This Thing Called Literature Reading Thinking Writing Compress

‘A very shrewd, lively, and at times irreverent introduction to literary
study, which explains that thinking about literature is thinking about

everything else, including thinking.’
Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and
Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA
‘Clear, fair-minded, and patiently elaborating, this is an invaluable field

guide for seasoned teachers and scholars as well as beginning students.’
Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of
English & American Studies, Yale University, USA
‘The seasoned authorial duo of Bennett and Royle has pulled it off

again. Avoiding both simplification on one side, and over-abstraction
on the other, this new book will engage and appeal to all readers with
doubts or hopes about studying literature seriously.’
Rachel Bowlby, Professor of Comparative Literature,
Princeton University, USA
‘Reports on the so-called “death of literature” – its increasing irre-

levance in an age of digital reason – are, we have long suspected,
greatly exaggerated. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle confirm
this with a timely and robust case for the defence, repositioning
literary studies at the centre of the humanities. With their eloquent
readings, witty aperçus and compendious range of reference, the
authors provide the kinds of insightful pleasures that, they argue,
are central to the literary arts themselves. The book’s brevity is no
indication of its ambition: if This Thing Called Literature does not
make you a better reader, writer, critic and thinker, you haven’t
been reading it closely enough.’
Paul Sheehan, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
‘Literature, it turns out in Bennett and Royle’s invigorating intro-

duction to the topic, is anything but a thing: it is an activity, a
provocation, an experience, a conundrum. This highly readable book
is an important contribution to debates about why literature matters
at the same time as offering a practical guide to the understanding
and enjoyment of literary works, the task of writing about them,
and the challenge of creating them.’
Derek Attridge, Professor of English, University of York, UK
‘What the duo of Strunk and White is to writing well the duo of
Bennett and Royle is to reading carefully and, especially, to thinking
deeply about literature. This Thing Called Literature is a fun, fresh
take on why we study literature and how to do it and is a useful and
accessible read for students just beginning their study; it is also a
rewarding, heartening read for those of us who got into the business
of literary study for the love of reading, thinking, and writing.’
Daniel Robinson, Homer C. Nearing Jr. Distinguished
Professor of English, Widener University, USA
‘This Thing Called Literature is another triumph by Andrew Bennett

and Nicholas Royle. They are our most trusted guides to literary
study writing today. Their exemplary pedagogy opens up the won-
ders and complexity of both literature and study itself. The future
of reading has been given a fighting chance by this wonderful book,
which will benefit everyone who reads it from the A Level student
to the Emeritus Professor.’
Martin McQuillan, Kingston University, UK
This Thing Called Literature
What is this thing called literature? Why should we study it? And how?
Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death,
the ordinary and the uncanny, this beautifully written book establishes
a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject
to study. Bennett and Royle delicately weave an essential love of
literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work
and what sort of questions and ideas they provoke.
The book’s three parts reflect the fundamental components of
studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use
helpful, familiar examples throughout, offering rich reflections on
the question ‘What is literature?’ and on what they term ‘creative
reading’.
Bennett and Royle’s lucid and friendly style encourages a deep
engagement with literary texts. This book is not only an essential
guide to the study of literature, but an eloquent defence of the
discipline.
Andrew Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Bristol, UK.
Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK.

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This Thing Called
Literature
Reading, thinking, writing
Andrew Bennett and

Nicholas Royle
Routledge
Routledge
Routledge
Routledge
Routledge
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2015 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
The right of Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle to be
identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bennett, Andrew, 1960
This thing called literature: reading, thinking, writing /
Andrew Bennett, Nicholas Royle.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature – Appreciation. 2. Literature – Philosophy.
3. Reading. 4. Authorship. I. Royle, Nicholas, 1957-II. Title.
PN45.B395 2015
801’.3 – dc23
2014007931
ISBN: 978-1-138-01925-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-408-25401-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77904-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of figures ix
1 Studying literature 1
PART I
Reading 21
2 Reading a poem 23
3 Reading a novel 37
4 Reading a short story 53
5 Reading a play 63
PART II
Thinking 77
6 Thinking about literature 79
7 Thinking critically 90
PART III
Writing 101
8 Writing an essay 103

viii Contents
9 Creative writing: the impossible 116
10 Writing short fiction 124
Appendix: the wordbook 133

Glossary 136
Bibliography 147
Index 157
Figures
2.1 Pieter Brueghel (c.1527–69), Landscape with the Fall of

Icarus (1569) 27
3.1 Title-page to Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, first
edition (London, 1719) 41
3.2 Title-page to Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, first edition
(London, 1721) 42
6.1 George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and
Private Ejaculations (Cambridge, 1633), pp.34–35 84
1 Studying literature
In this book we hope to give a sense of why and how literature

might be an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Our primary
concern is with a love of literature, with what literary texts do, with
how they work and what sorts of questions and ideas they provoke.
Our aim is to be concise, to give pleasure, and to provide a clear
and stimulating account of studying literature.
This book is primarily written for people who are starting, or who
are thinking about starting, literary studies at college or university.
We begin at the beginning, with the questions: ‘What is literature?’
and ‘Why study it?’ We then have a series of chapters on the three
basic activities involved in studying literature: reading, thinking and
writing. Part One comprises short chapters on reading a poem,
reading a novel, reading a story, and reading a play. Part Two
considers the question ‘What is thinking?’ – especially as regards
thinking in and about literature, and thinking critically. Part Three
turns to questions of writing. There are chapters on how to write
an essay, on creative writing, and on writing fiction.
What is this thing called literature?

This is a question to which no one has yet provided an entirely
satisfactory or convincing answer. As the critic Raymond Williams
observes, in a discussion of this question in his book Keywords:
‘Literature is a difficult word, in part because its conventional con-
temporary meaning appears, at first sight, so simple’ (Williams
1983, 183). The hedging precision of Williams’s phrasing (‘in part’,
‘appears’, ‘at first sight’) points towards the complexity of the
question. It is possible to provide numerous cogent but ultimately

unsatisfactory answers to the question ‘What is literature?’. We might
start with a couple of dictionary definitions, along with an obser-
vation about the recent historical and institutional significance of
the term ‘literature’. Chambers dictionary, for example, gives (1) ‘the
art of composition in prose and verse’ and (2) ‘literary matter’ as
two senses of the word ‘literature’. And since the late nineteenth
century, ‘literature’ has been understood to mean a subject of study
in schools and universities, involving certain kinds of imaginative or
creative writing, including fiction, poetry and drama.
As we hope to make clear in this book, however, ‘literature’ is a
peculiarly elusive word. It has, in a sense, no essence. With a bit of
effort and imagination, we would suggest, any text can be read as
poetic – the list of ingredients on a box of breakfast cereal, for
example, or even the most inane language of bureaucracy. Anything at
all that happens, in the world or in your head, can be imagined as
‘drama’. And fiction (or storytelling) has a funny and perhaps irre-
sistible way of getting mixed up with its alleged opposite (‘real life’,
‘the real world’). While we attempt, in the pages ahead, to clarify
what may seem enigmatic and perplexing about the nature of our
subject (the study of ‘literature’), we are also concerned to stay true
to it – in other words, to foreground and keep in mind what is slippery
and strange about literature. Rather than strive for definitive answers
and a final sense of certainty in this context, we want to suggest
that there is value in the very experiences of uncertainty to which
the question ‘What is this thing called literature?’ gives rise.
Uncertainty is, moreover, a consistent and powerful factor in literary
texts themselves: literary works – especially those most valued or
considered most ‘classic’ or canonical – are themselves full of difficult,
even impossible questions. We might consider just three memorable
and enduring questions that occur in literary works. First, there is
what is perhaps the most famous line in all of Shakespeare’s writings,
Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’ (3.1.58). Second,
in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), the young Oliver, despe-
rately hungry, asks his master for more gruel: ‘Please, sir, I want
some more’ (Dickens 2003, 15). Finally, there is the marvellously
odd (funny-strange and funny-amusing) poem by Emily Dickinson,
written in about 1861, which begins: ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? /
Are you – Nobody – Too?’ (Dickinson 1975, Poem 288). None of
Studying literature 3
these is a simple question or, indeed, simply a question. Let us

expand briefly on each of these examples.
In the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600–1), we only know that
‘to be or not to be’ is supposed to be heard as a question, rather
than understood as the specification of an alternative (either ‘to
be’, to live, to carry on being, or to stop, to commit suicide, to not
be), because Hamlet tells us so. We think of Hamlet as a word-man,
associating him for instance with the celebrated phrase ‘words,
words, words’ (his equivocal answer to Polonius’s deceptively
straightforward question ‘What do you read, my lord?’: 2.2.193–94).
But when Hamlet says ‘To be, or not to be’, he is not merely playing
with words. Rather he is posing a question that is a matter literally
of life or death. And this question is about the desire to die. It is ‘a
consummation’, as Hamlet goes on to say, ‘[d]evoutly to be wished’
(3.1.65–66). The question resonates throughout the play and indeed
continues to resonate today. What is this desire for self-destruction?
Is it in some strange way peculiarly human? Or is it, as Sigmund
Freud seems to suppose in his discussion of the death drive in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), inherent in all life forms? How
does literature illuminate these questions and help us to think criti-
cally about self-destruction, not only in the context of the life of an
individual (the self-destructiveness of drug addiction or self-harm,
for example, or other damaging, obsessive behaviour), but also with
regard to the behaviour of communities, societies or states more
generally (the apparent blind determination to destroy the environ-
ment, for instance, to maintain the alleged purity of some ethnic,
racial or nationalist identity, or to seek revenge even or perhaps
especially to one’s own detriment).
There is something similarly urgent and real at stake in Oliver’s
request for more food. ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ is, strictly
speaking, not formulated as a question, with an interrogative tone
or question mark at the end, but it is certainly understood as asking
for something. Mr Bumble, his master, ‘a fat, healthy man’, responds
by exclaiming ‘What!’ in ‘stupified astonishment’, then hitting the
little boy on the head with a copper ladle, and reporting the matter
to Mr Limbkins and other members of the Board: ‘“Oliver Twist
has asked for more.” There was a general start. Horror was depicted
on every countenance’ (Dickens 2003, 15). The eight-year-old’s
request is shocking and ironic in ways that ramify across Dickens’s
text and continue to provoke questions. What does it mean, how is

it possible, for a beneficiary of charity to ask for more? How does
this request disturb the relationship between donor and donee? If
Dickens lets a sort of grim humour play over the scene it is principally
in order to underscore the sense of outrage. For Bumble himself, the
little boy’s question is evidence for his prediction that ‘that boy will
be hung’, and the very next morning he has a bill ‘pasted on the
outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody
who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish’ (15). The
boy’s question, in other words, has disturbingly physical and violent
consequences. At the same time, we are made aware of the force of
a question that resounds down the years and is still with us: Why
should any child be ‘desperate with hunger and reckless with
misery’ (15)? Why should any child, in England or anywhere else in
the world, be forced to beg and be punished for doing so?
Finally, Emily Dickinson’s lines involve not one but a sort of
double question that also entails an enigmatic and unsettling affirma-
tion (‘I’m Nobody!’). Moreover, the poet plays with capitalization and
punctuation in ways that make questions proliferate within each
question. We are prompted to wonder, for example: is ‘Nobody’ a
proper name? Is Dickinson, in capitalizing the ‘too’, suggesting that
‘Too’ is a proper name too? What is a name in fact? Would you be
someone if you didn’t have a name? Are we justified in supposing
that it is truly the poet who is addressing us? In what sense is the
poet, any poet, a ‘nobody’? Is there a wry allusion here to John
Keats’s celebrated remark that a poet is like a ‘cameleon’ and has
‘no self’ (see Keats 2005, 60)? Who is the poet addressing here? Is it
me? Am I nobody, too? And how do the dashes affect our sense of
where Dickinson’s questions start – or stop?
One of the strange things about a literary work is its very uncer-
tainty. And literature can always be read otherwise. At issue is an
experience of uncertainty that goes to the heart of the law, entailing
issues of property and identity. Many contemporary novels carry a
cautionary note or disclaimer on the verso of the title-page. Don
DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), for example, specifies: ‘This book is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.’ How seriously are we supposed to take this?
DeLillo’s novel makes reference to Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitch-

cock), to Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, to New York City and
to the Pentagon, as well as to the enormity of so-called ‘extra-
ordinary rendition’. Is ‘the Pentagon’ in DeLillo’s book nothing to
do with the Pentagon that we all know about, the US military
headquarters in Washington, DC? Are the Anthony Perkins or Janet
Leigh to which the book alludes completely different from the actors
who appear in Hitchcock’s world-famous movie? Is the precise,
rather chilling discussion of the word ‘rendition’ in the book just
‘fictitious’, even when it is informing the reader about ‘enhanced
interrogation techniques’ and the history of the word (‘rendition – a
giving up or giving back … Old French, Obsolete French and torture
by proxy’) (DeLillo 2010, 33)? And, anyway, what does ‘entirely
coincidental’ mean? Coincidence is a compelling and decisive ele-
ment in fictional writing, whether this is construed as ‘true chance’
or ‘fate masquerading as chance’ (Jordan 2010, xiii), but the
‘entirely’ here seems to over-egg the pudding. To borrow the words
of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the author’s disclaimer ‘protests too
much, methinks’ (Hamlet, 3.2.219).
Other contemporary novelists have noticed the strangeness of the
so-called ‘copyright page’. In the ‘Author’s Foreword’ to David Foster
Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), for example, the speaker (allegedly
Wallace himself) resolutely denies that the book is ‘fiction at all’,
arguing that it is ‘more like a memoir than any kind of made-up
story’ and that therefore the ‘only bona fide “fiction” here is the
copyright page’s disclaimer’ (Wallace 2011, 67–68). The only purpose
of the disclaimer, Wallace adds, is as a ‘legal device’ to ‘protect me,
the book’s publisher, and the publisher’s assigned distributors from
legal liability’ (68). The disclaimer, in other words, is ‘a lie’ (69).
But is it a lie? How can we tell? Is this David Foster Wallace the
‘real’ David Foster Wallace, or is he a character in a book?
The seemingly dull back of the title-page of a novel, then,
becomes a good deal less certain than one might have supposed.
‘This book’, we are told, ‘is a work of fiction’. But this part of the
book (the information on the back of the title-page) is not part
of the book. If this sounds slightly unhinged, that’s because it is.
Various bits of the text, including the title and the name of the
author, are crucial to the novel’s being legally designated as a novel,
‘a work of fiction’, without themselves being part of the novel as
such. Is the title of a novel part or not part of the novel it entitles?
The answer is less straightforward than one might hope. It is both
and neither.
As these reflections might suggest, even a disclaimer about a
novel not, in effect, having anything to do with the real world, has
serious implications and effects for what we think the real world is,
for how we think about where the literary nature of a text begins or
stops or, conversely, about where law (legal claims of property and
copyright, the determination of who or what is ‘real’ and ‘actual’,
and so on) separates from fiction. Even (or perhaps especially) when
people try to make declarations or stipulations about what is not
literature, the question with which we began (‘What is this thing
called literature?’) comes back to haunt.
What’s the point of studying literature?

