complimentary literature changes the way we think about the demographic challenges our society increasingly faces. (p. 11) [Note that ' we ' in the title of the book should be ' We ', and "By rendering these seemingly oppositional terms, complimentary" should read "By rendering these seemingly oppositional terms complementary,"; misprints are not infrequent in the book].

Apart from the literary discussion to which Mack refers, his demonstration also proceeds via reflections on earlier thinkers whose reasoning can be related to the central argument, whether positively or negatively. The book contains seven chapters, and discussions of Spinoza, Arendt, Heidegger, de Man, Foucault, Žižek, and, particularly, Walter Benjamin figure prominently. Among examples from literature and the arts not only Roth and Ishiguro come in for consideration, but also, for example, Doctorow, Hölderlin, Celan, and the television series Mad Men . In this brief review I will not enter into Mack's wide-ranging discussions of philosophical and literary authors or of Mad Men . I will concentrate on the theses that are, according to Mack's own presentation just quoted, at the heart of his book.

Mack is teaching English literature and medical humanities, and the latter specialty no doubt explains his special focus on representations of birth and aging. He has earlier published books and articles on Spinoza and on aspects of German literature and German thinking over the last two centuries; Arendt and Benjamin are thinkers who have occupied him before. Mack does not, however, appear to have worked in literary theory or literary aesthetics, and I think that he radically underestimates how much it takes to say something new and interesting about the cognitive role of literature. I find his pronouncements on that subject sweeping and superficial; they can hardly be said to advance our understanding.

I am surprised to read that we are accustomed to thinking of literature as mimetic. The realistic novel is certainly still a very important genre, but that is not enough to justify Mack's claim (which, like many of his claims, comes without supporting evidence). Literature may have been primarily thought of as mimetic up until the nineteenth century, but then the focus largely shifted to regarding literature as expressive of its author's states of mind. Later, from the early twentieth century onwards, formal aspects of literature have been much in the foreground. Furthermore, even those who particularly stress the mimetic dimension of literature -- and the mimetic dimension is of course an undeniable aspect of literature, since literature is obviously a representational art -- do not understand literary representation as a copying of reality. It is thus not an original thought that we can derive ideas from literature about how we could or should live. In the orthodox Marxist tradition it was always, from Marx and Engels up to Socialist Realism, a central tenet that the literary representation of reality should not simply reproduce reality as it is but pay special attention to future-oriented tendencies. Nor has the idea that literature can change the way we think been alien to analytical philosophy of literature or mainstream literary studies; it is referred to, among many other functions of literature, in countless books and articles.

What is being debated when the cognitive role of literature is scrutinized theoretically -- which happens most of all in analytical literary aesthetics -- is the question of how literature can "say" something about reality. Can fictional literature convey statements, and if so, how? If the statements are really in the work, why is not then the literary work as such superfluous from a cognitive point of view: why can we not satisfy ourselves with having the statements and leaving the rest aside? There is a comprehensive specialized literature about issues like these, a literature ignored in Mack´s book. A defensible reconceptualization of literary representation will certainly have to take account of current specialist thought in the area, and it will have to engage closely and analytically with how literary texts function: with how linguistic representations work in general, and with the differentia specifica of literary representations and transactions.

There are, in addition, good reasons to be skeptical of generalizations about what literature does. "Literature" is a vague concept, and if you understand it broadly even an incoherent concept. Mack does not comment on the concept, but treats its content as if it were de facto unproblematic. Apparently, however, he is referring to modern high-quality fiction, drama, and poetry when speaking about literature. I do believe that you can make meaningful general observations about literature, taken in that sense, but modern high-quality fiction, drama, and poetry can assume many forms and cater to many different kinds of interest and need. Generalization about the effects of literature very easily becomes overgeneralization. Mack is certain that "literature critiques fiction" (p. 68; that is, that literature criticizes ideological distortions of reality) and connects us with "the unpredictability and inconsistency of our human condition" (ibid.). In one sense that is to say very little, for it would be problematic to evaluate literary texts highly (and other kinds of text too, for that matter) if they contained ideological distortions of reality or portrayed the human condition as perennially solid and safe. Understood in a more ambitious sense, however, as a kind of specification of what literature is about, Mack's generalization seems less convincing to me. It is true that modern high-quality fiction, drama, and poetry is sometimes focused on critiquing ideological distortions or connecting us with the uncertainty of our condition, but other such literature can seem more directed at simply making us think about ourselves and the social and natural world in which we live, or entertaining us, or fascinating us with new takes on familiar matters and with its inventive way of approaching reality, or other such things.

