Write 2 pages of Notes on the reading. Using either the Cornell Method or Outlining Method. Disregard the homework assignment portion of the texts. I just need notes, and please DO NOT write these notes sounding like an AI. Thank you
Text: CHAPTER 1 What Is Literature? How and Why Does It Matter? The title of this book, Making Literature Matter, may seem curious to you. Presumably your school assumes that literature already matters, for otherwise it would hardly offer courses in the subject. Quite possibly you are taking this course because you think literature is important or hope it will become so for you. But with our title, we want to emphasize that literature does not exist in a social vacuum. Rather, literature is part of human relationships; people make literature matter to other people. We are especially concerned with how you can make literature matter to others as well as to yourself. Above all, we point out ways you can argue about literature, both in class discussions and in your own writing. Here is a poem that has engaged many readers, judging by how often it has appeared in literature anthologies since its first publication in 1963. The author is James Wright (1927–1980), who was born and raised in the industrial town of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972. Many of Wright’s poems deal with the working-class life he experienced. Early in his career as a poet, he wrote in conventional forms, but later he became much more experimental. The following poem, perhaps Wright’s most famous, is a case in point. The poem’s speaker, you will see, comes to a judgment about whether he’s managed to make his very existence matter. JAMES WRIGHT Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. [1963] Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. Did the last line startle you? For many readers, Wright’s poem is memorable because its conclusion is unexpected, even jarring. At first glance, nothing in the speaker’s description of his surroundings justifies his blunt selfcondemnation at the end. If anything, the previous lines evoke rural tranquility, so that a more predictable finish would be “I am now at peace.” Instead, the speaker suddenly criticizes himself. Intrigued by this mysterious move, readers usually look at the whole poem again, studying it for signs of growing despair. Often they debate with one another how the ending does relate to preceding lines. Thus, although the poem’s speaker implies his life hasn’t mattered, the poem itself has mattered to readers, plunging them into lively exchanges over how to interpret Wright’s text. We present Wright’s poem to begin pointing out how literature can matter to people. We will keep referring to the poem in this introduction. But now we turn to three big questions: How have people defined literature? Why study literature in a college writing course? What can you do to make literature matter to others? How Have People Defined Literature? Asked to define literature, most people would include Wright’s text, along with other poems. In addition to poetry, they would say literature encompasses fiction (novels as well as short stories) and drama. But limiting the term’s scope to these genres can be misleading, for they are rooted in everyday life. Often they employ ordinary forms of talk, although they may play with such expressions and blend them with less common ones. Someone lying in a hammock may, in fact, recite details of the landscape — especially if he or she is talking to someone else on a cell phone, as is common nowadays. And quite possibly you have heard someone proclaim “I have wasted my life” or make a similar declaration. In any case, surely much of Wright’s language is familiar to you, even if you haven’t seen it arranged into these particular phrases and lines. The genres regarded as literary are tied in other ways to everyday behavior. For instance, things function as symbols not only in poems but also in daily conversation. Even people who aren’t poets have little trouble associating shadows, evening, darkness, and hawks with death. (In the case of Wright’s poem, the issue then becomes whether the text supports or complicates this association.) Hammocks, too, are often treated as meaningful images. They are familiar symbols of “taking it easy.” (With Wright’s poem, the issue again becomes whether the speaker’s hammock signifies more than just leisure.) Throughout the day, then, it can be said that people put literary genres into practice. Perhaps you have commented on certain situations by quoting a song lyric or citing words from a poem, story, or play. Surely you are poetic in the sense that you use metaphors in your everyday conversations. After all, most of us are capable, as Wright’s speaker is, of comparing a butterfly to a leaf (even if we aren’t apt to compare horse droppings to “golden stones”). Probably you are often theatrical as well, carrying out various kinds of scripts and performing any number of roles. Furthermore, probably you are engaged in storytelling no matter how little fiction you actually write. Imagine this familiar situation: you are late for a meeting with friends because you got stuck in traffic, and now you must explain to them your delay. Your explanation may well become a tale of suspense, with you the hero racing against time to escape the bumper-to-bumper horde. As writer Joan Didion has observed, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Almost all of us spin narratives day after day because doing so helps us meaningfully frame our lives. (Unfortunately, the story that Wright’s speaker tells is “I have wasted