That would be the question, wouldn't? In the
introduction to the course, I mentioned that the course is
designed to introduce you not just to fiction, but to ways of
experience and talking about fiction. So what might those ways be?
My own background is in a field called Rhetoric, and so I'm going to
borrow something called the Rhetorical Situation to introduce some of
the common ways in which we talk about fiction. This is usually
presented as a triangle, but in order to avoid a complicated graphic,
I'm adjusting it a bit:
So let's break this down:
We're actually going to start this course by focusing on the
READER. That is, we're going to learn to critically examine your
response to a story. The key here is "critically" - the goal is to
move beyond "I liked it" to an analytical response that gives other
readers insight into the text. Often, reader response will focus on
other elements like context, discussing how the differences between
the world and culture in which a story was produced and in which the
story is read challenge the reader.
The most obvious element is the TEXT itself, specifically
the internal elements of the text. This probably the form of literary
discussion you're most familiar with. It involves terms like
symbolism, point-of-view, and other terms that we'll discuss in the
Introduction to Literary Analysis.
Another element that literature scholars sometimes discuss is the
AUTHOR. Discussions of the author's life and circumstances can
sometimes illuminate the work. The danger, of course, is over overly
simplistic identification: just because the writer had an older
brother doesn't mean that the older brother in a story is a reference
to him.
CONTEXT refers to a couple of different things. Historical
Criticism attempts to shed new light on the work by looking at the
time and place in which it was written. Key to these explorations are
references or themes within the story that readers of that time and
place would recognize and that readers of another time and place might
not.
There are other forms of contextual criticism that tend to look at
how certain social issues are manifested in the story. Feminist
criticism, for example, looks at gender issues, particularly as they
pertain to female characters. Marxist criticism looks at ideas of
social and economic class; Queer Theory interrogates issues of sexual
orientation. Race and ethnicity are also commonly discussed.
PURPOSE is where we get one of my personal
favorites: rhetorical criticism. "Rhetoric" can be loosely defined as
the art pf persuasion, and rhetorical criticism looks at how the
author/text persuades the reader to a particular conclusion or
perspective, whether it's about events in the story itself or about a
larger social issue.
Like any scheme, this is overly simplistic and a
little reductive, but it gives you a basic idea of some of the things
we'll be talking about in the next eight weeks.