In his title, How Literature Changes the Way We Think , and in passages like the one quoted initially, Mack presupposes that literature does change the way we think. But does it? How do we know? That is a problem which Mack ignores. There are empirical investigations into the question of whether reading literature does affect our beliefs (by, for example, Richard J. Gerrig, Jèmeljan Hakemulder, and Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock), investigations that Mack does not mention. As I understand them, those investigations demonstrate that literature does have the capacity to affect our beliefs, but not that its capacity in this respect is any bigger than that of non-fiction texts or that the effects are more than transitory. I do not say that literature's cognitive effects are negligible or uninteresting or non-unique, far from it. I do maintain that the question of literature's cognitive effects is highly complex and that Mack has made no real efforts to charter that complexity. His optimistic claims on literature's behalf are just apodictic.

What, then, of birth and aging, the categories at the center of Mack's attention? Is it true that contemporary novels (by Roth and Ishiguro and others) question the traditional opposition between birth (youth) and aging and render these "seemingly oppositional" terms complementary? Well, at least Mack questions that opposition. He writes (p. 26): "As we have seen in this chapter, aging requires change. We start to age from the moment we are born. So the representational or standard opposition between aging and birth is actually fictitious." We are offered no evidence for the surprising idea that there is a standard opposition between aging and birth. The standard opposite of birth is, I suppose, death, or possibly non-birth, but it is certainly not aging. I doubt that there is a standard opposite of aging at all, but if there is, it could perhaps be not-aging, or possibly getting younger, but it can certainly not be birth. And although we no doubt start to age from the moment we are born, I fail to see how that obvious fact can make any standard oppositions in this area fictitious.

Mack comes back to the distinction between birth and aging, under partly new designations, later in his book, with equally confusing results. "One of the tasks of this book", he writes on p. 34, "is to render the oppositions between youth and age inoperable. The harm done by some representations is their production of static and mutually exclusive stereotypes." I do not doubt the existence of age stereotyping or the benefits of getting rid of such clichés, and we probably all agree that the distinction between young and old is not sharp and absolute. But how could it be made "inoperable"? Is there really no valid distinction to be made here? (And what, if anything, is the opposite of "age"? Certainly not "youth", which is, rather, the opposite of "old age".)

Spring 2025 Semester

Undergraduate courses.

Composition courses that offer many sections (ENGL 101, 201, 277 and 379) are not listed on this schedule unless they are tailored to specific thematic content or particularly appropriate for specific programs and majors.

• 100-200 level

ENGL 201.ST2 Composition II: The Mind/Body Connection

Dr. sharon smith.

In this online section of English 201, students will use research and writing to learn more about problems that are important to them and articulate ways to address those problems. The course will focus specifically on issues related to the body, the mind, and the relationship between them. The topics we will discuss during the course will include the correlation between social media and body image; the psychological effects of self-objectification; and the unique mental and physical challenges faced by college students today, including food insecurity and stress.

English 201 S06 and S11: Composition II with an emphasis in Environmental Writing

S06: MWF at 10–10:50 a.m. in Yeager Hall Addition 231

S11: MWF at 12–12:50 p.m. in Crothers Engineering Hall 217

Gwen Horsley

English 201 will help students develop skills to write effectively for other university courses, careers, and themselves. This course will provide opportunities to further develop research skills, to write vividly, and to share their own stories and ideas. Specifically, in this class, students will (1) focus on the relationships between world environments, land, animals and humankind; (2) read various essays by environmental, conservational, and regional authors; and (3) produce student writings. Students will improve their writing skills by reading essays and applying techniques they witness in others’ work and those learned in class. This class is also a course in logical and creative thought. Students will write about humankind’s place in the world and our influence on the land and animals, places that hold special meaning to them or have influenced their lives, and stories of their own families and their places and passions in the world. Students will practice writing in an informed and persuasive manner, in language that engages and enlivens readers by using vivid verbs and avoiding unnecessary passives, nominalizations, and expletive constructions.