my life.” Nevertheless, it’s a means for interpreting his existence, and maybe somehow it helps him keep on living.) You may admit that literature is grounded in real life and yet still tend to apply the term only to written texts of fiction, poetry, and drama. But this tendency is distinctly modern, for the term literature has not always been applied so restrictively. Literature was at first a characteristic of readers. From the term’s emergence in the fourteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, literature was more or less a synonym for literacy. People of literature were assumed to be well read. In the late eighteenth century, however, the term’s meaning changed. Increasingly it referred to books and other printed texts rather than to people who read them. At the beginning of this shift, the scope of literature was broad, encompassing nearly all public writing. But as the nineteenth century proceeded, the term’s range shrank. More and more people considered literature to be imaginative or creative writing, which they distinguished from nonfiction. This trend did take years to build; in the early 1900s, literature anthologies still featured essays as well as excerpts from histories and biographies. By the mid-1900s, though, the narrower definition of literature prevailed. This limited definition has become vulnerable. From the early 1970s, a number of literature faculty have called for widening it. In 1979, for instance, a National Endowment for the Humanities–Modern Language Association institute entitled “Women’s Nontraditional Literature” applied the term literature to genres that had not been thought of as such. Participants studied essays, letters, diaries, autobiographies, and oral testimonies. To each of these genres, women have contributed much; in fact, the institute’s participants concluded that a literature curriculum slights many works by women if it focuses on fiction, poetry, and drama alone. Of course, even within these three categories, the term literature has been selectively applied. Take the case of novelist and short-story writer Stephen King, whose books have sold millions of copies. Despite his commercial success, a lot of readers — including some of his fans — refuse to call King’s writing literature. They assume that to call something literature is to say that it has artistic merit, and for them King’s tales of horror fall short. Yet people who use the term literature as a compliment may still disagree about whether a certain text deserves it. Plenty of readers do praise King’s writing as literature, even as others deem it simply entertainment. In short, artistic standards differ. To be sure, some works have been constantly admired through the years; regarded as classics, they are frequently taught in literature classes. Hamlet and other plays by William Shakespeare are obvious examples. But in the last twenty years, much controversy has arisen over the literary canon, those works taught again and again. Are there good reasons why the canon has consisted mostly of works by white men? Or have the principles of selection been skewed by sexism and racism? Should the canon be changed to accommodate a greater range of authors? Or should literary studies resist having any canon at all? These questions have provoked various answers and continued debate. Also in question are attempts to separate literature from nonfiction. Much nonfiction shows imagination and relies on devices found in novels, short stories, poems, and plays. The last few years have seen the emergence of the term creative nonfiction as a synonym for essays, autobiographies, histories, and journalistic accounts that use evocative language and strong narratives. Conversely, works of fiction, poetry, and drama may center on real-life events. For example, beginning with James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock,” several of the poems in our book can easily be seen as autobiographical. Perhaps you have suspected already that the speaker in Wright’s poem is Wright himself. In numerous interviews, Wright admitted as much. He acknowledged that he based the poem on his own experience of lying in a hammock, which really did lead him to think “I have wasted my life.” A note of caution is in order. While testimony such as Wright’s can be illuminating, it should be used prudently. In crucial respects, Wright’s poem still differs from Wright’s life. The text is a representation of his experience, not the experience itself. His particular choice and arrangement of words continue to merit study, especially because he could have depicted his experience in plenty of other ways. As critic Charles Altieri notes, important to specify are the ways in which a poem is “binding the forms of syntax to the possibilities of feeling.” Keep in mind, too, that the author of a work is not always the ideal guide to it. After all, the work may matter to its readers by raising for them issues and ideas that the author did not foresee. Besides, often the author’s comments about the text leave certain aspects of it unexplained. Though Wright disclosed his poem’s origins, readers must still decide how to connect its various images to its final line. Even so, “Lying in a Hammock” confirms that a literary work can stem from actual circumstances, whatever use the reader makes of facts about them. Some people argue, however, that literature about real events is still “literary” because it inspires contemplation rather than action. This view of literature has traditionally been summed up as “art for art’s sake.” This notion brushes aside, however, all the poems, novels, short stories, and plays that encourage audiences to undertake certain acts. Included in our book, for example, is Sherman Alexie’s “Capital Punishment,” a poem designed to spark resistance to the death penalty. True, not every poem is so conspicuously action-oriented. Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock” seems more geared toward reflection, especially because the speaker is physically reclining while he observes nature and ponders his life. But readers may take even this poem as an incitement to change their behavior, so that they can feel they have not wasted their own lives. In our book, we resist endorsing a single definition of literature. Rather, we encourage you to review and perhaps rethink what the term means to you. At the same time, to expand the realm of literature, we include several essays in addition to short stories, poems, and plays. We also present numerous critical commentaries as well as various historical documents. Throughout the book, we invite you to make connections among these different kinds of texts. You need not treat them as altogether separate species. What Makes Literature “Literature”? We have suggested that, in some respects, literature can resemble other writing. So, too, can it resemble ordinary speech. Still, literature can be viewed as a distinct category, even if controversies arise over what specific texts belong to it. Usually, works classified as literature permit the reader to treat their characters as imaginary. Just as often, these works’ use of language is especially skillful and challenging. Through their style, they dramatically depict people, situations, and settings, emotionally drawing their readers in. At the same time, many of the words in such texts can have more than one meaning. They might be ambiguous, symbolic, or metaphorical. Furthermore, the main characters are often complicated, even mysterious. Their acts, relationships, and motives defy simple diagnosis. Typically, just as complex is any “lesson” these works teach. They illuminate life, but they do so by showing how it resists reduction to clichés or other slogans. Furthermore, the basic design of these works may not be immediately clear. Their patterns may be detectable only after repeated reading. Overall, a literary work tends to make its readers analyze it, interpret it. They may then disagree about its meaning and impact. Indeed, we hope that our own literary selections will spark debates in your class. To point out a literary work’s special features, we turn to a poem that dramatizes the exasperation many people feel when wildlife destroys their farms, gardens, or yards. Entitled “Woodchucks,” the poem is by Maxine Kumin (1925–2014) and appears in her 1982 collection Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief. MAXINE KUMIN Woodchucks Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right. The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange was featured as merciful, quick at the bone and the case we had against them was airtight, both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,i [1972] but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range. Next morning they turned up again, no worse for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch. They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course and then took over the vegetable patch nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots. The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses. I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinianii pieties for killing, now drew a bead on the littlest woodchuck’s face. He died down in the everbearing roses. Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard. Another baby next. O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard, the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith. There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps me cocked and ready day after day after day. All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream I sight along the barrel in my sleep. If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way. THINKING ABOUT THE TEXT Here are just a few of the questions that “Woodchucks” provokes. Choose one of them. Then, take ten minutes or so and freewrite an answer to it, supporting your statements with specific words from the poem. 1. In line 4, the word case evidently refers to a method of entrapping the woodchucks, but probably it also refers to the speaker’s reasons for hunting them. How good are her reasons? What might be the “case” for not killing these animals? 2. What key changes — psychological as well as physical — does the speaker go through in her campaign to get rid of the woodchucks? 3. To what extent does the speaker suggest that her feelings are mixed and even in conflict? 