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ENG206 Six American Authors/Kingsley Author’s Name: Peer Review/ 2nd Formal/Long Paper Draft Reviewer’s Name:
Remember that in reviewing this paper, you may help the author clarify, add, or change parts. Giving the author useful feedback, also gives you practice in going over writing. Make this work for you by writing full and thoughtful answers.
1. Tell your reviewer the things you want him/her to look at closely and offer suggestions for revision.
2. Identify the option the author chose. Identify and summarize the central idea, argument, or position the author develops throughout his/her paper. If the author has not yet identified/developed a central idea, position, or argument, point this out and suggest idea(s).
3. Determine whether the author works closely with the texts chosen (including at least two). If the author does not make reference to specific places in the books or illustrate his/her points with specific examples from these books, point this out and suggest places where he/she could or should do this.
4. Point out one or two sections you find particularly effective. State why you have chosen these sections.
5. Now, point out one or two places where you have questions about something the author has written or where you see space for clarification or further writing.
6. Look for evidence of the author using the terms/language for analyzing literature we have discussed this semester. Point out places where he/she does this or if the author does not do this, point it out and suggest places where he/she could.
7. What did you learn about your own paper by reviewing this one?
ENG206 Six American Authors/Kingsley Author’s Name: Peer Review/ 1st Formal/Long Paper Draft Reviewer’s Name:
Remember that in reviewing this paper, you may help the author clarify, add, or change parts. Giving the author useful feedback, also gives you practice in going over writing. Make this work for you by writing full and thoughtful answers.
1. Tell your reviewer the things you want him/her to look at closely and offer suggestions for revision.
2. Identify the option the author chose. Identify and summarize the central idea, argument, position the author develops throughout his/her paper. If the author has not yet identified or developed a central idea, position, or argument, point this out and suggest idea(s).
3. Determine whether the author works closely with the texts chosen (includes at least two). If the author doesn’t make reference to specific places in the books/illustrate his/her points w/ specific examples from the books, point this out/suggest places where he/she can do this.
4. Point out one/ two sections you find particularly effective. State why you have chosen these.
5. Now, point out one/two places where you have questions about something the author has written or where you see space for clarification or further writing.
6. Look for the writer’s use of the terms/language for analyzing literature we have discussed this semester (satire, irony, metaphor, etc ) or questions from the interpretive strategies list (website and handout). Point out places where he/she does this. If the writer doesn’t do this, point it out and suggest terms/questions the writer could use and where.
7. What did you learn about your own paper by reviewing this one?
ResourcesReading/Interpretive/Analytical Strategies
Below is a list and brief description of some of the more widely-used interpretive or analytical strategies for looking at a piece of literature or looking at and interpreting and analyzing a text : Formalist Strategies: Formalists read literature as an independent work of art rather than reflection of the author’s state of mind or as a representation of a moment of history. Formalists offer intense examinations of the relationship btw form and meaning w/in a work –emphasize how work arranged. Pay attention to intrinsic matters in a work – such as diction, irony, paradox, metaphor and symbol as well as plot, characterization, and narrative technique.
Things such as biography, history, politics, economics, etc. are considered extrinsic – less important than what goes on in the autonomous text.
Biographical: Knowledge of an author’s life can help readers understand a work more fully. Sometimes biographical information does not change our understanding of a work as much as it enriches our understanding.
Psychological: Psych. Approaches draw upon Freud’s theories and other psychoanalytic theories to understand more fully the text, the writer, and the reader. Critics use such approaches to explore the motivation of characters and the symbolic meaning of events while biographers speculate about a writer’s own motivation –conscious or unconscious—in a literary work. Psychological approaches are also used to describe and analyze the reader’s personal response to a text.
Historical Strategies: Use history as a means of understanding a literary work more clearly—the writing to a contemporary to an author (i.e. how Stowe’s novel U.Tom’s Cabin influenced by her reading of contemporary slave narratives) is an important element of the history that shapes a work. Historical readings of literature treat a literary text as a document reflecting, producing, or being produced by the social conditions of the time , giving equal focus to the social milieu and the work itself.