Students will prepare writing assignments based on readings and discussions of essays included in Literature and the Environment and other sources. They will use The St. Martin’s Handbook to review grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and usage as needed.

Required Text: Literature and the Environment: A Reader On Nature and Culture. 2nd ed., edited by Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O’Grady.

LING 203.S01 English Grammar

TuTh 12:30-1:45 p.m.

Dr. Nathan Serfling

The South Dakota State University 2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog describes LING 203 as consisting of “[i]nstruction in the theory and practice of traditional grammar including the study of parts of speech, parsing, and practical problems in usage.”

“Grammar” is a mercurial term, though. Typically, we think of it to mean “correct” sentence structure, and, indeed, that is one of its meanings. But Merriam-Webster reminds us “grammar” also refers to “the principles or rules of an art, science, or technique,” taking it beyond the confines of syntactic structures. Grammar also evolves in practice through application (and social, historical, economic changes, among others). Furthermore, grammar evolves as a concept as scholars and educators in the various fields of English studies debate the definition and nature of grammar, including how well its explicit instruction improves students’ writing. In this course, we will use the differing sensibilities, definitions, and fluctuations regarding grammar to guide our work. We will examine the parts of speech, address syntactic structures and functions, and parse and diagram sentences. We will also explore definitions of and debates about grammar. All of this will occur in units about the rules and structures of grammar; the application of grammar rhetorically and stylistically; and the debates surrounding various aspects of grammar, including, but not limited to, its instruction.

ENGL 210 Introduction to Literature

Jodi andrews.

Readings in fiction, drama and poetry to acquaint students with literature and aesthetic form. Prerequisites: ENGL 101. Notes: Course meets SGR #4 or IGR #3.

ENGL 222 British Literature II

TuTh 9:30-10:45 a.m.

This course serves as a chronological survey of the second half of British literature. Students will read a variety of texts from the Romantic period, the Victorian period, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, placing these texts within their historical and literary contexts and identifying the major characteristics of the literary periods and movements that produced them.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature

Randi l. anderson.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various types of juvenile literature.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature: 5-12 Grade

In English 240 students will develop the skills to interpret and evaluate various genres of literature for juvenile readers. This particular section will focus on various works of literature at approximately the 5th-12th grade level.

Readings for this course include works such as Night, Brown Girl Dreaming, All American Boys, Esperanza Rising, Anne Frank’s Diary: A Graphic Adaptation, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Hobbit, Little Women, and Lord of the Flies . These readings will be paired with chapters from Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction to help develop understanding of various genres, themes, and concepts that are both related to juvenile literature, and also present in our readings.

In addition to exploring various genres of writing (poetry, non-fiction, fantasy, historical, non-fiction, graphic novels, etc.) this course will also allow students to engage in a discussion of larger themes present in these works such as censorship, race, rebellion and dissent, power and oppression, gender, knowledge, and the power of language and the written word. Students’ understanding of these works and concepts will be developed through readings, discussion posts, quizzes and exams.

ENGL 240.ST2 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

April myrick.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various genres of juvenile literature. Text selection will focus on the themes of imagination and breaking boundaries.

ENGL 242.S01 American Literature II

TuTh 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Dr. Paul Baggett

This course surveys a range of U.S. literatures from about 1865 to the present, writings that treat the end of slavery and the development of a segregated America, increasingly urbanized and industrialized U.S. landscapes, waves of immigration, and the fulfilled promise of “America” as imperial nation. The class will explore the diversity of identities represented during that time, and the problems/potentials writers imagined in response to the century’s changes—especially literature’s critical power in a time of nation-building. Required texts for the course are The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865 to the Present and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.

WMST 247.S01: Introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

As an introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, this course considers the experiences of women and provides an overview of the history of feminist thought and activism, particularly within the United States. Students will also consider the concepts of gender and sexuality more broadly to encompass a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities and will explore the degree to which mainstream feminism has—and has not—accommodated this diversity. The course will focus in particular on the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, ethnicity, and disability. Topics and concepts covered will include: movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights; gender, sexuality and the body; intersectionality; rape culture; domestic and gender violence; reproductive rights; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW); and more.

ENGL 283.S01 Introduction to Creative Writing

MWF 1-1:50 p.m.