The world is in an absolutely terrible state and people want to talk
about poems and novels and plays? If I am going to study something,
aren’t there more pressing or more practical subjects, such as physics
or medicine or law or politics? Where does studying literature take
me? What can I do with it?
You have perhaps asked these questions yourself or heard others
ask them. In this book we attempt to provide some answers. Some of
our answers take the form of one-liners. Others involve a more patient
and detailed elaboration. Either way, we will see that answers also raise
further questions and indeed that developing the art of questioning is
one of the rewards or special effects of literary study.
If we were to play the role of devil’s advocate, we might say:
there is no obvious point in studying literature. It seems to serve no
purpose. It leads directly to no career or vocation, unless you want
to become a teacher or researcher in literary studies who teaches
and researches something that has no obvious point, seems to serve
no purpose, and so on, round in a circle. In fact, for a budding poet
or novelist it is not even clear that studying literature is more helpful
than studying medicine, say, or mechanical engineering. From the
perspective of professional training or practical knowledge, literary
studies is a dead-end. It’s a non-starter.
However – or contrariwise, as Tweedledee might say (see Carroll
1992, 146) – it is precisely this apparent purposelessness that makes
the study of literature interesting. Unlike more or less every other

thing you have to do in life that is connected with studying or
working for a living, the study of literature doesn’t tie you down to
anything. It frees you up. It opens up remarkable possibilities.
Literary studies is often seen as lacking the intellectual rigour of a
subject like philosophy, where you are at least supposed to expand
your mind and learn about the limits of knowledge, about philo-
sophical systems, about the meaning of existence, about formal logic,
and so on. And literary studies is also often seen as lacking the
seriousness and dignity of history, from the study of which you are
supposed to acquire a sound understanding of the past based on
careful and empirically based investigation of manuscripts, arte-
facts, and other records and documents. As a university subject,
literature is the odd one out, the weird one: it often seems that
governments and university managers alike don’t really know what
to do with it. But precisely because it has no obvious point, it is for
some the most alluring of all subjects for study: more than any
other discipline, literary studies is a space of intellectual freedom,
open to imagination, experimentation and exploration.
The exploration is focused, first of all, on language itself. What
does ‘space’ mean here, and ‘freedom’? Are these terms literal or
figurative? Is this about ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘physical freedom’ or
something else? What is this ‘space of literature’ (to use Maurice
Blanchot’s compelling phrase (Blanchot 1982))? Literature can be
about anything and can therefore teach us anything – its possibilities
and potential are endless.
The sky is not the limit

We might think about this in terms of the sky. If the study of literature
is concerned with what people call blue sky thinking, it is also
concerned with red sky, black sky and no sky thinking. ‘Red sky’
conventionally connotes a beautiful day to come (‘Red sky at night,
shepherd’s delight’) or a sense of impending danger such as a storm
(‘Red sky at morning, shepherds take warning’): literary studies
is concerned with aesthetic beauty (‘shepherd’s delight’), but also
with what is threatening or dangerous. Literature is a place not only
for fine language, lovely images and positive sorts of aesthetic
experience (‘Isn’t this poem beautiful?’), but also for what is
disturbing, menacing, even terrifying. We find ourselves drawn into

‘black sky thinking’: literature is very often explicitly about suffering,
melancholy, death and tragedy (‘Isn’t this play disturbing?’). Poems,
plays and novels can take us into very dark places. Some would say
that they do so in ways that are richer and more illuminating,
stranger and more instructive than is the case with other disciplines,
such as psychology or philosophy.
And then you may be wondering: ‘No sky thinking’, did they say?
What are they talking about? Suffice to note here that the writings
of Samuel Beckett, in particular, seem to us preoccupied with the
notion of ‘no sky’ thinking – thinking in a claustrophobically
enclosed place, thinking in the dark, or thinking in which a ‘cloudless
sky’ is occluded by a ‘clouded pane’: such kinds of thinking are
evident in his novel The Unnamable (1953), the late prose text
Company (1980) and the very late prose fragment ‘Stirrings Still’
(1989) respectively. For literary studies, then, the sky is not the
limit, although it might be a particularly remarkable subject for
analysis and reflection. As the poet Wallace Stevens says in one of
his essays, ‘when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to
say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it’, it is only
then that we can begin to appreciate that ‘we live in the centre of a
physical poetry’ (Stevens 1951, 65–66). In this sense, literature
makes it new (to recall a phrase that Ezra Pound uses to describe
the Modernist mood in 1928: see North 2013, 162–69). It allows
us to see the world differently, ‘purging’ from our ‘inward sight’, as
the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in 1821, the ‘film of
familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being’ (Shelley
1977, 505). And correspondingly, it can also enable us to see, in new
and often troubling ways, what is cruel, unjust, unacceptable in the
world around us (including certain activities of satellites and
drones, for example, in the sky above).
Literature and other worlds

A literary work, it is often said, is a work of imagination. It takes
us into another world, whether this is construed as another version
of this world or as somewhere out of this world, beyond the world,
unearthly. Literature is thus about other worlds or transformations
of the world we know. From this perspective it might even be said
that revolutionary changes in the world always entail a literary

dimension. It is not by chance that we refer to major events as
‘dramatic’ – precisely as if, in the words of Shakespeare’s As You
Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’ (2.7.139). And if we think about
major events and their aftermaths (the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11,
the invention of the internal combustion engine or the smart phone, the
abolition of slavery, the decriminalization of homosexuality), these
often have an element of the dream-like or incredible (‘Was it really
like that before? It seems unimaginable now’, and so on). The past is
in many respects like a dream. At the same time, dreams and literary
texts have a great deal in common. By this we are thinking not only
of dream visions in medieval poetry (such as Piers Plowman or
Pearl) and other literary representations of sleep and dreaming, but
more generally about the dream-like logic and structure of literary
works. Like dreams, poems, novels, plays and short stories are full
of sudden alterations of place and perspective, strange or unlikely
characters showing up, coincidences and reversals, as well as words
and phrases unexpectedly pregnant with meaning.
Politics of literature, literature of politics

This is not to suggest that literature is merely escapist or fanciful. If
literature is dream-like, it is also worldly, political through and
through. Studying literature can make you a ‘political animal’ in
surprising ways. Literary works always invite you to think about
context. They prompt questions that range from the obvious to the
more enigmatic. On the obvious side, then, we wonder: When was
this text written and published? Who wrote it? What genre or
genres does it belong to? What is it seeking to tell us and why? In what
cultural, social, political context was it produced? What cultural,
social, political issues does it encourage us to think about? And on
the less obvious side: Why does a play written in 1599, such as
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, seem to have more to tell us about
sovereignty and democracy today than any number of contemporary,
ostensibly more explicit novels on such topics? What are the limits
of ‘cultural, social, political context’?
In the second half of the twentieth century critics used to talk of
‘formalism’ and ‘New Criticism’ as terms referring to ways of reading
poems and other artworks without needing to engage with questions
of context. You were presented with the poem on the page and that
was all you needed to consider. No text exists in splendid isolation,
however: everything is connected, even if no context is ultimately
containable. Worldly and political concerns pervade literature, even
(or especially) if a writer or critic claims otherwise. We are living
(reading, thinking, writing) in a networked world.
To turn this idea around, we can see that even the ‘political
sphere’ in its most traditional form is unthinkable without literary
dimensions, such as storytelling, rhetorical tropes, dramatizing and
other poetic effects. The most important and enduring political
statements themselves have literary qualities. Today’s politicians
might seem more than ever a bunch of corporate, cliché-touting, party
puppets, but even they know that a good speech – or even a single
memorably fine phrase – can make or save a career. Great political
texts invariably carry a poetic charge. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’
(the opening words of the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848) is hardly an everyday, prosaic
remark. The same goes for Martin Luther King’s brilliantly anaphoric
‘I have a dream … ’ speech in Washington, DC, in August 1963. As
one of the Situationists (a group of European avant-garde revolu-
tionaries) observed in the same year: ‘Every revolution has been
born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry’
(see Knabb 2006, 150–51).
In his poem ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ (1939), W.H. Auden
gloomily declared that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’ (Auden 1979, 82),
but in the domain of politics, as elsewhere, the study of literature
provides a sharper understanding of the poetic as, precisely, a doing
or making. The ancient Greek origin of the word ‘poetry’, after all,
is the verb poiein: to make or to do. Politicians (with the help of
their speech-writers) do things with words: just as much as any
poet, they understand that a single choice phrase can work wonders
(‘we shall fight them on the beaches’, ‘the lady’s not for turning’,
‘it’s the economy, stupid’). As Barack Obama declared in a speech
in 2008, echoing such memorable soundbites: ‘don’t tell me words
don’t matter – I have a dream’. Like novelists, politicians make up
stories and struggle to keep them coherent. And words, after all, can
also be beautiful. Language can sweep you off your feet. Whether it is
a poet or a politician, a lawyer or someone wanting to go to bed
with you, what is invariably at issue is the rhetoric of persuasion.
In each case, words do not simply describe, but actually do things:

they engage, entice, convince, seduce. Studying literature can
immeasurably deepen and enrich our sense of the lying, deceptive,
conniving nature of what people or texts say, as well as of how
lyrical, lovely and truthful words may be. And sometimes, of
course, these tendencies can be very difficult to tell apart. To recall
another celebrated proposition from Shakespeare’s As You Like It,
‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ (3.3.16–17).
Of course, the art of persuasion also has to do with what is not
said. When a McDonald’s advert says ‘I’m lovin’ it’, it doesn’t
trouble to explain who that ‘I’ is, or even what the ‘it’ is, let alone
draw attention to the working conditions of the people who have
produced the fast food under consideration or the animals that
have died in its cause. (Were they lovin’ it too?) Studying literature
helps us to become alert to the unspoken, unspeakable or unsayable.
It enables us to see how far the meaning of a situation, relationship
or text is unstated, implicit, doing its work in silence. Some things
are better not said. Literary works can be disturbing because they
explore what is transgressive or taboo. Are there limits to such
explorations? If so, according to what criteria, on whose authority, in
what context? How far can a text go in its depictions of murdering
women in contemporary Mexico, for example (in the case of Roberto
Bolaño’s 2666 (2004)), or of combining a confession of mass murder
with a zealous love of designer clothing and so-called high-class
living (as in the case of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991))?
The very concept of literature is bound up with the democratic
principle of ‘freedom of expression’: that is indeed one of the most
fundamental ways in which ‘literature’ and ‘the political sphere’
necessarily belong together. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida
puts it, the ‘institution’ of literature allows one to ‘say everything,
in every way’ (Derrida 1992a, 36). In democratic societies, at least, a
writer can in principle say whatever she or he wants – with the
proviso that this should not be libellous, incite racial hatred or terrorist
acts, or unduly offend religious sensibilities. This proviso is complex
and ambiguous. Where does irony or satire end and libel begin? A
novel might include a racist character or even (as in William Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)) a racist narrator without, however,
being deemed to incite race hatred. Religious belief, hypocrisy and
bigotry, the attractions of terrorism, and so on are common themes
of contemporary literature. This is not by chance. Literature has to

do with the experience of limits: it probes, delves, tests what is
sayable and what it is not possible to say.
Life and death

Literature is for life. The study of literature deepens and enhances
an appreciation of what it is to be alive. D.H. Lawrence famously
refers to the novel as ‘the bright book of life’ (Lawrence 1972, 535)
and we hope that everything we say in the present book carries at
least a tint of this brightness and speaks to the love of life. Lawrence
is on the side of life, rather than any after-life, and he affirms this in
ways that can seem unnerving. Much critical and indeed literary
writing is tacitly or explicitly respectful of religious beliefs, including
the religious belief called agnosticism. Certainly, one might think,
there is no harm in being interested in the idea of heaven or paradise.
Some poetry and fiction, indeed, is happy to proclaim experiences of
the paradisal in the here and now. We might think of the delicious
heights of romantic love, as evoked for instance in the words of the
Victorian poet and translator Edward Fitzgerald, in quatrain XI of
the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859):
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
(Fitzgerald 2009, 21)
Lawrence, however, has no time for such notions. As he puts it in

the essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’: ‘Paradise is after life, and I for
one am not keen on anything that is after life’ (Lawrence 1972, 534).
Literature is also, however, about death. Perhaps more acutely
than any other kind of writing, it enables us to apprehend the ways
in which life and death are not opposites. Studying literature makes
us especially aware of the strange deathliness of writing, starting
with the fact that an author’s words have a capacity to survive him
or her. Most of the literary works that are worth reading are by
dead people. Dead people have vast amounts to tell us. There is
something ghostly about literary studies, then, and it is not surprising
that so many novels, plays and poems have to do with the return of
the dead, with haunting or being haunted. Reading involves what the
novelist and poet Margaret Atwood calls ‘negotiating with the
dead’ (see Atwood 2002). The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt calls
it ‘speaking’ with them: his book Shakespearean Negotiations opens,
‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’ (Greenblatt 1988, 1).
This is not a matter of the spiritualist or merely fantastical. Rather
it has to do with recognizing literature as a great treasure-house of
culture, memory and wisdom, not least concerning death, dying and
mourning.
Literature and magical thinking