4. Presumably the last line alludes to the mass exterminations of the Holocaust. What would you say to someone who argues that this is an inappropriate, even tasteless, way to end a poem about woodchucks? Of course, Kumin is by no means the only person who has ever written about the ethical and practical issues involved in killing woodchucks. For example, in a lengthy June 5, 2008, New York Times article entitled “Peter Rabbit Must Die,” reporter Joyce Wadler tells stories about various people she interviewed who had to decide whether and how to exterminate woodchucks or other invaders of their turf. In 2013, a Wisconsin legislator drafted legislation that would remove woodchucks from the state’s protected species list and permit hunting or trapping of them ten months out of the year. As you might expect, his proposed bill proved controversial; numerous bloggers argued for and against it. And woodchucks, for the present, still remain a protected species on the state’s most recent published list (2015). But Kumin’s poem differs from a news report, a statute, or an opinion piece about woodchucks in ways that for many readers would establish it as more literary: While news articles such as Wadler’s are arranged in paragraphs, “Woodchucks” proceeds through stanzas. This kind of structure, common in poetry, draws attention to words that begin and end lines. Like many poems, Kumin’s also includes words that stand out because they rhyme (e.g., “scratch” and “patch,” “grace” and “face”), virtually echo (e.g., “Gassing” and “gassed”), or begin with the same sound, a pattern known as alliteration (e.g., “bomb” and “bone,” “food” and “feel,” “neat” and “noses”). In addition, some words in this poem seem to have multiple meanings. For example, “right” in the first line can mean not only “efficient” but also “ethical,” just as “airtight” can mean “perfect” in a practical sense as well as “indisputable” in a philosophical sense. In reading Wadler’s article or the legislator’s bill or the blogs debating it, you are apt to be chiefly aware of these texts’ content. Most readers of Kumin’s poem are at least as concerned with its form. Most of them would linger over the language of “Woodchucks” more than they would over the news report’s style. Noteworthy, for instance, is how the speaker looks back ironically on her own language (“The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling”), thereby casting doubt on its logic. And of course, her concluding analogy to the Nazis jolts; it pushes readers to wonder how much the entire poem has been about Hitler’s genocidal regime. Many news articles describe their subjects’ thoughts rather broadly. For instance, the typical person in Wadler’s piece is someone who wants to get rid of intrusive woodchucks but looks for humane ways of doing the deed. Kumin’s speaker, on the other hand, seems to go through a complex series of psychological stages; her thoughts seem more intricate than those of Wadler’s interviewees. Kumin’s speaker, like many characters in literature, is hard to pigeonhole. Wadler identifies her interview subjects as particular individuals, but like many reporters she ultimately seems more interested in them as examples of basic human types. Describing an artist who actually spoke to the woodchucks on his property — warning them to flee before he shot them — she says that this man’s tale “is not as unusual as some would like to believe.” She thereby suggests that he is a common sort of person afflicted by pests: the sensitive soul driven to fight back. Similarly, in describing some opponents of the proposed Wisconsin bill who attended a hearing about it, Associated Press reporter Todd Richmond labeled them as merely “a handful of animal lovers” who were “blasting the measure.” Hardly a profile of psychological depth! Given the words that Kumin’s speaker uses and the various patterns they take, her speaker requires more figuring out. Whereas news writers surely expect you to assume that their interviewees are real, you don’t have to take Kumin’s speaker as such. This figure may reflect the poet’s own experience to some extent, for Kumin operated a farm in New Hampshire and so perhaps hunted pests herself. Still, you are free to see her central character as fictive. This possibility enables you to speculate long and broadly about the speaker’s psyche — including ideas and feelings of hers that she may not be quite aware of. Notice that after referring to “we,” she eventually shifts to “I,” a change that may be unconscious but that nonetheless implies she has become personally obsessed. Because you can see the poem’s speaker as imaginary, you are also free to entertain various responses to her. If she were an actual person — someone you knew or might someday meet — you might feel compelled to make a single, fast judgment about her. The poem, however, lets you access her thinking while not pressuring you to decide quickly how ethical she is. Your attitudes toward her can shift, clash, and blend more than if her acts had real-life effects. In this respect, “Woodchucks” is a thought experiment, as are most literary works. Still, in exercising your interpretive powers, such texts help you cope with the world. They heighten your awareness of the ways in which it, too, demands careful study. We are not saying that poems are always superior to news reports and other true-life texts. That would be an excessive claim. But, as “Woodchucks” demonstrates, literary works often lead you to grapple with more extensive and trickier questions — thereby offering you much to address in your own writing. To help you think further about what distinguishes literature from other writing, let’s turn to a short fictional piece. Its author, Ted Chiang (b. 1967), is primarily known as a writer of science fiction. His 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” won the prestigious Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards; it is also the basis of the 2016 film Arrival. The following work by Chiang originally accompanied a video installation by the team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. On multiple screens, these artists provocatively juxtaposed pictures of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo radio telescope with images of an endangered parrot species in a neighboring forest. Chiang’s text was then published in e-flux journal and subsequently chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2016. As you read, consider these questions: Do you consider Chiang’s text to be literature? Why, or why not? You might bear in mind a comment that another writer of fiction, Lydia Davis, made in a 2008 interview with The Believer magazine. “It’s a hard thing to define,” she remarked, “but to be simple about it, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only ‘she says,’ and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.” Why Study Literature in a College Writing Course? We assume you are reading this book in a course aimed at helping you write. Quite likely the course is meant to prepare you for writing assignments throughout college, including papers in fields beyond English. It’s natural to wonder how reading literature serves this purpose. Much academic writing is, in fact, based on reading. You’ll find the two interconnected in course after course. Many classes will ask you to produce essays that analyze published texts. To analyze means going beyond your first impressions, carefully noting a text’s ideas, techniques, and effects. You’ll also find yourself needing to synthesize: that is, to trace how the text is patterned, as well as how it relates to other works. Together, these acts of analysis and synthesis have been called reading closely, a process we explain and model in Chapter 2. We encourage you to practice this method with the selections in our book. Often, college courses will ask you to write about some text that isn’t easily understood. The purpose of your paper will be to help other readers of the text grasp its meanings and, perhaps, judge its worth. Literature is a good training ground for these skills of interpretation and evaluation. The poems, stories, plays, and essays in this book repeatedly invite inquiry. They don’t settle for delivering simple straightforward messages. Rather, they offer puzzles, complications, metaphors, symbols, and mysteries, thereby recognizing that life is complex. In particular, literary works encourage you to ponder the multiple dimensions of language: how, for example, a word’s meaning can vary depending on context. Furthermore, much literature can help you understand your own life and conduct it better. In this capacity, literature serves as “equipment for living,” scholar-critic Kenneth Burke’s description of its function. Some people dislike literature because they find it too vague and indirect. They resent that it often forces them to figure out symbols and implications when they would rather have ideas presented outright. Perhaps you wish the speaker in Wright’s poem had made clear why his observations prompted him to criticize himself. But in life, truth can be complicated and elusive. In many ways, literature is most realistic when it suggests the same. Besides, many readers — perhaps including you — appreciate literature most when it resists simple decoding, forcing them to adopt new assumptions and learn new methods of analysis. Indeed, throughout this book we suggest that the most interesting and profitable conversations about literature are those in which the issues are not easily resolved. One of the best things your course can provide you and your classmates is the chance to exchange insights about texts such as Wright’s. We have been suggesting that one value of studying literature in a writing class is that it often engages not just thought but feeling. The two interweave so that readers find themselves engaging in interpretation and evaluation because they care about lives depicted in the text. Most of the works in this book appeal to your emotions, encouraging you to identify with certain characters, to be disturbed by others, and to wonder what happens next in the plot. Indeed, many readers of literature prize the moments that make them them laugh or cry or gasp as well as think. To be sure, it can be argued that the most worthwhile literature gets us to comprehend, and perhaps even appreciate, certain kinds of people who would normally confuse or disturb us. Perhaps you would never say to yourself, “I have wasted my life”; all the same, you may find it valuable to analyze how Wright’s speaker reaches this conclusion. “When it’s the real thing,” critic Frank Lentricchia suggests, “literature enlarges us, strips the film of familiarity from the world; creates bonds of sympathy with all kinds, even with evil characters, who we learn are all in the family.” This “enlargement” is both intellectual and emotional. Finally, writing about literature is good training for other fields because literary analysis often involves taking an interdisciplinary perspective. A typical interpretation of James Wright’s poem, for example, will bring in principles of psychology to explain the speaker’s frame of mind. Similarly, to evaluate his statement “I have wasted my life,” readers find themselves grappling with the philosophical question of what constitutes a “productive” or “good” life. Moreover, the poem’s farm setting has economic, political, historical, and sociological significance, for much less of the world’s population performs agricultural labor than was the case a century ago. Wright’s brief text can even play a role in studies of cross-cultural relationships, for as Sven Birkerts has pointed out, the poem is one of several experiments the poet tried with Chinese literary forms. What Can You Do to Make Literature Matter to Others? In an 1895 essay called “The Art of Fiction,” the American novelist, shortstory writer, and critic Henry James wrote, “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” Certainly James was suggesting that