Prof. Steven Wingate

Students will explore the various forms of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) not one at a time in a survey format—as if there were decisive walls of separation between then—but as intensely related genres that share much of their creative DNA. Through close reading and work on personal texts, students will address the decisions that writers in any genre must face on voice, rhetorical position, relationship to audience, etc. Students will produce and revise portfolios of original creative work developed from prompts and research. This course fulfills the same SGR #2 requirements ENGL 201; note that the course will involve creative research projects. Successful completion of ENGL 101 (including by test or dual credit) is a prerequisite.

English 284: Introduction to Criticism

This course introduces students to selected traditions of literary and cultural theory and to some of the key issues that animate discussion among literary scholars today. These include questions about the production of cultural value, about ideology and hegemony, about the patriarchal and colonial bases of Western culture, and about the status of the cultural object, of the cultural critic, and of cultural theory itself.

To address these and other questions, we will survey the history of literary theory and criticism (a history spanning 2500 years) by focusing upon a number of key periods and -isms: Greek and Roman Classicism, The Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Formalism, Historicism, Political Criticism (Marxism, Post-Colonialism, Feminism, et al.), and Psychological Criticism. We also will “test” various theories we discuss by examining how well they account for and help us to understand various works of poetry and fiction.

• 300-400 level

ENGL 330.S01 Shakespeare

TuTh 8-9:15 a.m.

Dr. Michael S. Nagy

This course will focus on William Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic works and on the cultural and social contexts in which he wrote them. In this way, we will gain a greater appreciation of the fact that literature does not exist in a vacuum, for it both reflects and influences contemporary and subsequent cultures. Text: The Riverside Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

ENGL 363 Science Fiction

MWF 11-11:50 a.m.

This course explores one of the most significant literary genres of the past century in fiction and in film. We will focus in particular on the relationship between science fiction works and technological and social developments, with considerable attention paid to the role of artificial intelligence in the human imagination. Why does science fiction seem to predict the future? What do readers and writers of the genre hope to find in it? Through readings and viewings of original work, as well as selected criticism in the field, we will address these and other questions. Our reading and viewing selections will include such artists as Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick. Students will also have ample opportunity to introduce the rest of the class to their own favorite science fiction works.

ENGL 383.S01 Creative Writing I

MWF 2-2:50 p.m.

Amber Jensen

Creative Writing I encourages students to strengthen poetry, creative nonfiction, and/or fiction writing skills through sustained focus on creative projects throughout the course (for example, collections of shorter works focused on a particular form/style/theme, longer prose pieces, hybrid works, etc.). Students will engage in small- and large-group writing workshops as well as individual conferences with the instructor throughout the course to develop a portfolio of creative work. The class allows students to explore multiple genres through the processes of writing and revising their own creative texts and through writing workshop, emphasizing the application of craft concepts across genre, but also allows students to choose one genre of emphasis, which they will explore through analysis of self-select texts, which they will use to deepen their understanding of the genre and to contextualize their own creative work.

ENGL 475.S01 Creative Nonfiction

Mondays 3-5:50 p.m.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 485.S01 Writing Center Tutoring

MW 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Since their beginnings in the 1920s and 30s, writing centers have come to serve numerous functions: as hubs for writing across the curriculum initiatives, sites to develop and deliver workshops, and resource centers for faculty as well as students, among other functions. But the primary function of writing centers has necessarily and rightfully remained the tutoring of student writers. This course will immerse you in that function in two parts. During the first four weeks, you will explore writing center praxis—that is, the dialogic interplay of theory and practice related to writing center work. This part of the course will orient you to writing center history, key theoretical tenets and practical aspects of writing center tutoring. Once we have developed and practiced this foundation, you will begin work in the writing center as a tutor, responsible for assisting a wide variety of student clients with numerous writing tasks. Through this work, you will learn to actively engage with student clients in the revision of a text, respond to different student needs and abilities, work with a variety of writing tasks and rhetorical situations and develop a richer sense of writing as a complex and negotiated social process.

ENGL 492.S01 The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Tuesdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Dr. Jason McEntee

In 1975, the United States officially included its involvement in the Vietnam War, thus marking 2025 as the 50th anniversary of the conclusion (in name only) of one of the most chaotic, confusing, and complex periods in American history. In this course, we will consider how literature and film attempt to chronicle the Vietnam War and, perhaps more important, its aftermath. I have designed this course for those looking to extend their understanding of literature and film to include the ideas of art, experience, commercial products, and cultural documents. Learning how to interpret literature and movies remains the highest priority of the course, including, for movies, the study of such things as genre, mise-en-scene (camera movement, lighting, etc.), editing, sound and so forth.