The discipline of literary studies is firmly grounded in reason and in
the pursuit of truth. One of the most common misconceptions people
have when they first come to study literature at university is to think
that they can interpret a literary text in pretty much any way they
want. Those suffering from this woefully mistaken idea are often
also afflicted by the delusion that all interpretations are equally
valid. Bennett and Royle can’t be doing with that sort of talk. The
study of literature entails the learning and putting into practice of
rigorous protocols and methods of reading, critical argumentation
and demonstration. This is one of the ways in which, as we will
suggest, literary studies is akin to legal studies, and the art of the
literary critic closely corresponds with that of the lawyer.
If literary studies is grounded in reason, however, it is also deeply
given over to questions of madness and magic, the irrational,
uncanny and fantastical. After all, no one can seriously pretend that
a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky or Emily Brontë, a poem by Emily
Dickinson or a play by Samuel Beckett is reasonable. Literature is
mad. Literature is a discourse in which people say and do crazy
things all the time. It is not just a matter of there being certain
characters who speak or behave in irrational, even psychopathic
ways. It is about the very invention or creation of people who are
not real, of voices that don’t exist anywhere other than in the realm
of the literary work. This is perhaps especially manifest in a novel
or short story because the very structure of such texts involves
mind-reading and magical thinking: you encounter a narrator who
tells you what other characters are thinking and feeling. But there is
a similar dream-like or unreal air to a poem, even if it is a poem

about some real event, person or object. In order to make some sense
of the literary work, and especially in order to experience what
Roland Barthes calls ‘the pleasure of the text’ (Barthes 1990), you
have to submit, at least to some degree, to this madness and magic.
The ordinary and the everyday

At the same time, literary texts also give us the pleasure of the
ordinary or everyday, what is not (at least not immediately) strange
or uncanny or magical or dream-like. Thus Roland Barthes also
talks about the pleasure that we take in reading the ‘irrelevant’
details that novels, in particular, offer, in order to generate what he
calls their ‘reality effect’ (Barthes 1986). A novelist does not have to
tell you the colour of the wallpaper in a room or the size and shape
of a table, s/he does not have to describe how the light streams in
through the window or how many butterflies are dancing on the
flowers outside – the plot will work perfectly well without these
‘irrelevant’ details. But part of the pleasure of literary texts lies in
the way that they produce the illusion that we are witnesses to a
slice of ‘real life’. And the details seem to guarantee, precisely on
account of their irrelevance to the plot, that this is somehow ‘real’.
Writers as diverse as William Wordsworth, George Gissing, Virginia
Woolf, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop,
Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Zadie Smith and Alice Munro, all
work hard at times to downplay or sidestep the supernatural,
transcendent, ghostly or uncanny, in order to focus on the intensity, the
fascination and beauty of the ordinary, the everyday, the dull, trivial
or banal.
Writers explore the strangeness of the ordinary, its uncanny
aspects, it is true. But they also explore the ordinary just because of
the wish, indeed the need – which we all at some level have – for the
routine, the banal, the everyday, the familiar. In this way they prompt
other kinds of question in turn: on what basis do we distinguish
between the ordinary and extraordinary, the familiar and the
strange? Is the sense of ‘real life’ enough in itself? Why, in this case,
do we sometimes prefer to read a work of short fiction, say, rather
than watch some so-called ‘real life’ (a news programme or doc-
umentary) on TV? What are ‘reality effects’ in literature for? As the
great Russian novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov makes

clear, both in his novels and in his deceptively autobiographical
memoir Speak, Memory (1966), we are creatures who indeed enjoy
what can variously be called simulacrum, mimicry, realism, virtual
reality, mimesis, verisimilitude, and accurate or faithful representa-
tion. (See the glossary for our explanations of these somewhat
technical words.) The ability to copy, mimic, deceive and seduce, as
well as to hide, secrete or camouflage, is of course not peculiar to
humans (or butterflies) – as Peter Forbes makes clear in his
remarkable study Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage
(2009). And fooling or pleasing someone with an impression of the
real (‘That’s so life-like!’) is not necessarily an innocent or benign
activity. The word ‘camouflage’, after all, is originally concerned
with warfare – with concealing camps, guns, ships, and so on from
the enemy. But there is something remarkable about a story or play
or poem that draws us into its world or gives us a new sense of
what the so-called ordinary world is like.
Consider the opening lines of a poem such as Wordsworth’s ‘The
Thorn’ (1798):
There is a thorn; it looks so old,

In truth you’d find it hard to say,
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey.
(Wordsworth 2010, 24)
Or consider the opening sentences of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A

Farewell to Arms (1929):
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that

looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed
of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in
the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the
channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.
(Hemingway 2003, 3)
Such openings might readily be compared with the life-like qualities of

film or of certain kinds of painting. But there is also a fundamental
difference. The poem and the novel are made of language. We can
enjoy the ‘reality effects’ or sense of realism they produce, but they
may also prompt us to see something more complex and challenging.
They might, in the first place, draw our attention just to the very
words out of which the worlds are made – to how strange, for
example, that Wordsworthian ‘you’ (in ‘you’d find it hard to say’)
is, since it is not ‘you’ but the ‘I’ of the poem that has seen and finds
it hard to say anything much about the thorn; or to the way that the
apparently literal, prosaic, everyday quality of Hemingway’s writing
is inflected with figurative and poetic effects (the metaphor of the
village that ‘looked’, the powdering of the leaves, the rhythmical
insistence of the word ‘and’, which appears eight times in this short
passage). They might also allow us to see not only that a world
such as Wordsworth’s or Hemingway’s is itself a world of words, but
also that words in themselves can create or change the world. In this
sense, as we will see, there is something radically performative about
language – and the study of literature is one of the most instructive
and rewarding ways of deepening our understanding of this.
Creative reading
The chapters ahead are informed by a concern with the idea of
creative reading. Thinking about this idea begins with the realization
that reading is not a passive activity, in which you have the words
gently wash over you till your eyes reach the bottom of the page
before you turn over and set the eyes to re-wash. Reading a good
novel or poem or play is like entering a previously unknown country,
a love-tangle, a mad-house. And reading also involves writing. To do
it well you need a pencil and you need to annotate, underline or make
notes as you go. To read well is to develop a writing in response.
To read critically and creatively is to acknowledge and reckon with
what the text is saying, with what you (and other critics) think the
text is doing or trying to do; and it is also to add something of your
own, to bring your own critical and creative concerns to bear on the
text that you are reading.
If you fail to annotate a novel or short story or play as you read it,
you will forget what it was you found interesting or funny or sad or
perplexing, and you won’t be able to find those particularly exciting,
enticing, intriguing passages or moments again so easily. You may
think you will, but you won’t. Human memory is weirdly fickle and
treacherous. Annotation (including underlining or side-lining) is

indispensable. But what do you mark? What is important? What is
interesting and what is not interesting? These things vary, even from
one reading of a text to the next. And of course you cannot expect
to spot every key phrase or moment on a first reading. But you
might think to note, for example:
striking phrases, arresting metaphors, unusual wordings;

significant events or changes in the direction of the narrative;
the recurrence of a motif, topic or figure that intrigues you (flowers,
say, or telephones, or moments of humour);
moments of self-reflexivity – moments where a text seems to be
referring to itself, for example where a poem says something
about the poem you are reading or about poetry or language
more generally;
significant alterations in narrative perspective (you might, for
example, mark places where you feel that the voice of a narrator
falters or shifts, perhaps by feigning not to know something, or by
moving suddenly into the point of view of one or other of the
characters);
significant alterations in temporal perspective (you might mark a
flashback or analepsis, a flashforward or prolepsis, the incursion of a
scene of memory or the past in the midst of the present, and so on).
Creative reading has to do with ways of reading that are not only
rigorous, careful, attentive to historical context, to the specific
denotations, connotations and nuances of words, and so on, but
also inventive, surprising, willing to take risks, to be experimental,
to deform and transform. Creative reading is not about inventing
things that are not in the text but about inventing new ways of
thinking about things that are in the text, in relation to things
beyond the text.
Creative reading is the key to writing strong, effective and successful
literary criticism. In creative reading you might find yourself doing all
sorts of unexpected things, including:
Getting absorbed, even mildly obsessed by the play and meaning

of a certain word, phrase, image, figure or idea that would not
necessarily occur to other readers: you start tracking it across the
text and this focus on a detail can lead you to a fresh and
exciting perspective on the work as a whole.
Making links between the text you are reading and another text
that is by the same author but that is not usually – or perhaps
has never previously been – juxtaposed with the primary text (a
short story by D.H. Lawrence, for example, might be linked to a
letter he wrote years afterwards regarding something ostensibly
quite different).
Making links between the text you are reading and a text by a
different author (for example, the way that, from its title
onwards, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust evokes T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land and the way that the novel responds throughout
to the collected works of Charles Dickens).
Making links between the text you are reading and another,
perhaps very different text or object (a poem by Sylvia Plath, for
example, and a science book about the moon or a piece of modern
sculpture): the principal challenge here is to ensure that, however
perverse they may initially appear, these links are demonstrable,
compelling and convincing.
Seeing a way in which the literary work that you are reading leads
to a new, insightful and surprising angle on some pressing aspect
of the world beyond the text at hand (justice, the environment,
religion, and so on).
The term ‘creative reading’ is hardly recent. As the great essayist

Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in ‘The American Scholar’ in 1837:
‘There is … creative reading as well as creative writing’ (Emerson
1996, 59). Creative reading requires a curiosity about the past, an
openness to discovering – with irony or delight – how eloquent,
perceptive and thought-provoking writing from earlier centuries or
decades can be, and how much you thought was new has in fact
been (often more eloquently) said or done before. But creative
reading can also entail a sense of trepidation and excitement about
the future. Reading is an exposure to the unforeseeable. When you
are reading a poem, a play, a piece of fiction or even a critical essay
for the first time – no matter how ‘canonical’ it might be, no matter
how many thousands of other people have read it and written about
it – this reading is something that is happening only to you, with
you, at this moment, for the first time in the history of the world.
Creative reading is bound up with a critical appreciation of that

singularity.
Finally, that singularity, a sense of your uniqueness as a reader,
does not come from the first book (or even the twentieth) that you
pick up. Your capacities and skills for creative reading come, slowly
but surely, from practice. It is a question of reading carefully, with
concentration, imagination and humour, with passion and dis-
crimination, with a pencil at the ready. And beyond all that, the
challenge is simply, in the words of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1759–67), to ‘Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader!
read’ (Sterne 2003, 203–4). It is never the same from one day or even
one minute to the next. It can be pleasurable, painful, boring, awe-
inspiring. But creative reading is about thinking critically and, at the
same time, about tapping into something endlessly and peculiarly
promising. It is a matter of trying to make sense of what Emerson
means when he says: ‘One must be an inventor to read well’
(Emerson 1996, 59).
Further reading
There are many books to which you might turn in order to expand
and deepen your knowledge of topics and ideas discussed in this
chapter. In particular you might like to look at one or more of the
following: J. Hillis Miller’s On Literature (2002), Derek Attridge’s
The Singularity of Literature (2004), Jonathan Bate’s English Litera-
ture: A Very Short Introduction (2010) and Herman Rapaport’s The
Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods
(2011). On fiction and realism, especially in a contemporary context,
see Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First Century Fiction (2013). For a rich,
entertaining and informative account of rhetorical figures and
tropes, see Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a
Phrase (2010); an excellent online resource for classical terms of
rhetoric is Silva Rhetoricae at http://rhetoric.byu.edu/
Part I
Reading
2 Reading a poem
Reading might seem as easy as A, B, C, or might seem to be something

that you do unthinkingly, like breathing or walking or, perhaps,
talking. We are bombarded by written messages every day and those
of us who have successfully learnt to read at a young age and who
do not suffer from dyslexia or a visual impairment tend hardly to
notice the sheer amount of written stuff that we process every
waking hour. And the experience of being immersed in or carried
away by a book seems to confirm the sense that reading is some-
thing that can happen more or less automatically, something about
which you hardly need to think.
Most of the time, then, reading just happens. You are reading a
newspaper, a cereal packet, a road sign, an advertising leaflet, a menu,
and scarcely give it a moment’s thought. You want the information,
and you want it now. But you should never read a poem – just as you
should never read a novel, play, literary essay or short story – for
information, for information only, and arguably indeed not for infor-
mation at all. All sorts of other questions come into play as well. You
find that you are reading for a voice, tone or texture, for intriguing
effects of language, for the way that the writer does things with words
and the way that a text seems to foreground the very experience of
reading – the question of what reading is and how it works (and per-
haps sometimes fails to work), how it baffles or delights, what it is
about (not always obvious) and what it is trying to do to you, what it
prompts or even forces you to think about, even if in spite of yourself.
It is this rather special kind of reading that we are interested in
here. Our intention is to offer practical tips, as well as to suggest
new ways of thinking about the familiar but also oddly unpredictable
24 Reading a poem
activity of reading. In particular, we want to explore the idea of

