Thinking (Aloud) About Literature
The videos included in this section draw on the strategies presented in Joanna Wolfe and Laura Wilder’s Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016). The book demystifies the process of analyzing literary and other kinds of texts. Wolfe and Wilder’s approach is built around eight research-proven strategies for interpreting texts and writing persuasive arguments about those interpretations. Students are taken from the basic strategies for performing close readings to increasingly sophisticated interpretive techniques that enable them to involve historical and literary context, engage with literary theory, and situate themselves in ongoing critical conversations.
Overview of strategies
| Surface/depth | Revealing deeper, less obvious meaning beneath a surface (literal) reading of the text. |
| Patterns | Finding an image, a word choice, or an other pattern that is repeated in surprising places throughout the text. |
| Opposites | Noting contradictions or opposites in the text and drawing conclusions that complicate the typical way we understand things. |
| Context | Using information about the author’s time period, culture, or other writings or about cultural references made in the text to discover or support an interpretation. |
| Genre | Using information about the history, cultural associations, or conventions of the text’s genre to support or discover an interpretation. |
| Social relevance | Using the text to understand the origins or nature of social problems in our own contemporary situation. |
| Theoretical | “Reading” or interpreting the text through the lens of a theory, or concept external to the text, to see what this lens elucidates or highlights in the text. |
| Joining the critical conversation | Identifying a point of disagreement or a gap in what others have said about the text and responding to or building on that previous discussion by adding something new. |