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Chapter 1: Introduction

In the following passage, rhetorical and literary scholar Kenneth Burke describes a scene that
will help us explain much of the thinking behind the advice this textbook has to offer. As you
read the passage, ask yourself if you find it describing any scenarios you have experienced.

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long
preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for
them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact the discussion has already
begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for
you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for awhile, until you decide that you
have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you
answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either
the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your
ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must
depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
(Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.
111.)

We have all experienced discussions like this, though not necessarily in a “parlor.” For instance,
if you wanted to say something about a controversial subject such as immigration, you would
essentially be entering a heated discussion that started long before you "entered" and will
continue long after you leave the conversation. Although Burke intended this description of a
parlor conversation that precedes and outlives any individual participant to serve as a metaphor
that clarifies what scholars do, this metaphor can apply to any ongoing conversation.

Moreover, for any topic, there can be multiple "parlors." For instance, someone talking about
immigration at a family reunion would be joining a very different conversation (a different
"parlor" if you will) than someone talking about immigration in a political science or social
studies classroom. And this classroom conversation would look very different from a
congressional hearing on immigration. In each of these different settings, there would be
different unspoken rules for what "counts" as a valid contribution, what is considered relevant to
the conversation, what is an appropriate tone or manner of expression. At a family reunion, for
instance, very personal opinions exaggerated with humor might count as valid arguments,
whereas in a political science class, there might be an expectation that arguments should be
backed by statistical evidence while speakers at a congressional hearing might be expected to tie
their comments closely to specific points of law. In each setting, speakers are expected to follow
certain conversational rules: it would be just as out of place to quote from the O'Reilly factor in
a political science class as it would be to produce a series of charts and graphs at a family
reunion.

Conversations about literary texts can likewise take place in different "parlors." Imagine how the
conversation might be different if you were to discuss Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
with a group of twelve-year-olds versus a group of parents or a group of middle school

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instructors. Each of these groups would have different values and different ideas about what in
the book is worthy of discussion. And each of these various conversations would look very
different from the conversation that literary scholars might have about the book.

In fact, you might wonder what exactly a group of literary scholars might say about Harry
Potter. After all, popular texts (and young adult texts) are not what most people immediately
think of when they hear the word "literature." Yet literary scholars do have conversations about
Harry Potter and many other popular books, films, and even television shows. But the type of
conversation that literary scholars have—the particular rules and values that govern the "parlor"
of literary scholarship—might look very different from other conversations about these texts.

This textbook aims to teach you the unspoken rules for joining the "parlor" of literary
scholarship. Like other academic parlors, the parlor of literary studies expects speakers to make
persuasive arguments, and thus this textbook tries to make explicit what "counts" as an effective
argument in this particular academic parlor. We aim to teach you how to say things about texts
that a literary scholar will find both interesting and persuasive. Even if you have no aspirations
to go on to become a literary scholar, your experience of learning to write persuasively for such a
challenging audience will teach you important lessons about writing for unfamiliar audiences
that will transfer over into other aspects of your life and career.

Writing in a Discipline
This book is based upon research about how literary scholars—people who publish in academic
journals in literature—make and support their arguments about texts. In all of our research, we
have been consistently impressed by literary scholars' abilities to go into depth on an issue—to
see patterns and connections that others could easily miss and to show how the easy answers to a
question are insufficient. It is these skills—particularly, the abilities to look deeply into
something relatively small and to see patterns connecting disparate things—that we hope you
will take from your work in literary analysis to other areas of your intellectual development.

We also hope that you will learn how to make persuasive academic arguments that explicitly
appeal to scholars in literary studies. Research on argument has long taught that writers ought to
study and appeal to their audience’s values in order to successfully persuade them. We hope that
by understanding the conversations that literary scholars have about texts in their community's
"parlor," you will be better prepared to join conversations in other academic parlors. While
many of the unspoken rules for what counts as an effective argument vary from discipline to
discipline—or parlor to parlor—we hope that you will come to understand that each parlor has a
set of rules and conventions that determines what counts as a valid contribution to that
conversation. In other words, we hope that by laying out the rules for speaking in the parlor of
literary studies, you will be better able to figure out the rules that govern arguments in other
academic parlors.

The writers of this textbook have closely studied the types of argumentative moves and
presentation strategies in the writing that literature professors routinely produce—articles
published in professional literary journals. We have found that the more students, even students
in introductory general education courses, sound like professional colleagues to their professors
in their arguments, the more highly literature professors evaluated their essays. Therefore, this

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textbook seeks to make explicit the strategies of argument used at the highest levels of literary
studies scholarship and invites you to practice and refine your use of these strategies. Along the
way, we believe you will find the advice this book offers will help you explore and share your
views with your instructors and classmates. We also hope you will take away from this
experience of your introduction to the rhetorical work and practices of this particular discipline
an understanding and appreciation of how other particular communities may use language to
establish common ground and converse effectively with one another. We believe such
understanding will help you analyze and the audiences for which you wish to write, an important
first step towards influencing them.

Some key terms used in this book

We would like to begin by explaining the ways in which we will use some terms in this book in
order to reduce potential confusion which can arise when we speak of you as a writer of texts
about texts and their writers.