‘close reading’ – reading, as the nineteenth-century philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche idiosyncratically puts it, ‘with delicate eyes and
fingers’. In the Preface to his book Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche
defines the philologist (from the ancient Greek philo (love) logos
(word)). ‘Philologist’ is another word for ‘literary critic’, a lover of
language and literature, someone concerned to read well: to read
well, Nietzsche declares, one should read ‘slowly, deeply, looking
cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open,
with delicate eyes and fingers’ (Nietzsche 1997, 5). Extensive reading
and even skim-reading is an essential dimension of studying literature,
and our advice would be to read as much and (when necessary) as
fast as possible. But ‘close reading’, reading carefully, slowly, ‘with
delicate eyes and fingers’, really is what matters. Of course, you
might ask how close is close or how slow is slow. As the French
mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal observes in his Pensées
(1670), ‘When we read too quickly or too slowly we do not understand
anything’ (Pascal 1995, 16).
You can’t win, it seems. So what would it mean to read well, to
read closely or to read creatively? In the first place, it means to read
with attention not only to what the text says but to how it is saying
it, to the linguistic and rhetorical features of a work, to its literary
‘form’, as well as to its sense. It is this double reading or dividing of
attention, indeed, that characterizes literary study. When you read a
novel or poem or play, for example, it is all about the way images
and ideas are articulated, all about language, about the way words
work.
We can try to illustrate this by turning to a poem. W.H. Auden’s
‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938) is, as its title suggests, a poem about
looking at pictures in a museum, and about the relationship
between art and suffering. Here it is:
About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Reading a poem 25
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s
horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(Auden 1979, 79–80)
The language of Auden’s poem seems very straightforward, indeed

almost un-poetical. The poem does not include many of the kinds of
metaphors, specialized or ‘poetic’ diction, regular rhythm and other
rhetorical effects that one tends to associate with poetry. Although
the word-order is inverted in lines 1–2 (‘The Old Masters were never
wrong about suffering’ would be more usual in everyday speech),
you could almost mistake the poem for a version of someone
speaking, informally commenting on some paintings in a museum.
Look, for example, at the way that the subject of the poem, ‘The
Old Masters’, is introduced as if as an afterthought, parenthetically,
in line 2; or at the way that the extended fourth line strolls rather
casually, even quite dully, from one everyday action to another
(‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’). Like
much modernist verse, the poem strives for a certain ordinariness or
‘naturalness’ of language, evoking everyday speech patterns, while
being, at the same time, highly crafted. And perhaps that is no surprise:
after all, the poem is itself about ordinariness, about the way that
life just carries on, even if a calamitous or momentous or amazing
event is occurring nearby. You can get a sense of this odd combination
of the ordinary and the amazing by looking at how the rhymes
26 Reading a poem
work. Although it is easy to miss, the poem does mostly rhyme: in

fact, only line 3 is unrhymed (no word rhymes with ‘place’). But the
rhyme-scheme is so complex and irregular that you could easily
overlook this aspect of the poem. The rhyme-scheme of the first
section runs: abcadedbfgfge (where the ‘a’-rhyme is ‘wrong’/‘along’,
the ‘b’-rhyme ‘understood’/‘would’, and so on). Through its rhymes,
the text both acknowledges and conceals its specialness. The poem
does rhyme, but irregularly (line 1 rhymes with line 4, but line 2 has
to wait until line 8 for its rhyme, and so on). We might also note the
easy, apparently casual rhythm of the language and the variation in
stressed and unstressed rhyme-words. Crucial to all these effects is
the marvellously quirky enjambment – lines that end without
punctuation or pause, where the sense runs on (‘how it takes place /
While … ’). Along with their casualness, there is an artfulness about
the line-endings that ramifies the hazards and coincidences of life
that the poem is contemplating. Part of Auden’s achievement in
constructing this poem, in other words, has to do with the intricate
and subtle ways in which he exploits the sound-effects of verse to
suggest that things are a matter at once of chance and device, that
the world and the poem are at once poetic and prosaic – both
amazing and unremarkable.
And that is what the poem is about: paying attention – finding
things remarkable or not. The poem is in the venerable tradition of
‘ekphrastic’ poems – poems that try to evoke paintings, sculptures
or other visual works. (‘Ekphrasis’ is a technical word that origi-
nates in the Greek for ‘description’ and is used for the attempt by a
work in one medium to represent a work in another.) The poem
asserts that the ‘Old Masters’ alert us to something important about
humanity – that a momentous event for one individual (his birth,
for example, or his death) may not be of much consequence to
unrelated bystanders. Something remarkable, tragic, appalling
happens to someone while for others in the vicinity life just goes on,
unperturbed. But how does painting, or art more generally, relate to
this? In the first section of the poem, the speaker describes two
unnamed (and perhaps fictitious) paintings from the Musées Royaux
des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, one of which seems to depict the birth of
Christ (the ‘miraculous birth’) and the other his crucifixion (the
‘dreadful martyrdom’). The speaker is struck by the way that these
world-changing events happen against the background of children
Reading a poem 27
blithely skating, dogs doing what dogs do, and the torturer’s horse
being more concerned with an itch on its backside than about what
its master might be up to. These animals and children don’t care,
and why should they? The second part of the poem more specifi-
cally concerns a painting in the same museum thought to be by the
sixteenth-century Dutch painter Pieter Brueghel (c.1527–69), entitled
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1569).
The painting depicts the death of the mythological figure of
Icarus, whose father, Daedalus, had made his son wings of feathers
bound together with wax. Although his father had warned him not
to fly too near the sun for fear that the wax would melt, Icarus does
so and, his wings disintegrating, falls into the sea. In Auden’s poem,
the speaker comments on the way that in Brueghel’s painting a ship
sails ‘calmly on’, ignoring this momentous event (momentous for
Icarus, since he dies, but not of much consequence to anyone else, it
seems).
As critics have pointed out, one of the interesting dimensions of
Auden’s poem is that, unlike the Old Masters, the speaker is
wrong – wrong in particular about the Old Masters (see Heffernan
Figure 2.1 Pieter Brueghel (c.1527–69), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
(1569): the legs of Icarus can be seen disappearing into the water
in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.
28 Reading a poem
2004, 147). While Brueghel’s painting does indeed build on Ovid’s

account in the Metamorphoses (8 AD) to highlight the way in which
the death of Icarus has minimal impact on the rest of the world, there
are plenty of paintings by Old Masters in which suffering is put centre-
stage and made the focus of general attention. You might think, for
example, about the way that the Spanish painter Francisco Goya
(1746–1828) is explicitly concerned with what it means to suffer,
with the horrors of the brutality of war, and with what it means to
come across or to be a spectator at another’s suffering. There is no
sense that anyone is looking away from the suffering individuals in
his ‘Disasters of War’ series (1810–20), paintings in which the com-
bination of inhuman brutality and human suffering is the central and
even sole topic.
Auden’s poem also intersects with other traditions. In particular, it
is possible to link ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ with the tradition of elegy.
There is a moment in the Mike Newell film Four Weddings and a
Funeral (1994) when John Hannah, playing Matthew, recites another
famous Auden poem, ‘Stop all the clocks’ (aka ‘Funeral Blues’)
(1936). The poem figures mourning as the impotent desire for the
whole world to stop because the person one loves has died. ‘Stop all
the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking
with a juicy bone’, the poem begins, ‘Silence the pianos and with
muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come’ (Auden
1979 141). This is no doubt an experience many of us have shared
and will share – the sense of being appalled that the world simply
goes on regardless when someone close to you has died. ‘What is
wrong with people that they can just go on with their ordinary,
unremarkable lives, in the face of this catastrophe?’, we might find
ourselves wondering, in incredulity. And this indeed is one of the foci
of the elegiac tradition – the tradition of poems of mourning. Because
his friend and fellow poet Edward King has died, Milton argues, even
nature itself is in mourning: ‘ … thee the woods, and desert caves, /
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown, / And all their
echoes mourn’ (‘Lycidas’ (1638), ll.39–41) (Milton 2003, 40). In
‘Adonais’ (1821), Shelley’s speaker laments the fact that his grief
‘returns with the revolving year’ even while ‘The amorous birds
now pair in every brake’ and while ‘A quickening life from the
Earth’s heart has burst / As it has ever done’ (‘Adonais’, ll.155, 159,
164–65) (Shelley 1977, 396). In a more domestic vein, Alfred Tennyson
Reading a poem 29
asks in In Memoriam (1850) ‘How dare we keep our Christmas-eve[?]’,

when he has ‘such compelling cause to grieve’ the death of his
friend Arthur Henry Hallam (section 29) (Tennyson 1989, 372).
The tradition of remarking on the disjunction between our own
grief and the insouciance of others, even of nature, is also alluded to
in Derek Walcott’s sequence of elegies for his mother in his 1997
collection The Bounty. There is ‘the traffic of insects going to work
anyway’ – anyway, despite his mother’s death – and there is a sense of
‘astonishment’ even ‘that earth rejoices / in the middle of our agony’
(Walcott 1997, 3, 14). And there is also something perhaps still
harder to bear: our tendency to forget our grief just as and even just
because we try to memorialize it in a formal elegy: ‘pardon me’,
Walcott demands plaintively and self-reflexively, ‘as I watch these lines
grow and the art of poetry harden me // into sorrow as measured as
this’ (5). The desire to stop all the clocks can also be a form of
narcissism, a troubled realization that the world does not revolve
around your existence and therefore around your grief or suffering.
So ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ connects with ‘Funeral Blues’ and with
the elegiac tradition more generally by highlighting and putting into
question a narcissistic fantasy about being at the centre of the
world, about the desire for the world to take note, to notice you. In
Auden’s poem, the speaker’s (erroneous) idea about the profundity
of the Old Masters’ understanding of the human predicament, their
understanding, always, that human suffering goes unnoticed, can
then be seen as part of a concern about being and not being noticed.
This is a way of reading ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’: we have begun to
try to tease out the thematic core of the poem, the poem’s ‘message’
(as it is sometimes crassly called), or its ‘theme’, what it ‘says’ or
what it is about, and we have remarked on its links with other
poems in the elegiac and ekphrastic traditions. And we might join
other critics in linking the poem to its historical contexts. A number
of critics have suggested that the ignored or disregarded suffering
that Auden alludes to in his poem includes the Spanish Civil War,
for example, in which he had been personally involved, as well as
the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, and other events of what, in his poem
‘1 September 1939’, he calls that ‘low dishonest decade’ (see Cheeke
2008, 107–8). Considering the question of its historical resonance
is one way to pursue a close and creative reading of Auden’s poem.
The poem is about the nature of examples, but it is more than
30 Reading a poem
merely an example. It points beyond itself. Indeed we could say that

one of the most forceful underlying arguments of the poem is that it
is always necessary to take context into account but that context is
always larger and more complex than the point of view of any
single individual.
There is a famous essay by the ‘New Critic’ Cleanth Brooks called
‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ (Brooks 1949), in which Brooks argues
powerfully and influentially that a poem should not be understood to
have a propositional content in the way that, say, this sentence or a
newspaper story does. As Archibald MacLeish famously puts it at the
end of his ‘Ars Poetica’ (1926), ‘A poem should not mean / But be’ –
although as MacLeish also rather less famously says in that poem,
‘A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds’, which does rather
make you wonder how seriously to take it (for the record, ‘Ars Poetica’
contains 129 words). Brooks argues that to try to extract the content
or meaning from a poem, to attempt simply to paraphrase it, is a
kind of ‘heresy’, a fundamental error, since it is in the very nature
of literary texts that what they say is bound up with how they say it.
After all, like translation, strictly speaking, it is impossible. You
cannot paraphrase without altering. As Bill Readings memorably
puts it, ‘paraphrase is a philosophical joke’ (Readings 1991, xxi).
And even if you could do it, just paraphrasing anyway would not
get you very far. Paraphrase may be helpful, even necessary, but a
reading of a literary text should start rather than stop there.
We have talked about the language and rhetorical structures of
Auden’s poem, about its linguistic plainness or ‘naturalness’ – with
respect to the syntax and lexical details in particular – and about
the way it rhymes but at the same time seems to resist regular and
overt rhyming. This is the fundamental premise of close reading:
vocabulary, syntax and rhetorical effects cannot be distinguished
from a poem’s meaning. The rhyme-scheme will tell us very little
unless we can link that feature persuasively to a consideration of
other aspects of what the poem is doing, and above all to how it
makes meaning. What Auden’s poem means has to do with the way
that the seeming casualness of the apparently un-poetic voice interacts
with the poem’s veiled poeticalness.
We have suggested that the speaker is wrong to declare that the
Old Masters have only one approach to suffering. In the real world,
so to speak, and especially if the speaker was, say, an art critic, that
Reading a poem 31
error would be a problem. When art critics make generalizations

about paintings or about the Old Masters they are supposed to get
their facts right, or at least to speak with a certain authority – that,
after all, is their job. But when poets make demonstrably false pro-
positional statements, the erroneousness of their assertions only
serves to complicate and enrich the experience of reading. Poems
and other literary texts do not, in a sense, make propositional truth
claims – or if they do, those claims should themselves be understood
as rhetorical tropes. To put it bluntly, it doesn’t matter whether or
not the statement the speaker makes is right, any more than it
matters whether Jane Austen’s famous generalization at the begin-
ning of Pride and Prejudice (1813) (‘It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife’) is true (Austen 2006a, 3). Her statement
is effective precisely to the extent that it is questionable (particu-
larly as a truth universally acknowledged): until Austen wrote this
sentence one might think that the sentiment was anything but
‘universally acknowledged’. It was perhaps more generally acknowl-
edged afterwards, at least among a certain social class, by certain
heterosexual men and women, in a certain historical period. And in
that sense, the sentence is ‘performative’: it performs or produces
what it presents itself as only describing. But we are still perhaps
enticed and indeed even charmed by the grand, if somewhat com-
placent authority of the narrator’s voice. What Austen is doing at
the beginning of her novel is not so much expressing a universal
truth as establishing for her narrator a certain voice or claim to
authority.
Like Austen’s opening, Auden’s generalization about the Old Masters
provokes a series of questions that are fundamental to reading:
First, there are questions of voice and authorship: Who is speaking?