the creators of literature play a big role in making it matter. But he was suggesting, too, that plenty of other people contribute to literature’s impact. Today, these people include publishers, printers, agents, advertisers, librarians, professional reviewers, bookstore staff, Internet chat groups, and even show-business figures such as Oprah Winfrey, who has interested millions of viewers in participating in her “book club.” Teachers of literature also make it matter — or at least they try to. Perhaps your parents or other family members have contributed to your appreciation of certain literary texts; many adults introduce their children and grandchildren to books they loved when young. Moreover, friends often recommend works of literature to one another. Again, we concede that some people think of literature negatively, believing that it matters in a way they don’t like. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wanted to ban poets from his ideal republic because he thought they merely imitated truth. Throughout subsequent history, various groups have tried to abolish or censor much literature. In communities across the contemporary United States, pressure groups have succeeded in removing particular novels from library shelves, including classics such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. History has also seen many writers killed, jailed, or harassed for their work. In recent years, the most conspicuous example of such persecution has been the Ayatollah Khomeini’s indictment of author Salman Rushdie. In 1989, the ayatollah was so enraged by the portrayal of Islam in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses that he commanded his followers to hunt Rushdie down and slay him. Even after the ayatollah died, Rushdie was in danger, for the fatwa against him remained in effect. Not until eight years after the original edict did the Iranian government back away from it. At present, Rushdie still enjoys only a limited measure of safety, and the affair stands as a reminder that some writers risk their lives. Ironically, the ayatollah’s execution order was a sort of homage to literature, a fearsome way of crediting it with the power to shape thinking. Our book aims to help you join the conversations that Henry James saw as nourishing literature. More specifically, our book focuses on helping you argue about literature, whether your audience is your classmates, your teacher, or other people. While arguments involve real or potential disagreement, they need not be waged like wars. When we use the term argument in this book, we have in mind civilized efforts through which people try to make their views persuasive. When you argue about literature, you are carefully reasoning with others, helping them see how a certain text should matter to them. In particular, we have much to say about you as a writer. A key goal of your course, we assume, is to help you compose more effective texts of your own. By writing arguments about literature, you make it matter to others. Moreover, you learn about yourself as you analyze a literary text and negotiate other readers’ views of it. We emphasize that, at its best, arguing is a process of inquiry for everyone involved. Both you and your audience may wind up changing your minds. WRITING ASSIGNMENTS 1. Write a brief essay in which you explain what you value in literature by focusing on why you like a particular literary work. Don’t worry about whether you are defining literature correctly. This exercise will help you begin to review the values you hold as you read a work that you regard as literary. 2. Sometimes a literary work matters to you in one way when you first read it and in another way when you read it again. Write a brief essay in which you discuss a work that you interpreted differently when you reread it. What significance did it have for you the first time? What was its significance later? What about your life changed between the two readings? If you cannot think of a literary work, choose a film you have seen. 3. Write a brief essay in which you identify the values that a previous literature teacher of yours seemed to hold. Be sure to identify, too, ways in which the teacher expressed these values. You may want to bring up one or more specific events that took place in the teacher’s classroom. 4. Many bookstores sell computer-instruction manuals. Examine one of these. Do you consider it literature? Write a brief essay answering this question. Be sure to explain how you are defining literature and to refer to the manual’s specific features. 5. Visit a bookstore at your school or in your town. Spend at least half an hour looking at books in various sections of the store, noting how the publishers of these works try to make them matter. Look at such things as the books’ physical formats, the language on their covers, and any introductory material they include. Write a brief essay in which you identify and evaluate the strategies for “mattering” used by at least three of these books. 6. Visit a Web site that includes readers’ comments about particular works of fiction. A good example is www.amazon.com, a commercial online “bookstore.” Another good site is Oprah Winfrey’s, www.oprah.com, which features extensive exchanges about novels she has chosen for her “book club.” At whatever site you visit, choose a novel or short-story collection that has attracted many reader comments. Write a brief essay in which you identify the values that seem reflected in the comments. In what respects does literature seem to matter to these readers? What do they evidently hope to find in it?