Four Influential historical strategies: literary history criticism, Marxist criticism, new historicist and cultural criticism:
Literary History: Emphasis shifted from history to the work -- place work in the context of its time and make connections with other literary works that may have influenced the author. Basic strategy is to illuminate the historic background in order to shed light on some aspect of the work itself.
Marxist: developed from interest in radical reform during 1930s when critics looked to literature as a means of furthering proletarian social and economic goals – based largely on writings of Karl Marx. Focus on ideological content of the work – its explicit and implicit assumptions about matters such as culture, race, class and power—Marxist studies goal reveal ideological issues and correct social injustice. Marxist critics argue that criticism, like lit., is political because it either challenges or supports economic oppression. Marxist critics pay more attention to content and themes of lit rather than to its form.
New Historicist: Developed since 1960s—emphasizes the interaction between the historic content of a work and a modern reader’s understanding and interpretation of the work. In contrast to traditional literary historians, new hist. attempt to describe the culture of a period by reading many different kinds of texts that traditional historians might previously have left for sociologists and anthropologists. New historicist criticism acknowledges more fully than trad. Hist approaches the competing nature of readings of the past and tends to offer new emphases and perspectives. By emphasizing that historical perceptions are governed, at least in part, by our own concerns and preoccupations, new historicists sensitize us to the fact that the history on which we choose to focus is colored by being reconstructed from our own present moment. This reconstructed history affects our reading of texts.
Cultural Criticism: Like New. Hists. Focus on the historical contexts of a literary work but pay particular attention to popular manifestations of social, political, and economic contexts. Popular culture and high culture are given equal emphasis. Cultural critics draw from new hists., psychology, gender studies, and deconstructionism to analyze not only literary texts but also talk shows, comic strips, commercials, baseball cards, etc. Post colonial criticism is part of cultural criticism – looks at cultural behavior and expression in relationship to the formerly colonized world – analysis of works written by writers from countries once controlled by colonizing powers – written about colonial cultures by writers from colonizing countries, etc.
Gender Strategies: Gender critics explore how ideas about men and women – what is masculine and feminine—can be regarded as socially constructed by particular cultures – ideas about gender and what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior are created by cultural institutions and conditioning. Gender criticism expands categories and definitions of what is masc/fem—regards sexuality as more complex than merely masc.’fem. hetero, homo.
Feminist: Analyze literature by both men/women in effort to understand literary representations of women as well as the writers and cultures that create them. Concerns about how gender affects way men and women write about one another –do women use language differently from way men do – Feminist critics use broad range of disciplines include psych, sociology, linguistics, etc.
Mythological Strategies Attempt to identify what in a work creates deep universal responses in readers. Psych. Critics interpret the symbolic meaning of characters and actions in order to understand more fully the unconscious dimensions of an author’s mind, a character’s motivation, or a reader’s response, mythological critics (also known as archetypal critics) interprets the hopes, fears, and expectations of entire cultures. Literary critics use myths as a strategy for understanding how human beings try to account for their lives symbolically. Myths help people organize their experiences –these systems of belief embody a cultures assumptions and values. What matters to mythological critic is not truth of those assumptions and values –what matters is that they reveal common human concerns—look for underlying recurring patters in lit. that reveal universal meanings.
Reader- Response Strategies: Focuses its attention on the reader rather than the work itself – attempts to describe what goes on in the reader’s mind during process of reading text in a sense all approaches (esp. psych and myth) concern themselves with the reader’s response but reader response strongly emphasizes the reader’s active contraction of the text--- in effect we get a reading of the reader who comes to the work with certain expectations and assumptions which are either met or not – Just as writing is a creative act, reading is –since it also produces a text.