To what extent are these views the poet’s own? Whose voice is
this? In what tone or tones are we invited to hear it?
Second, there are the questions of sincerity and intentionality:
Does the speaker mean what he says? Does Auden? What does
Auden want to convey?
Third, there is irony: Should we be alert for the distinction
between what is said and what is meant? In other words, does
the poem say one thing and mean another?
32 Reading a poem
Fourth, there is form and content: How do technical factors such

as the rhyming, alliteration, enjambment and so on participate in
the sense?
And finally, there is interpretation: How should we construe this
poem’s sentences? How can we ensure that our reading is accurate,
valid, credible?
Careful attention to these questions, and especially to distinctions

such as those between poet and speaker or author and persona, is
fundamental to effective critical reading.
So we are left with a poem that makes a bold, assertive statement
but that is also about the act of making bold assertive statements, a
poem that raises questions (about voice and intention and meaning
and irony, and so on) without necessarily resolving them. Indeed,
what we have is a sense of tension or paradox or uncertainty with
regard to the poem’s meaning or its meaningfulness. The poem seems to
be utterly lucid, transparent, interpretatively straightforward. But that
very simplicity generates hermeneutic or interpretative problems.
There is a fundamental strangeness about the way in which the
poem moves between the particular and the general. We need to
respond to the ways in which the poem is general (it is about
poetry, painting, suffering, and so on). And at the same time we
need to acknowledge its particularity or singularity. We need to try
to do justice to the fact that ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is untranslatable,
unparaphrasable. This relationship between the general and the
singular was noted by Aristotle in his Poetics more than two thousand
years ago. But it is a principle that has been reinvented, rediscovered,
restated in different ways down the centuries – most recently, for
example, by W.K. Wimsatt (Wimsatt 1954, 69–84) and Jacques
Derrida (Derrida 1995, 142–43). Briefly, in the Poetics Chapter
Nine, Aristotle argues that unlike history, which seeks to record and
account for single, individual and essentially unrepeatable events,
but also unlike philosophy, which is based on the establishment of
universal truths without regard for the singularity of the event,
poetry is about both the particular or individual or singular and the
general or universal (Aristotle 2001, 97–98). In this context we
might notice, then, the rather strange ways in which Auden’s poem
involves both very large generalizations (about all the Old Masters
being right about something all of the time) and three very specific
Reading a poem 33
examples. What happens in ‘Museé des Beaux Arts’ is that a general

statement is made and then exemplified. But in exemplifying the
statement, the speaker seems to get caught up, lost even, in the detail,
in the particularities of the paintings, and especially with respect to
Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. We might thus notice, for
example, the particularity and queer eroticism of the boy’s white legs
in the corner of Brueghel’s picture as they disappear into the sea.
And this, in a sense, is what happens to us – or what could or
should or might happen to us – in reading Auden’s poem. Although we
start out wondering what it means, what argument or ideas are being
conveyed, we quickly get drawn in by the verbal and rhetorical effects,
by the language, in short by how something is being said rather than
simply what is being said. We might think here about anaphora, the
rhetorical figure for the repetition of a word or phrase at the
beginning of successive lines or clauses. Once you have noticed it, for
example, it is difficult to ignore how insistently the poem speaks of
‘how’: ‘how well they understood’, ‘how it takes place’, ‘How when
the aged … ’, ‘Anyhow in a corner’, ‘how everything turns away’.
This brings us to our final point about reading a poem. People,
including many critics and theorists, often seem to assume that there is
a clear and final distinction between the practice of reading, close
reading in particular, and literary theory. Indeed, people often seem
to suppose that there is a sense in which close reading and literary
theory are mutually exclusive: you can’t read closely, carefully,
slowly if you are also doing theory, they say; theorizing about
literature is obstructed or distorted by reading, by attending to the
idiosyncrasies of individual texts, they think. But this overlooks the
fact of literature’s singularity, its strange mixing of the general and
particular. Close reading is necessarily bound up with questions of
theory – and theory itself is always a question of reading. As soon
as you begin to ask questions about a poem (‘What does it mean?’,
‘What kind of text is it?’, ‘Was the author male or female?’, and so
on), you are engaging with theoretical questions and issues.
Here, in summary, are some fundamental points about how to
read poems, and about how to read them well:
Paraphrase, if you like: it can be helpful. But recognize that a

paraphrase is never an end in itself. Saying that Auden’s poem is
about suffering is just a beginning.
34 Reading a poem
Attend to the way that a poem says something as well as to

what it says. Look, for example, at how the intricacies of the
rhyme-scheme in Auden’s poem help to propound its meanings.
Think about how the language and rhetorical effects reflect or
enact, enhance or nuance a poem’s meaning. The plainness, the
un-remarkableness of Auden’s language reflects his subject, the
way that ordinary, everyday life just goes on, oblivious to
extraordinary events.
Be sensitive to issues of authorial intention that your reading
brings up and be ready to engage with these as integral to the
poem’s meaning and significance. Is Auden being ironic, oblique,
understated, misleading, playful? What are his intentions here?
What weight should we anyway give to authorial intention?
Be alert to the kinds of allusions (in language or genre) that the
text involves. Is there, in this instance, an intertextual relationship
between Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and his ‘Funeral Blues’?
In what ways does the poem engage with, revise, respond to the
ekphrastic tradition of poems on paintings? What is distinctive or
singular about this poem’s painterly qualities?
Respond to the ways that a poem is itself, in a self-reflexive way,
attentive to the question of reading. In Auden’s poem, looking at
pictures might be taken to be a form of reading and the poem
might be understood to be about what Frank Kermode, in a
book of that name, calls ‘Forms of Attention’ (Kermode 1985).
Consider how the poem moves between the particular and the
general. Auden’s poem is in part about the way that one generalizes
from particular examples, but it is also about what is stubbornly
singular in the particular.
Tease out the logic of the poem and try above all to explore
what is conflictual or paradoxical or ironic. Auden’s poem is
about paying attention and not paying attention to amazing events,
and is itself both amazing and very ordinary – giving the sense that
the ordinary may itself be extraordinary, and may even be more
interesting, in some ways, than what seems extraordinary.
Remember history: in what ways is this poem embroiled in the
historical, cultural, social, economic as well as perhaps personal
circumstances in which it was written and published? As we
indicated earlier, critics have suggested that Auden’s poem
should be read in contexts including the Spanish Civil War and
Reading a poem 35
the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. History cannot explain everything

about a poem, but it does help us to better understand crucial
features.
Examine details: get stuck on words, images, rhetorical figures,
formal features such as rhyme and rhythm. What is the word
‘human’, for example, doing in line 3 of Auden’s poem? What is
its relationship to the dogs and to the torturer’s horse later on,
and to the non-human ship which is nevertheless anthro-
pomorphized by being given the human attribute of not noticing
or stopping to help when it ‘sees’ Icarus fall to his death? What
does the poem tell us about what it means to be ‘human’? Well,
that might be the beginning of another reading of the poem.
Perhaps we should start again …
Note: the singularity of the poem is something that calls for a
singular response to it in turn. Reading well, or creatively,
entails not just noticing what other readers might be expected to
notice, but also adding something of your own – taking a path
or flight across the poem that involves new connections, new
resonances, new possibilities.
Further reading
You are spoilt for choice when it comes to introductions to poetry,
most of which pay careful attention to its formal aspects. You
might try Michael D. Hurley and Michael O’Neill’s brief, lucid and
carefully focused Poetic Form: An Introduction (2012), or rather
more expansive books by John Strachan and Richard Terry, Poetry
(2nd edn, 2011), by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, Reading Poetry:
An Introduction (2007), and by John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook
(2005). Three brief, readable, thought-provoking and sometimes
intentionally provocative recent books on poetry (as a way of writing
and as texts to be read) by practising poets are David Constantine’s
Poetry (2013), Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry (2012) and James Fenton’s
An Introduction to English Poetry (2003). Jon Cook has edited a
generously proportioned and very useful anthology of brief essays
by twentieth-century poets and critics on poetry, Poetry in Theory:
An Anthology 1900–2000 (2004). A rather different but also very
useful anthology is the collection of prominent examples of ‘close
reading’ edited by Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, Close
36 Reading a poem
Reading: The Reader (2003) – the volume includes ‘classic’ essays

from the mid-twentieth century as well as more recent essays that
take on board developments in race and gender studies, political
and historical criticism, and poststructuralism and postcolonialism.
Talking of ‘classic’ texts, we might mention William Empson’s
amazing Seven Types of Ambiguity: now more than eighty years old,
Empson’s book set high standards for close reading when it was
published in 1930, and still constitutes a remarkable demonstration
of just how close you can get to ‘the words on the page’. Ekphrasis
(and specifically poems about paintings) is a very lively area of literary
studies: see, in particular, Stephen Cheeke’s Writing for Art: The
Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (2008), James A.W. Heffernan’s The Poetics
of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (2004), and three brilliant
books by W.J.T. Mitchell: What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and
Loves of Images (2005), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and
Visual Representation (1994), and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology
(1986). Finally, specifically on the question or problem of paraphrase,
it is worth looking at Cleanth Brooks’s classic essay ‘The Heresy of
Paraphrase’ (1949).
3 Reading a novel
People often talk about being ‘lost in a book’. Perhaps you have
experienced this yourself. Enthralled by the textual drama being
played out in your head, you forget the weather, the time, your sur-
roundings, who you are with – even who you are. You forget these
things and, for the time of that forgetting at least, don’t really care.
There is a wonderful moment in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1963 novel
The Little Girls that evokes this sense of being lost in a book, but
evokes it from the outside, so to speak. One of the eponymous little
girls, Clare, occupies herself with a puzzle in the sitting room of her
friend’s house, while her friend’s mother reads a book:
The scarlet, brand-new novel, held up, masked its wholly-

commanded reader’s face. Though nominally she was ‘lying’ on
the sofa, the upper part of the body of Mrs Piggott was all but
vertical, thanks to cushions – her attitude being one of startled
attention, sustained rapture and, in a way, devotion to duty …
She was oblivious of all parts of her person as she was of herself.
As for her surroundings, they were nowhere. Feverel Cottage, the
sofa, the time of day not merely did not exist for Mrs Piggott, they
did not exist. This gave Clare, as part of them, an annihilated
feeling. She burned with envy of anything’s having the power to
make this happen. Oh to be as destructive as a story!
(Bowen 1964, 78)
Clare is piqued, troubled by the fact that she has become nothing in
the face of this book. She wishes she had such power and she feels,
in the face of it, ‘annihilated’. It is possible to get carried away by
38 Reading a novel
other art forms, to be sure – to be swept up breathless into the energies

and excitement of a film, to be powerfully moved by a piece of music,
to be held rapt by a picture, or to be engrossed in a play. But there
is something unique, something very particular, about being lost in a
novel, an experience that can go on all day, or for day after day in the
case of a really long novel. And it is something that happens inside
your head in a way that makes it both convivial and reclusive at
the same time. Novel reading is the most social of activities (you are
getting inside other people’s heads when you read novels and they
are getting inside yours) and one of the most anti-social activities in
the world (reading is a mostly solitary, silent activity, effectively
subverting any idea of community or communitarian ideal).
Go on, try it – try turning off your mobile, tablet, laptop; try
getting out of your current game, chat, email, social networking
site; try closing this book and picking up instead George Eliot’s
Middlemarch or Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy
or Richard Ford’s Independence Day – or any other great work of
fiction – and see what happens. …
Ok, then: finished?
What did we say?
So now we can get on with asking some questions about what is
involved in reading such a book.
The novel in its modern form is a strange creature, a peculiar
cross-breed or chimera. It emerged more than three hundred years ago
out of various forms of storytelling and reportage – journalism, the
epistolary (letter-writing), accounts of remarkable lives, chronicles,
travellers’ tales, romances, ballads, news-sheets, and so on. Partly for
this reason, the novel is almost infinitely malleable: it is highly
diverse in its form, in its subject-matter and in its style. Constantly
evolving, the novel adheres to no consistent set of rules or proce-
dures. One might say that the rule of the novel is to break the rules.
In fact, the novel is always – how can we put it? – novel. The word
‘novel’ comes from the French nouvelle, which originates in the Latin
novellae, meaning ‘news’. So one way of thinking of the novel might
be as a narrative that tells us something ‘new’ – it reads you the
news, so to speak. Certainly, novels that work well are those that
give you a sense that you are experiencing something new. They tell
you a story, present you with people, places, situations, events, ideas
Reading a novel 39
and feelings in a way that seems new, fresh, even unprecedented.