"Text" in Literary and cultural analysis

Many people make sharp distinctions between literary texts and popular texts, such as the latest
WB television series. However in the past several decades, the field of English studies has been
calling these distinctions between literary and popular texts into question. Newer literary
theories, or paradigms (which we will discuss more later on), have persuaded literature scholars
to broaden their notions of what constitutes their object of study. In fact, what makes the parlor
of literary studies distinctive is not so much what these scholars discuss as it is the kinds of
questions and types of analysis that they use to study texts. Thus, the conversations that literary
scholars might have about a text such as Harry Potter would differ dramatically from the types
of conversations this text might generate in disciplines such as education or psychology.

Thus, this book uses the word “text” to refer to any literary or cultural work that a literary critic
analyzes in whatever medium—whether the printed page, film, television, performance, or
website. Most professional critics today agree that any text is worthy of study and analysis as
long as the analysis shows the text to be complex and open to multiple layers of interpretation.
Thus, literary critics have written about horror films such as Dawn of the Dead, television shows
such as Seinfeld, and children's books such as Black Beauty and The Wind in the Willows. The
subject of a literary analysis is not necessarily limited to those texts that we might traditionally
think of as "literature."

Thus, although we use the phrase "literary analysis" throughout this book, you should not take it
to mean that we are just talking about highbrow works of literature such as Shakespeare's plays.
Any book, movie, television show, story, poem, even television commercial that is sufficiently
complex (a term we'll be describing in detail later) can be analyzed using the strategies of literary
analysis. Thus, if you see the phrase "literary analysis" standing alone, this should not be taken
to mean that we are suggesting that your analysis is limited to texts traditionally thought of as
literature. Any text that yields itself to a complex interpretation is a valid object of literary
analysis.

Author vs. Literary critic

In this book, we use the word author to refer to the writer of the primary text (e.g., story, film,
poem, etc.) being studied. The term literary critic or just critic refers to the person writing a

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literary analysis of that text. Thus, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the author of "Young Goodman
Brown" and you and your professor and classmates are the critics who are writing about "Young
Goodman Brown."

The word "critic" here does not mean "critical" in the sense of finding fault, but "critical" in the
sense of important. A critic is someone who explains why certain features, themes, images are
important to understanding the text's meaning or message. A critic is someone who analyzes a
text in details and tells others what is important and meaningful.

Thus, in the lexicon of this book, William Shakespeare, Spike Lee, Jerry Bruckheimer, Toni
Morrison, Ursula Le Guin, and Sylvia Plath are authors while you, your classmates, and your
instructors are critics. (That said, some experience trying on the role of “author” can provide
critical insight into the work of other authors, too. For instance, trying to write in the genre or
poetic form of one of the texts you are studying can give you insights into how the genre or form
may work to convey meaning. Hence, we encourage you to “play” in writing exercises and class
discussions with the roles of “critic” and “author” to gain greater understanding of them both,
their similarities and differences).

Let’s Get Started: Joining the Parlor of Literary Analysis

As Burke’s parlor metaphor seeks to make clear, literary analyses, like all scholarly arguments,
can be understood as “turns” in an ongoing “conversation.” As in any conversation, we often
find the most thoughtful and useful participants have listened well before contributing. They
have a sense of the nature of any disagreements occurring in the conversation and seek to
respond to the other participants’ concerns. Or they might have a keen sense of what issues have
not been addressed yet but deserve attention.

Initially, your class conversations about texts will help you decide what counts as a valid
contribution to the conversation. You should listen to your instructor and classmates not just in
order to learn what they have to say, but also to figure out how you can contribute something
new to the conversation. Thus, one of your early papers in a given semester might take as a
starting point a controversy left hanging (or unaddressed) in one of your class discussions of a
text. What is important is that you find something new to say about the text—something that
does not merely repeat arguments you have already heard—while also making your contribution
persuasive to members of the literary studies parlor.

As you progress in your ability to write effective arguments about literature, you will eventually
begin to read published academic articles about the texts you are analyzing. These academic
articles, rather than class conversations, will begin to form the parlor that you are seeking to join.
Thus, you will learn to "speak back to" the ongoing, published conversations on a text.

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Overview of the Book

Chapter 2 covers the basics of what "counts" as an argument in the parlor of literary analysis by
defining the necessary elements that any contribution must have. Chapters 3-5 describe some
fundamental strategies for developing and writing analytic arguments about texts. To those of
you who have received lots of training in literary analysis in high school or elsewhere, much of
the material in these initial chapters will just be giving names to strategies and concepts that you
have already absorbed intuitively. To others, these chapters will provide essential information
for getting you started on writing persuasive literary analyses.

Even if you have already learned most of the information in these introductory chapters, we
believe that you will benefit from understanding exactly what it is that you know. Having names
for concepts and argumentative strategies will allow you to apply these strategies more
effectively by helping you organize knowledge you have collected in an intuitive though perhaps
haphazard way. Moreover, these labels for particular strategies will help you analyze the
argumentative values and moves made in other academic conversations and enable you to
identify how these conversations may be similar to or different from the parlor of literary
analysis. Such ability to conceptualize what exactly it is that you know is key to transferring
writing knowledge across different contexts.

Chapters 6-9 each introduce you to increasingly sophisticated strategies of literary analysis. As
you master these chapters, you will gain a better sense of how to make your analyses look like
those of professional literary critics. Chapter 9, Extending the Critical Conversation, teaches you
to respond to professional arguments about texts.

Chapters 11 and 12 both provide details on writing literary analyses, including advice on
organization and documentation.

For discussion:
What do you think of Burke's use of the term “parlor”? What are the connotations of this term?
Does this setting suggest types of actions and stances that might be appropriate for the arguments
that take place in it?

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Chapter 1: Introduction ©2007 Wolfe & Wilder