Reader Response critics do not assume a lit. work is a finished text with fixed formal properties –seen as an evolving creation of the reader as he/she processes character, plot, . No single definitive reading of a text – readers create rather than discover meaning in texts. Readers who go back to a work find different responses –almost as though two different people have read the text – Not after a “correct” reading of the text” – looking at the reader’s experience of the text.
Calls attention to how we read and what influences our reading. It does not attempt to define what a literary work means on the page but rather what it does to an informed reader --a reader who understands language and conventions used in a given work. Not a rationale for mistaken or bizarre readings of works – but opens up possibilities of plurality of readings shaped by readers’ experiences with the text.
Deconstructionist Strategies: Insist literary works do not yield a single fixed meaning. There can never be absolute knowledge about anything because language can never say what we intend it to mean. Anything we write conveys meaning we never intended -- so the deconstructionist argument goes. Language is not a precise instrument but a power whose meanings are caught in and endless web of possibilities that cannot be untangled. Thus, any idea or statement that insists on being understood separately can ultimately be deconstructed to reveal its relations and connections to contradictory and opposite meanings.
Deconstructionists focus on the gaps and ambiguities that reveal a text’s instability and indeterminacy – not easy to summarize or paraphrase
Source:
Meyer, Michael. Poetry: An Anthology. 3rd Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s: Boston, 2001. Questions for Interpretive Strategies Below are questions, grouped by interpretive strategy, you may use to apply that interpretive or reading strategy to the text you choose. These questions could help you get started applying the strategy and deciding how to focus your analysis.
Formalist Questions
1. How do various elements of the work—plot, character, point of view, setting, tone, diction, image, symbol, and so on – reinforce or reveal its meanings?
2. How are the elements related to the whole?
3. What issues does the work raise? How does the work’s structure reveal or resolve those issues?
Biographical Questions
1. Are facts about the writer’s life relevant to your understanding to the work? How are the relevant to your understanding of the work?
2. Are the characters and incidents in the work versions of the writer’s own experiences? Are they treated factually or imaginatively?
3. How (show where and how) do you think the writers values are reflected in the work?
Psychological Questions
1. How does the work reflect the author’s personal psychology?
2. What do the characters’ emotions and behavior reveal about their psychological states? What types of personalities are they?
3. Are psychological matters such as repression, dreams, and desire presented unconsciously or consciously by the author?
Historical Questions
1. How does the work reflect the period in which it is written?
2. What literary or historical influences helped to shape the form and content of the work?
3. How important is the historical context to interpreting the work?
Marxist Questions
1. How are class differences presented in the work? Are the characters aware or unaware of the economic and social forces that affect their lives?
2. How do economic conditions determine the characters’ lives?
3. What ideological values are explicit or implicit?
4. Does the work challenge or affirm the social order it describes?
New Historicist Questions
1. What kinds of documents outside the work seem especially relevant for shedding light on the work?
2. How are social values contemporary to the work reflected or refuted in the work?
3. How does your own historical moment affect your reading of the work and its historical reconstruction?
Cultural Studies Questions
1. What does the work reveal about the cultural behavior contemporary to it?
2. How does popular culture contemporary to the work reflect or challenge the values implicit or explicit in the work?
3. What kinds of cultural documents contemporary to the work add to your reading of it?
4. How do your own cultural assumptions affect your reading of the work and the culture contemporary to it?
Gender Studies Questions
1. How are the lives of men and women portrayed in the work? Do the men and women in the work accept or reject these roles?
2. Is the form and content of the work influenced by the author’s gender?
3. What attitudes are explicit or implicit concerning heterosexual, homosexual, or lesbian relationships? Are these relationships sources of conflict? Do they provide resolutions to conflicts?
4. Does the work challenge or affirm traditional ideas about men and women and same-sex relationships?
Mythological Questions
1. How does the story resemble other stories in plot, character, setting, or use of symbols?
2. Are archetypes presented, such as quests, initiations, scapegoats, or withdrawals and returns?
3. Does the protagonist undergo any kind of transformation such as movement from innocence to experience that seems archetypal?