That, in a word, is what a novel is, or should be: it records, explores
and prompts you to think of something new, in a new way.
Saying that the novel is novel amounts to little more than a tau-
tology. How might we define it? It is not easy. But the Oxford
English Dictionary has a go. Citing examples of the word from the
mid-seventeenth century onwards, the dictionary explains that a
‘novel’ in the modern sense is a ‘long fictional prose narrative’, that
it usually fills ‘one or more volumes’, and that it ‘typically’ presents
‘character and action’ with ‘some degree of realism and complexity’
(OED, novel, n. 4b). The last point is curious: novels, we are told,
are ‘realistic’, have ‘some degree of realism’. What does that mean?
After all, novels are generally classified as ‘fiction’ – certainly that is
how bookshops and libraries group such works. The word ‘fiction’ also
includes the short story and novella, of course, but is in any case
taken to designate the kind of writing that departs from the real,
from what we like to think of as real life. Fiction is, after all,
thought of as precisely not ‘real’ life, not true. In fact the novel is
shot through, from its beginnings in the late seventeenth century
right up to today, with this question of its fictional/real status. In a
sense, that is what every novel entails: an experience of undecidability,
uncertainty about the real.
Why does the OED insist on this element of so-called ‘realism’?
Novels typically give us the sense that they are describing the ‘real’
world, or that they are describing what the real world could be like, or
creating something that might be a world, an alternative world, one
that looks and feels something like our own, ordinary, everyday,
‘real’ world. There are plenty of novels, and indeed whole genres, that
depart from this sense of the real – science fiction, fantasy novels,
magic realism, for example. But such novels are almost always
underpinned by a recognizable if distorted sense of the familiar
world (by the laws of physics, for example, or by conventional ideas
about character or time or causality). The power and strangeness of
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), for
instance, depends on the ways in which we compare the brave
newness of its imagined world with the old and familiar.
What we must never forget, however, is that ‘realist’ and ‘realistic’
are never simply the same as ‘real’. Indeed, as the critic Pam Morris
bluntly comments of realist novels: they ‘never give us life or a slice
40 Reading a novel
of life, nor do they reflect reality’ (Morris 2003, 4). This might seem
paradoxical, given the name ‘realism’, but the point is that it is a
convention of representation: realist fiction follows certain conven-
tions in describing the world. After all, a novel is made of words, it
is not a mirror. As the Marxist critic Pierre Macherey argues, the novel
is ‘analogous to’ (rather than a representation or version of) ‘reality’:
‘the imaginary universe is not a reflection of the real universe’, he goes
on, since it constitutes a ‘system of reality’ such that the ‘project of
writing a novel’ is ‘inevitably remote’ from ‘that of telling the truth’
(Macherey 2006, 299). Indeed, these notions of the conventionality
of realism have a troubling corollary: perhaps the sense of the ‘real’
that novels purport simply to present is in fact a way of constructing
reality for us. Perhaps it is, at least in part, precisely by reading
narratives such as novels that we invent for ourselves a sense of
what the ‘real’ world is like.
Some examples might help. The journalist, merchant, political
pamphleteer and life-long debtor Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731) also
produced some of the earliest novels in English. His two most
famous, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), present
fictional but credible accounts of relatively ordinary people in rela-
tively extraordinary situations. Robinson Crusoe recounts Crusoe’s
attempt to survive on an island on which he is stranded after a
shipwreck. The novel is based on the model of contemporary
travellers’ tales (which, like all travellers’ tales everywhere, no doubt,
were themselves embellished, improved, exaggerated or simply false),
as well as on an account of Alexander Selkirk’s actual experience of
being a castaway between 1704 and 1709. Defoe allows his readers
to imagine such a situation through the vivid detailing of the
objects, events and people that his hero encounters. The full, rather
lengthy title-page to the first edition of the novel that is now known
as Robinson Crusoe gives no indication that the events described
did not happen. Indeed, in its excessive detailing of events and in its
withholding of Defoe’s name, it goes to considerable lengths to
suggest that they did actually happen (see Figure 3.1).
The title-page of a novel is a paratext. (Other paratexts include
prefaces, notes, introductions, and so on.) This title-page suggests
that the adventures to which it alludes really occurred, ‘strange’ and
‘surprizing’ as they may be. Although these events did not happen,
Defoe works hard to persuade us here that they did. The narrative is
Reading a novel 41
T H E
L LI IF FE E
AN D
S t r a n g e S u r p r i z i n g
ADVENTURES
O P
R O B I N S O N CRUSOE,
Of TO R K ,. M a r i n e r :
W ho lived Eight and Twenty Years,

i l l alo n e in an u n -iu h a b ite d I (lan d o n th e
C o a ft o f A m i k i c a , n e a r th e M o u th o f,
th e G re a t R iv er o f O r o o n o q . u i ;
H arip g been caft o» Shore by Shipwreck, w here

in all flic M en perilhcd but himfclf.
W I T H
An Account how he w u *t lift a< flrancclv deli
ver'd by P Y R A T E S .
W Ï m Ü I, Himftlf,
L O N D O N
L O N D O N L O NL DO ON ND O N
L O N D O N
Figure 3.1 Title-page to Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, first edition (London,
1719).
to be ‘strange’ and ‘surprizing’ because it is new, but it is nevertheless

familiar, true-to-life, realistic.
Defoe’s scandalous fictitious ‘life’ of Moll Flanders is similarly
devoted to propounding a sense of the ‘real’, of historical authenti-
city. The novel that we now know as Moll Flanders is presented
as a memoir written by the character herself (see Figure 3.2). In
tabloid-headline style, the title-page entices readers to buy the book
by mentioning the major events in the scandalous life of Moll
Flanders. The book is presented not as a novel but as a version of
Moll’s own ‘memorandums’, as if it were simply a transcription of
her personal diary. The life of the rather ordinary Moll Flanders is
extraordinary, ‘surprizing’, like Crusoe’s, and, like Crusoe’s, her
narrative is presented in such a way as to allow Defoe’s con-
temporaries to suppose that it is a faithful record of actual histor-
ical events. These are not fictions, the title-pages suggest, and they
are not written by a novelist.
What both of these title-pages insist on is the historical authenti-
city of the narrative to be recounted. In this respect they would
appear to be indistinguishable from a later work that is considered
42 Reading a novel
T H E
FORTUNES
A N D
MISFORTUNES
O f the F a MO U s
Moll T l anders, &c.

W h o w as B o rn in N e w o a t e , a n d d u rin g a
L if e o f c o n tin u ’d V a r ie ty for T h ree fc o re Y ears,
befides h e r C h ild h o o d , w as T w e lv e Y e a r a
V b o re, fiv e tim e s a V 'ife (w h e re o f o n ce t o h e r
o w n B ro th e r) T w e lv e Y e a r a T b i e f, E ig h t Y ea r a
T r a n f p o rte d Felon in V irg in ia , a t la ft g rew R ich,
liv ’d H onefit a n d died a Penitent.
IV ritten fr o m ber cwn M E M O R A N D U M S .
LONDON: P rinted for, and Sold b y W .

C h e t w o o d , at Cato'z-Head, in Ruffel-
_f in e t, Covent-Ganlm\ and T . E d l i n o , at
the Pr/«re’s-^mx,over-againft Exerter-Cbange
in the Strand. M DDCXX/.
Figure 3.2 Title-page to Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, first edition (London,
1721).
to have an entirely different referential status, the remarkable Narrative

of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by
Himself (1845). The development of the novel indeed is characterized
by a concern with the relationship between historical authenticity and
invention or fiction. So while contemporary novelists may not expli-
citly claim that their narratives are historical accounts or concern
actual events, they tend nevertheless to work hard to produce effects
of credibility, of ‘reality’. Contemporary fiction is often portrayed
as preoccupied, even obsessed with the relationship between its own
fictionality, its inventedness, and the real that it purports to represent.
In fact, however, this has been the condition of novel-writing from
the beginning.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s compelling novel Never Let Me Go (2005)
exemplifies this concern to construct a sense of a real place, a real
world, and to play on the expectations that that sense of the real
produces in the reader. The first part of the novel is set in Hailsham,
a fictional but seemingly stereotypical boarding school of the late
twentieth century. There is one crucial difference from your average
Reading a novel 43
boarding school, however: the reader is gradually made aware that

the children in this school are clones and that as adults they will
effectively be farmed for their body-parts, which they will ‘donate’
to ‘normals’ (non-clones, people created by conventional means).
Ishiguro’s novel is highly ‘realistic’ in the sense that the descriptions
of people, places and events are credible and indeed largely accord
with the conventions of ‘realist’ boarding school narratives from
Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) to Anthony
Buckeridge’s Jennings books (1950–94) to J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter books (1997–2007). But at the same time, Ishiguro has
invented a parallel world in which some individuals are classified as
not human and are, as young adults, slowly killed in order to provide
body-parts for others, those classified as human. The novel asks
fundamental questions about what it means to be human, what it
means to treat others as objects. Never Let Me Go works hard to
convince us that a world that does not exist in fact does, or could do.
Part of the pleasure that we take in reading this and other novels has
to do with an experience of uncertainty, a delicate balancing of
verisimilitude with a sense of the impossible.
So a sense of realism – what eighteenth-century critics (following
Aristotle) called ‘probability’ – is an integral dimension of the
novel. It is precisely this creation of the probable, the elaboration of
a world in which we can believe, that allows us to get imaginatively
lost. But in addition to this sense of realism and to the other elements
that the OED identifies – character, action, complexity – there is
another important feature of the novel that the dictionary over-
looks, namely the way it allows us unprecedented access into the
minds of its characters. While lyric poems give readers a sense of
what one person – the poet or speaker – is thinking, they do not
typically present the interiority of a series of other people. And
while plays usually present the actions of a number of individuals,
they are not very good at presenting interiority. Interiority in plays
tends to be presented, rather awkwardly, in the convention of the
soliloquy, a convention in which the character talks to him- or
herself out loud, so that s/he may be overheard by the audience
(although curiously not by any other character who might happen to
be on the stage). Shakespeare’s Iago, for example, talks to himself
with dazzling eloquence as he wonders about how to bring about
the downfall of the noble Othello, before concluding: ‘I have ’t, it is
44 Reading a novel
engendered! Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the
world’s light’ (Othello, 1.3.402–3). Dramatic soliloquy (literally
‘speaking alone’) is an oddly artificial convention and usually only
takes up a small proportion of a character’s time on stage. And yet
it is a crucial historical antecedent for the novel. The figures of
Iago, Hamlet and Macbeth, for example, thinking aloud on stage,
anticipate and inspire the interiority of characterization that we
associate with the modern novel. Nonetheless, it is in the novel that
you can get inside other people’s heads most comprehensively, most
intimately. This is the ‘special life-likeness’ of the novel, as one
critic puts it, and it depends paradoxically but crucially on ‘what
writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks’
(Cohn 1978, 5).
A sharing of interiority is crucial to how we get lost in the ‘world’ of
a book. We come to inhabit other minds and bodies imaginatively,
becoming other to ourselves. This process of empathizing or identifying
is not restricted to novels, of course. Human beings spend enormous
amounts of time trying to work out what other people are thinking
and feeling and desiring and imagining and believing. In particular,
they spend a lot of time thinking about what others are thinking
about them. What you want to know – what you need to know – is
what other people are thinking, and especially what other people
are thinking about you. We are not saying that you are narcissistic
or vain or egotistic, of course – no more than the next person, at
least, and certainly no more than, say, Bennett or Royle. We would
contend, rather, that the desire to know what others are thinking,
and the desire especially to know what others are thinking about
you, is not just a form of narcissism, but intrinsic to everything you
do as a social being. Success in life, however you measure it, almost
always requires an element of mind-reading. You won’t pass an
exam unless you are able to have a sense of what it is that the
examiner wants to hear you say; you won’t get very far in work
unless you are able to predict reasonably accurately what your boss
wants from you; and the essential and intricate game of love that
we all play requires an attempt to decipher the mind of your lover.
Mind-reading, for humans, is a means of survival.
Novels are the great art form of mind-reading. Indeed, we would
suggest, they reflect on other minds in richer and more nuanced
ways than any other discourse, including psychiatry, psychology
Reading a novel 45
and psychoanalysis. Novels allow us to know, or perhaps more

accurately to imagine or believe that we know, precisely what goes
on in the minds of others, to understand other minds. So in reading,
discussing, studying and writing about a novel, it is important to
consider how it presents other minds, how it creates and plays with
this illusion.
The novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817) are intently alert to all
these issues. She takes as her subject a certain class of people – the
middle- and upper-middle classes living in southern England – and
pays scrupulous attention to their manners and relationships, their
opinions, prejudices and ways of speaking, their lifestyles and pur-
chasing preferences, their habits, occupations and finances. And their
love lives. Especially their love lives. The typical Austen heroine is
middle-class but financially insecure, young, unmarried but eminently
marriageable, and dependent on finding a husband for a resolution
to her life. What Jane Austen realized is that there is nothing more
important in these women’s lives than the ability to read the minds
of others. She recognized that the happiness of these young women,
if not their very existence, depended on this skill, and that no minds
needed to be read with more care than those of these women’s
suitors, their potential husbands. Given the constraints of social
discourse and the lack of available information, Austen’s young
heroines have to make high-risk decisions about the honesty, integ-
rity and trustworthiness of the men that come into their orbit, by
effectively reading their minds.
Austen’s novels can be seen as mind-reading training manuals.
She is dealing with a particular socio-economic predicament, one
that requires a particularly skilful decoding of the lives of others.
And it is, we suggest, for this thematic reason that Austen’s novels are
so technically accomplished: theme (what the novels are about) and
technique (how they work) come together in the way that these
novels present other minds. Austen’s heroines are by necessity profes-
sional mind-readers – in a sense, mind-reading is their only profession.
In this way they are in collusion with the Austenian narrator, who
is the presiding expert at the subtle and complex construal of others’
minds. And just as the society that Austen depicts requires people to
say things by not saying them, and for characters to surmise what is
not said, she is herself accomplished at saying things by withholding
them, by indirection. This occurs most pervasively by means of irony,
46 Reading a novel
by saying one thing and meaning another. In this respect, Austen

makes us, novel readers, mind-readers too. We are, in effect, compelled
to read the narrator’s mind.
Here, by way of example, is a brief passage from the opening
pages of Austen’s final novel, the posthumously published Per-
suasion (1818). The passage concerns the views of the snobbish
and self-regarding father of the novel’s heroine Anne, the widower
Sir Walter Elliot:
For one daughter, his eldest, he would really have given up any
thing, which he had not been very much tempted to do. Eliza-
beth had succeeded, at sixteen, to all that was possible, of her
mother’s rights and consequence; and being very handsome,
and very like himself, her influence had always been great, and
they had gone on together most happily. His two other children
were of very inferior value. Mary had acquired a little artificial
importance, by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne,
with an elegance of mind and a sweetness of character, which
must have placed her high with any people of real under-
standing, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had
no weight; her convenience was always to give way; – she was
only Anne.
(Austen 2006b, 6)
The questions of who is speaking and whose views are being

