1.5–Writing about Literature: Diving Deep

After reading, you’ll be able to summarize what you’ve read (in other words, you’ll have a sense of the surface), and as you begin to write about it, you’ll begin to dive deep, thinking about what lies beneath that surface summary and beyond your annotations. At every stage, from your initial reading onwards, you are beginning to consider the subtexts of the work—those aspects that may not be readily apparent at first. During the process of writing about literature, you are working to bring those subtexts to light. As you formulate your thesis argument/claim, you’ll also begin to research what others have written about the work. While you will not repeat what they’ve said as your own argument, you will begin to connect with those scholars by annotating their texts and considering how you might use pieces of their work to support your argument and how you’ll respond to their connections by adding those of your own, whether you agree or disagree with them.

Earlier, we mentioned that literature’s purpose is to encourage readers to connect—both with the ideas in the text and with what they, themselves, bring to the text. These connections that authors forge when they write and to which you contribute when you read are deepened when you begin the process of writing about literature. As you write and converse with the text and with others who are thinking and writing about it too, you will develop deeper levels of understanding and an even greater connection with the text. As you dive into literature—as you consider its surface, plumb its depths, and resurface to write a unique argument that will shed new light on text and subtext—you connect not only with the work and yourself but with a community of other readers, writers, and scholars. You are becoming part of the many conversations about literature.

These ideas of discovery, conversation, and community within and around texts arise in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Diving into the Wreck” (1973). Rich writes the following lines, which we included as an epigraph at the beginning of this chapter:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.^[1]

One of the beauties of this poem, and of all literature, is that there are many possible and valid readings and analyses. Here, Rich uses the metaphor of diving in order to examine the process of rediscovering something. Critics have posited that the speaker of this poem is diving into herself, her sexuality, her own creative process, her positionality as a lesbian writer, and/or her attempt to rediscover texts by marginalized authors who went, for the most part, unrecognized and unremembered.

The works in this OER feature some of those authors and writings that, until recently, went unrecognized and unremembered, along with authors who may be better known. But Rich’s metaphor—“The words are purposes./The words are maps”—applies to all of these authors. When we read and think and write about their words, we, like Rich’s speaker, are diving in, looking for the purposes and contexts which perhaps motivated or shaped these works, reading the maps these authors created in order to guide us in our understanding of them. Whenever we read literature, we begin by diving in and exploring alone; when we discuss and write about literature, we then join many communities of divers who are doing the same thing. In the following pages, we invite you to leap in with us, and if we dive deep enough, we just may resurface with some of “the treasures that prevail.”