4. Do any specific allusions to myths shed any light on the text?
Reader-Response Questions
1. How do you respond to the work?
2. How do your own experiences and expectations affect your reading and interpretation?
3. What is the work’s original or intended audience? To what extent are you similar to or different from that audience?
4. Do you respond in the same way to the work after more than one reading?
Deconstructionist Questions
1. How are contradictory and opposing meanings expressed in the work?
2. How does the meaning break down or deconstruct itself in the language of the text?
3. Would you say that ultimate definitive meanings are impossible to determine and establish in the text? Why? How does that affect your interpretation?
4. How are implicit ideological values revealed in the work?
These questions will not apply to all texts. Nor are they mutually exclusive. You can combine questions to explore a text from more than one critical perspective simultaneously. The questions should help you discover significant issue(s) in the text from which you can develop a persuasive analysis while using relevant evidence.
Question Suggestions: Meyer, Michael. Poetry: An Anthology. 3rd Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s: Boston, 2001
Formalist Strategies: Formalists read literature as an independent work of art rather than reflection of the author’s state of mind or as a representation of a moment of history. Formalists offer intense examinations of the relationship btw form and meaning w/in a work –emphasize how work arranged. Pay attention to intrinsic matters in a work – such as diction, irony, paradox, metaphor and symbol as well as plot, characterization, and narrative technique. Things such as biography, history, politics, economics, etc. are considered extrinsic – less important than what goes on in the autonomous text.
Biographical: Knowledge of an author’s life can help readers understand a work more fully. Sometimes biographical information does not change our understanding of a work as much as it enriches our understanding.
Psychological: Psych. approaches draw upon Freud’s theories and other psychoanalytic theories to understand more fully the text, the writer, and the reader. Critics use such approaches to explore the otivation of characters and the symbolic meaning of events while biographers speculate about a writer’s own motivation –conscious or unconscious—in a literary work. Psychological approaches are also used to describe and analyze the reader’s personal response to a text.
Gender Strategies: Gender critics explore how ideas about men and women – what is masculine and feminine—can be regarded as socially constructed by particular cultures – ideas about gender and what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior are created by cultural institutions and conditioning. Gender criticism expands categories and definitions of what is masc / fem—regards sexuality as more complex than merely masc., fem., hetero, homo. Feminist: Analyze literature by both men/women in effort to understand literary representations of women as well as the writers and cultures that create them. Concerns about how gender affects way men and women write about one another –do women use language differently from way men do – Feminist critics use broad range of disciplines include psych, sociology, linguistics, etc.
Reader- Response Strategies: Focuses its attention on the reader rather than the work itself – attempts to describe what goes on in the reader’s mind during process of reading text in a sense all approaches (esp. psych and myth) concern themselves with the reader’s response but reader response strongly emphasizes the reader’s active contraction of the text--- in effect we get a reading of the reader who comes to the work with certain expectations and assumptions which are either met or not Just as writing is a creative act, reading is –since it also produces a text.
Reader Response critics do not assume a lit. work is a finished text with fixed formal properties –seen as an evolving creation of the reader as he/she processes character, plot, . No single definitive reading of a text – readers create rather than discover meaning in texts. Readers who go back to a work find different responses –almost as though two different people have read the text – Not after a “correct” reading of the text” – looking at the reader’s experience of the text.
Calls attention to how we read and what influences our reading. It does not attempt to define what a literary work means on the page but rather what it does to an informed reader --a reader who understands language and conventions used in a given work. Not a rationale for mistaken or bizarre readings of works – but opens up possibilities of plurality of readings shaped by readers’ experiences with the text.
Source: Meyer, Michael. Poetry: An Anthology. 3rd Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s: Boston, 2001.
English 206: Six American Authors Sp ‘07 Kingsley
Notes on Thoreau:
In tackling Thoreau, especially Walden, it might be useful or helpful to understand a little about his influences. Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts and attended Harvard, was part of a group of writers and intellectuals which included, among others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott (father to Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women).