expressed call for careful analysis. We need to try to figure out
exactly what the narrator is trying to convey, what she means, to
work out what she is thinking: we need to read her mind. But this is
not as simple as it might seem, since the narrator is not presenting a
pure, unmixed version of her own thoughts or opinions but instead
mixing them up with those of her characters, in particular with
those of Sir Walter Elliot. Because at this point, Austen is trying to
convey several different concerns: she is trying to give us a sense of
a) what Sir Walter thinks, so that we can get a sense of b) what his
financially dependent daughter Anne is up against, and, relatedly,
c) what the narrator thinks of what Sir Walter thinks.
This last point is decisive. Novels do not only give us a sense of
their characters’ minds, but allow us – require us, indeed – to
understand what the narrator might be thinking. In the striking
Reading a novel 47
statement that ‘His two other children were of very inferior value’,
for example, we have to wonder who is speaking, and who thinks
this. This is a ‘third person’ narrative in which the narrator does not
appear explicitly as a character. She is ‘omniscient’ (or, more accu-
rately perhaps, ‘telepathic’) in the sense that she seems not only to
know about everything that happens but also to be able to tap into
what different characters are thinking and feeling. No doubt it is the
narrator who says ‘His two other children were of very inferior
value’. But to whom do these children seem of ‘inferior value’? Is
this the perspective of the narrator? To talk about someone as of
‘very inferior value’ involves a distinctive and disturbing set of
assumptions – the assumption that a person has objectively measur-
able ‘value’, that some individuals are ‘inferior’, while others are
presumably highly superior, and so on. The sentence seems to take
a chillingly instrumentalist stance on a person. And since it refers to
Anne, the heroine of Austen’s novel, who is otherwise presented as
flawed but admirable, we must conclude that the views expressed by
these words, and even the words ‘inferior’ and ‘value’ themselves,
are not the narrator’s so much as those of the snobbish and
thoughtless father.
So through an apparently objective, omniscient or telepathic
third-person narrator, Austen is in fact presenting the assumptions
and prejudices of one of the characters, Sir Walter Elliot. We are
reading Sir Walter’s mind, in other words, getting an insight into
what he thinks. But we are also implicitly and perhaps more
importantly getting an insight into what the narrator thinks of what
Sir Walter thinks. We thus infer that she does not think much of
Sir Walter’s brutal, instrumentalist, class-ridden opinion of his
daughter’s value. It is this critique of Sir Walter’s prejudices that
the passage may be said finally to convey in this indirect, wonder-
fully ironic way. The technical term for the narrative technique
whereby the narrator moves freely and flexibly from her own per-
spective into and out of the minds of her characters is ‘free indirect
speech’ or ‘free indirect discourse’. Jane Austen was one of the first
to develop this technique – a technique that is still pervasive in the
novel today.
Free indirect discourse is a feature of third-person narratives. But
mind-reading also occurs in relation to first-person narrators. Para-
doxically, first-person narrators often know themselves less well than
48 Reading a novel
we know them. And it is this gap of insight, of self-knowledge, that

first-person novels most richly explore and exploit. To illustrate this
we could return to the case of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. As she
begins her story, the thirty-one year old narrator Kathy H. proudly
boasts of her abilities as a ‘carer’. She has spent more than eleven
years caring for other clones as they ‘donate’ their body-parts and
eventually die. She has apparently been told that she has eight more
months to go before she will end her time as a carer and become a
‘donor’ herself. Ishiguro manages to generate enormous pathos by
making us see the limitations of Kathy’s sense of her own humanity –
her inability to think beyond the terms of a world in which she has
been sentenced to a painful, selfless death. She is not trying to boast,
she tells us:
But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my

work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always
tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times
have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified
as ‘agitated’, even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am
boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my
work well, especially that bit about my donors staying ‘calm’.
I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors, I know when
to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to
themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and
when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
(Ishiguro 2005, 3)
Ishiguro deftly maps the limits of his narrator’s understanding.

Kathy H. is what is known as an ‘unreliable narrator’. Ordinarily,
an unreliable narrator fails to tell the truth, or obfuscates, or mis-
leads. Kathy does none of these things – at least not on purpose.
Rather, she remains enigmatic to us: she is unreliable because she is
unable to fully appreciate the true ethical and existential horror of
her own situation. Her proud boast about her ability to keep her
donors calm is, as we will later learn, grounded in the appalling,
agonizing early deaths that she has overseen and that she will soon
herself suffer at first hand. Ishiguro’s dystopian vision of England
presents a world in which certain individuals are treated as if they
are not human. But what is striking and moving about Ishiguro’s
Reading a novel 49
prose is the fact that Kathy H. is unable quite to grasp something

fundamental that her readers do understand: everything she says, all
her pride and compassion, all her humanity, indeed, is undermined
by a gaping hole in her ethical understanding, by her inability to see
that her society treats her inexcusably, inhumanly. Ishiguro generates
immense pathos through this technique of narratorial blindness.
Kathy H. is blind to the full horror of the story she is narrating.
Everything comes through the voice or perspective of an individual
who cannot see the enormity of the crimes committed against her
and those like her.
Ishiguro’s novel is perhaps a more sophisticated example of a
book that carries us away, in which we can get ‘lost’. It creates a
parallel world in which we can believe, inventing characters with
whom we can identify, and at the same time it resists such identifi-
cation, prevents us from fully losing ourselves. The novel brings us
up short. In a subtle and intricate way, Ishiguro produces what the
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht refers to as the ‘alienation
effect’ (Brecht 1964, 136–47), inasmuch as his novel refuses to offer
us the easy comfort of identification with his novel’s narrator and
protagonist, Kathy H.
All of the novels we have discussed in this chapter – Robinson
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Persuasion and Never Let Me Go – have
been turned into TV or cinema films in recent years. Despite their
best efforts, however, movies make a massive loss in translating
written texts onto the screen. They lose the voice and the con-
sciousness of the narrator, the personality, the texture of the minds
of others. It is such voices that echo in our heads as we read these
novels, and such presences that reverberate. Like the artifice of
soliloquy in plays, the convention of the voice-over is occasionally
employed in movies to mimic the novelistic narrator. But this tends
to feel un-filmic, and is usually dropped fairly quickly, while other
cinematic aspects – scene, spectacle, sound, music, dialogue, action –
take its place. Only in novels do we get these particular kinds of
voices, the thoughts and feelings of others inhabiting our heads.
Only in novels do we get this verbal richness that allows us, as the
novelist David Foster Wallace puts it, to ‘leap over the walls of self’
(Wallace 1998, 51). Only in novels do people inhabit our thoughts
in this way, prompting us to reflect on the idea that they read our
minds as we are reading theirs.
50 Reading a novel
Questions for the novel

How should you examine a novel? The following are some questions
for you to think about:
What work is the title doing? Are there other paratextual features
of the book that are of interest (a preface or notes or introduction
or acknowledgements, and so on)?
In what ways does the novel examine, play with, subvert or in
other ways explore the relationship between language and
representation (or text and world)?
What other texts does the novel evoke, develop, ironize, challenge?
What genres does it engage or identify with, mimic, satirize or
deviate from?
How are characters represented and developed? What kinds of
language and rhetorical effects are used to describe them? What
is individual or idiomatic about the way in which a particular
character speaks?
What kind of narrator is employed? Is it first-person or third-
person? How much does the narrator seem to know? Is s/he
omniscient, telepathic, unreliable? Ironic? Playful? Is s/he a character
in his or her own right? Is there more than one? How does the
narrator interact (if at all) with the characters?
How is the narrative focalized (through whose eyes are the
events seen and understood)? Whose language and perspective does
the narrator use to describe events, characters, objects, scenes?
What kinds of lacunae are involved in the narrator’s perspective?
What does s/he fail to understand or perceive? Does s/he withhold
information? How (and how do you know)? Why?
And finally, how about some of the issues we have not had a
chance to discuss here, such as the uncanny, humour, shock,
dream, sadness, terror, love, eroticism, place, ghosts, God, the
future, wordplay?
Further reading
The eminently readable title-essay in David Lodge’s Consciousness
and the Novel (2002) is good on the ways that novels seem to allow
us access to other minds, while Dorrit Cohn presents a more
Reading a novel 51
technical and more detailed consideration of the novelistic pre-

sentation of consciousness in her book Transparent Minds (1978).
Probably the most influential book on the early development of the
English novel is Ian Watt’s Marxist analysis in The Rise of the Novel
(1957), which connects it with the socio-economic rise of the middle
classes and the ideology of possessive individualism in the late-
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two important revisions to
Watt’s narrative were published in the 1980s: Lennard Davis, Factual
Fictions (1983) and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English
Novel (1987). Another classic study of the novel that we would
recommend is the shrewd and pleasingly anti-authoritarian Aspects
of the Novel (1927) by E.M. Forster. Brian Richardson’s Unnatural
Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction
(2006) offers a valuable overview of recent developments in novelistic
practice, while the opening chapter, ‘What is a Novel?’, in Terry
Eagleton’s The English Novel (2004) offers a bracing introduction to
his lengthy historical study of the topic, and David Amigoni’s The
English Novel and Prose Narrative (2000) is a wide-ranging advanced
introduction to the various aspects of the English novel and to novel
and narrative theory. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction:
Contemporary Poetics (2005) is an admirably concise, lucid and
helpful introduction to the topic, and H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge
Introduction to Narrative (2008) is likewise a rich and valuable
resource for thinking about how to read novels. For an important
corrective to the often rather loose usage of the term ‘omniscient
narrator’, see Chapter 8 in Jonathan Culler’s The Literary in Theory
(2007). Michael McKeon helpfully brings together a large number of
the most influential essays and book chapters on the theory of the
novel in Theory of the Novel (2000), and David Herman’s Cambridge
Companion to Narrative (2007) offers useful essays on character,
plot, focalization and other features of narrative texts. Of course, we
also have our favourites among more focused and more scholarly
studies on the novel – these include three studies of Victorian fiction:
D.A. Miller’s marvellous Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of
Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981), which has chapters on
Austen and George Eliot; Peter Brooks’s powerful Freudian reading
of narrative, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(1992), with chapters on Henry James, Joseph Conrad and William
Faulkner; and Garrett Stewart’s brilliant micro-linguistic study of
52 Reading a novel
violence in Victorian fiction, Novel Violence: A Narratography of

Victorian Fiction (2009), with chapters on Dickens, Anne Brontë,
George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. We also like Richard Kearney’s
wide-ranging philosophical meditation on the whys and the ways of
narratives as cultural artefacts, On Stories (2002).
4 Reading a short story
How short is a short story? What does ‘short’ mean in this context?
One critic is brave, or foolhardy, enough to proffer some numbers,
stating that a prose narrative of anything up to about fifty pages
(say 20,000 words) can be classified as a short story. A prose narrative
of more than about 150 pages (50,000 words or so) is then classed
as a novel, while between the two there is that half-way house, the
novella – texts such as Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd (1886–91) or
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), George Orwell’s Animal
Farm (1945) or Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden (1973) (see
Scofield 2006, 4–5). In a famous discussion of the short story pub-
lished in 1842, one of the great early masters of the form, Edgar
Allan Poe, argues that the fact that a story takes between half an
hour and two hours to read allows for a ‘unity’ of form: ‘During
the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control’,
he claims. There is no ‘weariness’, he says, no need for interruption:
everything comes at one sitting. The short story produces what Poe
calls ‘a single effect’ (Poe 1965, 106–8).
To be brief, then. That is the thing. As Adrian Hunter suggests,
the short story involves ‘the art of saying less but meaning more’
(Hunter 2007, 2). In the Introduction to his Collected Stories, the
short story writer V.S. Pritchett argues that the short story is concerned
with ‘concision, intensity, reducing possible novels to essentials’. He
comments that the short story writer is ‘a mixture of reporter,
aphoristic wit, moralist and poet’ (Pritchett 1982, x–xi). A typical
short story lacks formal chapters, requires a relatively simple plot-line
with little in the way of sub-plot, and attempts little in terms of
character development. It relies on ‘poetic tautness and clarity’,
according to Elizabeth Bowen, another great exponent of the form,

and it ‘stand[s] on the edge of prose’. It is, she says, ‘nearer to
drama than to the novel’ (Bowen 1950, 38).
On the face of it, then, there is not much to the short story – so,
how do we read one?
Closely related to Poe’s notion of ‘single effect’, short stories
often turn on a single event, or, more particularly, on a moment of
recognition or awakening. James Joyce famously referred to such
moments as ‘epiphanies’, borrowing this term from the Christian
idea of a ‘manifestation’ or ‘showing forth’ in which Jesus Christ is
revealed to the Magi. Joyce’s secular epiphany retains a sense of the
interaction of the natural with the supernatural. In Stephen Hero
(written c.1904–6), Joyce defines ‘epiphany’ as ‘a sudden spiritual
manifestation’ which constitutes ‘the most delicate and evanescent
of moments’ (Joyce 1963, 211). Short fiction often revolves around a
moment of recognition or revelation, but the epiphany is not necessarily
religious or even illuminating. It might be a moment of opacity or
uncertainty, of obscurity or indecision. Another helpful approach to
short fiction is to consider such a work as an elaboration on a single
sentence, or phrase, or word. Indeed, relying on what has been called
‘elliptical suggestiveness’ (Malcolm and Malcolm 2008, 7), many
short stories can be considered as elaborations on their own titles.
There is a remarkable, disturbing work of short fiction by the
American writer David Foster Wallace called ‘Suicide as a Sort of
Present’ (1999) that brings out these ideas about titles and epiphanies
particularly well. Wallace’s work hinges on the question of how we
interpret its opaque but also intriguing and provocative title. What
does it mean to call suicide ‘a sort of present’? Uncertainty here
revolves around the meaning of the word ‘Present’. ‘Present’ can denote
a gift or it can mean something that is here, now. Since the idea that
suicide might be a gift of some sort appears to be aberrant, if not
abhorrent, ‘Present’ in the title seems at first glance to mean ‘now’ or
‘here’. But this is odd as well: how can suicide be here or now? And why
only ‘sort of’? Is there some obscure philosophical idea at work here? By
the end of the narrative, however, the problem appears to be resolved:
it is evident that ‘present’ does indeed mean ‘gift’. In this regard, the
whole point of the story comes down to the question of how suicide
can possibly be conceived of as a gift, even a ‘sort of’ gift. On one level,
at least, the story and its title function as a kind of riddle.
Reading a short story 55
How does Wallace work this conundrum? The story involves a

