Activity 1: Creating an Audience and Deciding What to Write AboutSometimes the thought of writing for an English professor, someone who probably knows much more than you do about literature, can be intimidating enough to give you a touch of writer's block. To overcome this block, imagine an "empowering audience" as suggested in Chapters 18 and 19 of your text. Imagine that you are going to write for an audience that has not studied the literary work as you have and that needs to hear your insights.
Describe that audience now and the poem, short story, play, novel, or film you would write about.
Even with this audience in mind, you still may not know what to write about. You need a purpose that avoids the following common errors: (1) giving your opinion about whether the work was good or bad; (2) writing a summary of the work, (3) describing the emotional impact the work had on you.
To avoid making these errors, think about how you might apply the "eight critical tasks" from Chapter 19 in your text:
- Find an odd or surprising feature of the work and explain why the artist did it.
- Make clear what unconscious or hidden lessons the work is teaching us.
- Choose an issue that matters to you and ask what position the work takes on that issue.
- Discuss ways in which the work is representative of its author or historical period, or ways it isn't.
- Take a group of works and discuss ways they're alike or ways they're different.
- Describe how the work's form and its message are related: Why was this work put together this way?
- Describe the historical, cultural, biographical, or literary background of the work.
- Interpret the work through the lens of a specific critical approach, literary theory, or individual critic.
Choose a text you know well and come up with an eight different essay ideas for writing about that text, reflecting each of the "eight critical tasks." Each idea need only be two or three sentences long.
Idea 1
Idea 2
Idea 3
Idea 4
Idea 5
Idea 6
Idea 7
Idea 8
Email your answers to your instructor.