We will read Dispatches , A Rumor of War , The Things They Carried , A Piece of My Heart , and Bloods , among others. Some of the movies that we will screen are: Apocalypse Now (the original version), Full Metal Jacket , Platoon , Coming Home , Born on the Fourth of July , Dead Presidents , and Hearts and Minds . Because we must do so, we will also look at some of the more fascinatingly outrageous yet culturally significant fantasies about the war, such as The Green Berets and Rambo: First Blood, Part II .

ENGL 492.S02 Classical Mythology

TuTh 3:30-4:45 p.m.

Drs. Michael S. Nagy and Graham Wrightson

Modern society’s fascination with mythology manifests itself in the continued success of novels, films and television programs about mythological or quasi-mythological characters such as Hercules, the Fisher King, and Gandalf the Grey, all of whom are celebrated for their perseverance or their daring deeds in the face of adversity. This preoccupation with mythological figures necessarily extends back to the cultures which first propagated these myths in early folk tales and poems about such figures as Oðin, King Arthur, Rhiannon, Gilgamesh, and Odysseus, to name just a few. English 492, a reading-intensive course cross-listed with History 492, primarily aims to expose students to the rich tradition of mythological literature written in languages as varied as French, Gaelic, Welsh, Old Icelandic, Greek, and Sumerian; to explore the historical, social, political, religious, and literary contexts in which these works flourished (if indeed they did); and to grapple with the deceptively simple question of what makes these myths continue to resonate with modern audiences. Likely topics and themes of this course will include: Theories of myth; Mythological Beginnings: Creation myths and the fall of man; Male and Female Gods in Myth; Foundation myths; Nature Myths; The Heroic Personality; the mythological portrayal of (evil/disruptive) women in myth; and Monsters in myth.

Likely Texts:

• Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Faulkes, Anthony, trans. Edda. Everyman, 1995
• Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster. Forgotten Books, 2007
• Jones, Gwyn, Thomas Jones, and Mair Jones. The Mabinogion. Everyman Paperback Classics, 1993
• Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda . Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. Penguin Classics, 1969
• Apollodorus, Hesiod’s Theogony
• Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homeric Hymns
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Iliad, Odyssey
• Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica
• Ovid’s Heroides
• Greek tragedies: Orestaia, Oedipus trilogy, Trojan Women, Medea, Hippoolytus, Frogs, Seneca's Thyestes, Dyskolos, Amphitryon
• Clash of the Titans, Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy (and recent miniseries), Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

ENGL 492.ST1 Science Writing

Erica summerfield.

This course aims to teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing and presentation. The course examines opportunities for covering science, the skills required to produce clear and understandable text about technical subjects, and important ethical and practical constraints that govern the reporting of scientific information. Students will learn to present technical and scientific issues to various audiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on conveying the significance of research, outlining the aims, and discussing the results for scientific papers and grant proposals. Students will learn to write effectively, concisely, and clearly while preparing a media post, fact sheet, and scientific manuscript or grant.

Graduate Courses

Engl 575.s01 creative nonfiction.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles, and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 592.S01: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Engl 704.s01 introduction to graduate studies.

Thursdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Introduction to Graduate Studies is required of all first-year graduate students. The primary purpose of this course is to introduce students to modern and contemporary literary theory and its applications. Students will write short response papers and will engage at least one theoretical approach in their own fifteen- to twenty-page scholarly research project. In addition, this course will further introduce students to the M.A. program in English at South Dakota State University and provide insight into issues related to the profession of English studies.

ENGL 792.ST1 Grant Writing

This online course will familiarize students with the language, rhetorical situation, and components of writing grant proposals. Students will explore various funding sources, learn to read an RFP, and develop an understanding of different professional contexts and the rhetorical and structural elements that suit those distinct contexts. Students will write a sample proposal throughout the course and offer feedback to their peers, who may be writing in different contexts, which will enhance their understanding of the varied applications of course content. Through their work in the course, students will gain confidence in their ability to find, apply for, and receive grant funding to support their communities and organizations.