I have placed a link below to a description or discussion of the philosophy of transcendentalism in Wikipedia below. I also suggest that you look it up in Britannica Online (the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica) which you can access through the UMass Healey Library. Go the library homepage and click on Electronic Sources: Databases and Indexes. Go to Databases and Index page and click on letter “B” to go the Britannica Online. A pop up will appear prompting you to enter your Barcode in order to access the content. The Britannica Online article is a little more user-friendly than the Wikipedia article and the links it offers to other sites are quite good, but I cannot post or link it here as the security features on the site prevent this. As UMass students, however, you have access to all this content using the barcode on your student i.d.
Transcendentalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
A brief description of transcendentalism from Wikipedia: Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early-to mid-19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental. Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among their core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, as well as Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, George Putnam, and Sophia Peabody, the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a time, Peabody and Hawthorne lived at the Brook Farm Transcendentalist utopian commune. Later Hawthorne became an anti-transcendentalist. Walden Background: Published 1854: pre-Civil War;5 years prior to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species Thoreau wanted to cure himself of what he saw as “over-civilzation” whch he linked to timidyt & uncritical faith in the authority of others (xvi)
Walden: not a wilderness adventure but “..an effort to locate & give voice to the wilderness w/in the cultivated and domesticated” (xvi) Thoreau’s voice/style: “…effort to use words in ways that recapture forgotten aspects of their original meaning” (xviii) Thoreau was not especially religious like most other transcendentalists. However, “…the New England culture of the day was so saturated with religious attitudes and controvery that Thoreau often seems religious even whrn not.” Thoreau’s focus in Walden: “…the larger purpose of his project was to describe not Walden and its surroundings but the effects of Walden and its surroundings on his marvelously sensitive and resonsive mind” (xviii) Characteristics of Thoreau’s Writing:
“In Walden Thoreau is clear as Emerson seldom was, about the location of meaning and value. He is saying that it does not reside in the natural facts or in social institutions or in anything ‘out there’ but in consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the analogy perceiving , metaphor-making, mythopoetic power of the human mind “ Leo Marx xviii).
Changing Critical Response to Thoreau and Walden:
Although, “Thoreau’s engagement w/the politics of his day has always been central to readings of his work …” And “…readers often regard Walden as the ultimate expression of N.E. elite culture: liberal in sentiment but hopelessly compromised by its entanglement w/ social institutions of the status quo” (xxxi) And, “…many readers have complained that Walden’s preoccupation w/ langusge and consciousness compromises th forceful sopcial commentary w/ which T. opens the book…” Reading Questions for Walden: When reading Chapter 1: “Economy,” think about/answer the following questions: Why does he write? Who is his audience? Why does he discuss the use of “I” snd whether it is okay or ego? What picture does Walden giveof the U.S. at this time?
Thoreau believed “Americans are suffering a kind of moral and spiritual depression” (xxxvii)
Observations on Walden: The chapter “Economy” is filled with examples of men and women driven by “trivial social expectations” which leave them alienated from their sourroundings “ …individuals have an obligation to challenge the status quo when that status quo diminishes their lives and the lives of others (xxxix)
Civil Disobedience Questions to ask: In the first few pages of the essay one could say that Thoreau laysout a theory of gov’t. Can we say what this theory is? What is the role of government according to Thoreau? What are the responsibilities of government? What is the individual’s responsibility versus the government’s responsbilty? What rhetorical strategies does Thoreau employ or adopt to make audiences see and be sympathetic to a relatively unpopular position?
Quotations from or work with specific passages:
Refers to the “right of revolution” (305). When? Why?
Look at paragraph on page 306 about when to resist government and when not.
Thoreau critiques those activities we would “normally’ cheer.. giving alms, etc. (309)
“What is man’s responsibility toward unjust laws” (310-110)
Good neighbor vs. bad subjetct (321)
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