How To Write a Literary Essay

Just a reminder: You should consult your "How to Write a Literary Essay" packet, paying particular attention to the "seven steps." This is designed to help you write your reader response essays. It should be a valuable tool; use it! Excerpt:

Analyzing literature is a learned skill and a process you can master. As you gain more practice with this kind of thinking and writing, you’ll be able to craft a method that works best for you. Until then, here are seven basic steps to writing a well-constructed literary essay:

1. Ask questions*
2. Collect evidence
3. Construct a thesis
4. Develop and organize arguments
5. Write the introduction
6. Write the body paragraphs
7. Write the conclusion

* Read the "ask questions" section carefully.

Growing up with your favorite fictional characters

On today's London Guardian book blog, Wayne Gooderham asks an interesting question: "Does anyone else find themselves measuring their own age against the people they read about in novels?"

I was 29 when I first became interested in the ages of literary characters. Re-reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I made the shocking discovery that somehow I was now a year older than Yossarian. How did this happen? Rebellious, wise-cracking Yossarian should be forever my senior, someone to look up to and secretly admire. An older brother or dodgy uncle almost. I shouldn't be able to overtake him. It didn't seem right. I was too young for such revelations.

Shaken by this, I got to thinking: not only was I a year older than Yossarian, but I was two years older than Hans Castorp when he came down from the Magic Mountain (and as readers of the Thomas Mann novel will confirm, he was up there for a very long time). Worse still, I was 13 years older than JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield. This was all very worrying to say the least. I went back to Catcher in the Rye and was relieved to discover that while I still enjoyed the book immensely, some of Holden's attitude and behaviour did strike me as a tad immature. Perhaps not quite as immature as they should appear to a 29-year-old, but enough to make me feel I was heading in vaguely the right direction life-wise.

Suddenly I was acutely aware of time moving on and dragging me along with it while Yossarian and his peers stayed youthfully behind. It was obvious that I needed to find a new yardstick to measure myself by. Measure myself how exactly? I'm not entirely sure. If part of the reason we read literature is to find out how to live, then I suppose I just liked the reassurance that someone reaching the grand old age of twenty-nine could still be living a life deemed interesting enough to be written and read about (Holden Caulfield hadn't quite lost his grip on me yet).

read on...