02/10/2024
You might want to save this post! Think of it as your formula for critical reading:
1. What is the story? Sometimes this is totally obvious, but the more complex the book, the more complex the plot can be. It is worth sitting down and figuring out the chronology of you’re dealing with a twisty structure or multiple timelines. It’s worth parsing those weird scenes to make sure you understand what’s actually happening. It’s worth summarizing the book in three sentences and deciding on the climax. This stuff can feel basic, but it’s the essential starting point for every literary discussion.
2. What does it mean? Texts don’t exist in a vacuum. When you sit down to read something, your ideas, opinions, knowledge, and experience shape your ideas about the text. Find literary devices and tropes you know, and think about how they work in the world. Write “this reminds me of” at the top of a page and jot down every single thing you can think of, from childhood memories to sitcom moments to that thing you’re studying in chemistry. The more connections you can make, the better your conversations about the text will be.
3. Why does it matter? I feel like we don’t ask this enough about literature! I like to use critical lenses here — if we look at this from a Marxist or a semiotic or a postcolonial perspective, how does that change the way we read it? As long as you can pull evidence from the text to support it, any argument is fair game! Push yourself to get specific with that evidence, though. You don’t have to like a book to analyze it — in fact, sometimes it’s easier to talk about a book you didn’t love than one you did.
Work through these questions — it’ll take a couple of days or weeks! — and you’ll have a fully formed literature unit finished without any reading guide needed.
Will you try this?