mother who has ‘a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside’
(Wallace 2000, 241). She is a high-achieving perfectionist whose
failure to live up to her own standards leads to self-loathing: ‘Her
expectations of herself were of utter perfection, and each time she
fell short of perfection she was filled with an unbearable plunging
despair that threatened to shatter her like a cheap mirror’ (241–42).
Her desire for perfection is transferred onto her son, who naturally
fails to live up to his mother’s ‘impossibly high’ expectations (242).
The high standards that the mother expects of herself require that
she loves her son unconditionally. And her perfectionism also means
that she detests his failings: ‘every time the child was rude, greedy,
foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish, wilful, or
childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to
loathe it’ (243). But there is a disconcerting twist to the mother’s
predicament: since a ‘good mother’ cannot loathe her child, instead
of loathing him for these failings, she loves him more, because not
to do so would be to fail as a mother. Indeed, paradoxically, the
more loathsome the child is, ‘the more loving the mother required
herself to be’ (243). And she turns her loathing inward and loathes
herself even more for the loathing she feels for his failings. Because
the son loves his mother more than anything else in the world he
therefore paradoxically fails more in order to gain more of her
love – since the worse he behaves the more, perversely, she loves
him. The only way out of this double bind of love and loathing is,
as we discover when we reach the final paragraph, for the son to
kill himself. The story doesn’t actually say that he kills himself, it is
true – instead it tells us that because the mother is unable to express
her feelings of love and loathing, the son, who is ‘desperate, as are
all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of
mothers’, finally ‘expressed it all for her’ (244). Putting this sentence
together with the story’s title and with a reference in the final
paragraph to the boy becoming old enough to ‘apply for various
licences and permits’, we can infer that the son’s ‘present’, his ‘gift’,
is to buy a gun and shoot himself, thereby, within the terms of his
own perverse and paradoxical psycho-logic, producing the perfect
‘expression’ of his mother’s conflicted feelings of love, loathing and
self-loathing. It is in this way that the title’s conundrum, the idea
that suicide can be a ‘sort of present’, is resolved.
Wallace’s text is, in various respects, characteristic of the short

story more generally. It has a single and relatively simple plot. It
contains a small number of characters whose development is limited.
It concludes in a kind of epiphany whereby the title’s word ‘present’
is resolved as ‘gift’. It is all there in the single resonant, ominous
phrase, ‘[he] expressed it all for her’. This is a story about loathing
and self-loathing, and about maternity and a child’s psychological
development – a story about the way that ‘Man hands on misery to
man’, as Philip Larkin puts it in his poem ‘This be the Verse’ (1971)
(Larkin 2012, 88). And it is tightly focused on that one titular word
and its implications: ‘present’.
Works of short fiction also tend to be concerned with the present
in the other, temporal sense, with a sense of ‘now’, of immediacy, of
presence. Nadine Gordimer contends that short story writers ‘see by
the light of the flash’: their art is ‘the art of the only thing one can be
sure of – the present moment’. In the short story, events are presented
‘without explanation of what went before and what happens beyond
this point’, she claims (quoted in Hunter 2007, 2). Gordimer seems
to be pointing to something important in the form. The ‘flash’ has
been variously described, in fact. Pritchett observes that the short
story is ‘the glancing form of fiction’ (Pritchett 1982, xi). Wallace
talks in an interview about stories coming together with ‘the click
of a well-made box’ (Wallace 2012, 35). He borrows this idea from
a letter by W.B. Yeats on the idea of a poem coming ‘right with a
click like a closing box’ (Yeats 1940, 24). In the same interview,
Wallace refers to James Joyce’s notion of ‘epiphany’, linking stories
with a form of spiritual manifestation or revelation. In Joyce, however,
and in Wallace and others, this ‘click’ or flash or epiphany is both
revelatory and obscuring – mysterious or unfathomable, uncanny.
Indeed, it might be said that what distinguishes such authors from
hack writers is the difference between a ‘twist in the tale’ that reveals
everything, that leaves no more to be said or imagined, and the kind of
‘click’ or ‘flash’ or epiphany that at once closes and opens up the
text to further reading and thinking.
There is much more that we might say about Wallace’s story. We
could explore at length the rich verbal texture of the narrative, the
way that, for example, in the form of something like a psychological
case-study, it satirizes therapeutic discourses. Thus, so-called ‘therapy-
speak’ – as a child, the mother was seen as ‘bright, attractive,
popular, impressive’ (242) but, as an adult, her self-loathing ‘tended

to project itself outward and downward onto the child’ (242), and
so on – gets incorporated into the casual discourse of contemporary
American conversation. We read that she has ‘a very hard time of it,
emotionally, inside’ (241); that, as a child, she had ‘some very heavy
psychic shit laid on her’ by her parents (241), and so on. We could also
talk about the way that Wallace produces a searing analysis of the
social and psychological, the political and institutional discourses of
contemporary America, the way that this apparently psychological
tale also involves a deeply felt critique of the social and cultural
institutions (including the ‘institutions’ of the family and of education)
that nourish such agonizing, pointless, deadly self-loathing in the
first place.
Let us consider another example. In Flannery O’Connor’s story
‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (1953), the wording of the title again
proves crucial. The title sounds like a quotation, and a quick internet
search reveals that the phrase originates in a 1918 song of the same
name by Eddie Green, made famous in the following decades by Bessie
Smith, Sophie Tucker (the original ‘Last of the Red Hot Mamas’)
and others. But Flannery O’Connor’s writings tend to have prominent
religious dimensions, and this story proves to be no exception. The
title, we quickly discover, also has a Biblical resonance. The idea of
a good man being hard to find occurs in Mark 10:18 when Christ
refutes the claim that he is himself a ‘good man’, commenting that
‘There is no man good, but one, that is God’ (see Desmond 2004,
129). And in fact the same phrase is used in an even more apoca-
lyptic line in Micah, one of the books of the Old Testament: ‘The
good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright
among men: they all live in wait for blood’. ‘Trust ye not in a
friend’, Micah continues, ominously (Micah 7:2, 5).
O’Connor’s ‘Good Man’, then, involves a number of allusions. But
where does knowing this get us? Recalling or researching individual
words and phrases is all very well and it is fine to speculate on where a
phrase in a story originates, but we need to go further. Allusion-
spotting is akin to that oddly inconsequential hobby, train-spotting.
Like train-spotting, it is basically harmless. But neither, in truth,
gets you very far. So how do these allusions work in O’Connor’s title?
Perhaps the point is that it is not just hard but in fact impossible to
find a ‘Good Man’. Eddie Green’s second line tells us that ‘You
always get the other kind’; Micah’s apocalyptic worldview encom-

passes only violence and distrust (‘there is none upright among men’);
and Christ denies that any man, whether or not he is the son of
God, can be described as ‘Good’. These sentiments seem to chime
with O’Connor’s work: her fictional world is characterized by alien-
ation and disillusionment, mental and physical disability, random
acts of violence and cruelty, deception, unkindness, in short the
elusiveness of moral and spiritual ‘goodness’.
O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ concerns a family from
the deep South: husband and wife, two children, a baby and the
man’s mother. The father, Bailey, wants to take the family south to
Florida for a holiday, but his mother wants to go north to Tennessee.
As part of her case against travelling south, she cites news reports of
a violent escaped convict self-dubbed ‘The Misfit’ who is said to be
heading for Florida. Florida is a dangerous place to visit, she argues,
and Bailey is acting irresponsibly in taking his family there. But
Bailey ignores his mother’s advice and the family set off in their car.
In a farcically random accident on the way, Bailey crashes the car into
a ditch. Another car comes by with three men in it. Unfortunately,
Bailey’s mother recognizes one of them as the Misfit, and says as
much. His response is darkly menacing:
‘Yes’m,’ the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in

spite of himself to be known, ‘but it would have been better for
all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.’
(O’Connor 2009, 127)
Since he has been ‘reckernized’ and identified as the escaped convict,

the Misfit tells the two other men to take Bailey and his son to the
nearby woods: ‘The boys want to ast you something’, he says
politely but ominously to Bailey, ‘would you mind stepping back in
them woods there with them?’ (128). Soon two gun shots are heard
and the men return without Bailey or his son. Next, Bailey’s wife,
daughter and baby are taken to the woods and with a kind of
gruesome inevitability a scream and three pistol shots are heard.
While all this is happening, the grandmother engages the philo-
sophically minded but psychotic Misfit in an ethico-religious dis-
cussion, in which she attempts to persuade him that he is really, at
heart, a ‘good man’. She tells the Misfit that she knows he has ‘good
blood’ and urges him to pray, but to no avail: as she reaches out to
touch him, the Misfit shoots her dead (O’Connor 2009, 131–32).
The narrative relies for much of its dark humour, lambent pathos
and sharp, almost nihilistic sociological critique on the stark evocation
of the linguistic registers of the American South – of Bailey, the
grandmother, the children, the Misfit and of the owner of a roadside
diner where the family stop to eat before the car crash. In particular,
there is a focus on the title-word ‘Good’. When the family stop at the
diner, the grandmother engages in a conversation with the owner,
Red Sammy (‘Red’, we might surmise, because he expresses left-wing
views). Micah-like, they talk about the recent decline of society and
of manners, and she agrees with Red Sammy that nobody is to be
trusted ‘these days’. Red Sammy tells her that he recently allowed a
customer to take some gas for his car on credit and asks why she
thinks he did such a naively trusting thing: ‘Because you’re a good
man!’, declares the grandmother, before undermining her argument
by saying that there ‘isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you
can trust’ while looking directly at Red Sammy. Red Sammy replies
that ‘A good man is hard to find’ (122). Part of the force of Red Sammy’s
comment involves the fact that he is not saying anything new or neces-
sarily sincere, that he is quoting from or at least echoing a pop-song
or half-remembered phrase in the Bible. He seems to be spouting a
cliché. It is only later, when the grandmother engages the Misfit in
conversation as he calmly has his men shoot each member of her
family in turn, that this tired cliché returns with despairing force.
‘I know you’re a good man’, the grandmother tells him with increasing
desperation, ‘I know you’re a good man at heart … I just know you’re
a good man’ (127–28). But the Misfit disagrees after pondering her
proposition a while: ‘Now, I ain’t a good man’, he says after a darkly
comic pause, ‘but I ain’t the worst in the world neither’ (128). It is
debatable, of course, whether the Misfit is the worst in the world, but
as he himself affirms, he is certainly not ‘good’. And yet O’Connor is
evidently rather taken by the Misfit’s eerily psychotic way of thinking
about morality, about what it means to be ‘good’. His way of thinking
about ethics and about punishment includes the idea that it doesn’t
matter what you do because you will be punished anyway, even if
you don’t know or have forgotten what it is that you have done to
deserve the punishment; and that he can never ‘fit’ what he has done
or not done with the punishments he has been made to endure
(hence the Misfit’s name). For him, Jesus threw ‘everything off bal-
ance’ by raising the dead and thereby forcing us to choose whether
to believe in him (according to which reasoning, we should logically
abandon everything else and follow him) or not believe in him (in
which case, following strict logic, we are free to do anything, to take
our pleasure where we will) (O’Connor 2009, 131). After shooting the
grandmother dead, the Misfit offers the reader a final insight into his
home-made and ethically bizarre sense of what ‘good’ means: chal-
lenging even linguistic sense, he declares that the grandmother ‘would
of been a good woman … if it had been somebody to shoot her every
moment of her life’ (133). The Misfit’s deformations of grammar
(‘would of been’; ‘if it had been somebody’) seem to reflect the defor-
mations in his ethics. In a sense, the statement eludes both language and
logic, has no language, no logic. O’Connor’s disturbing but also dis-
turbingly funny ending brilliantly evokes the impossibility and violence
of both saying and doing what the Misfit wants to say and would do.
‘Good’, then, does an enormous amount of work in this story, as
O’Connor explores the ethical, theological, criminological, psychia-
tric, political and sociological dimensions of the word. She evokes
the idea of the ‘good’ in an uncanny, surprising and unsettling
way – in a way that is really only available in fiction, and with a
concision and intensity that is characteristic of short fiction at its
most powerful. She re-invigorates the tired, seemingly banal word
‘good’ in prose that evinces ‘tautness and clarity’, while hovering at
the same time on the edge of sense. By putting pressure on the word
‘good’ and the idea of a ‘good man’ in this way, O’Connor’s story
investigates the limits of morality, religion and sense itself.
Here is a summary of the points we have tried to emphasize in this

chapter:
Think small: the short story’s brevity has particular consequences

for its form. Often allusive and elliptical rather than discursive in
manner, short stories tend to focus on a small number of characters
and are often based on a single incident. They often involve a
sense of epiphany or revelation even as they complicate any sense
of resolution or closure.
Begin with the title, or at least come back to it at the end:
what does it tell us? How does it work? In what ways does the
story elaborate on, depart from, resolve or even resist its own
title?
Be suggestible: if short fiction involves ‘elliptical suggestiveness’
then it is important to pay careful attention to nuances of phrasing
and word choice. What kinds of denotations, implications, asso-
ciations and connections are produced by and through individual
words and phrases in the story? Attend to what Bowen calls the
‘poetic’ – effects of syntactical deformation, unusual metaphor,
striking turns of phrase, arresting images.
Look out for repetition: there are often key words or phrases
that recur or seem to stand out in a short story. A single word (like
‘good’ in O’Connor’s story) can often provide a way into thinking
and writing about the story.
Talk about the plot: when writing about a work of short fiction,
it is often helpful to summarize the plot (as we have done in the
case of the two stories we consider in this chapter). It is always
instructive and often surprising. It is a way of finding out what
you think, what matters to you in the story under consideration.
The way that you retell the plot is never innocent or neutral: you
are inevitably being selective and partial, and thus, in effect,
already foregrounding a particular reading.
Be alert to effects of intertextuality: look for ways that the story
seems to be alluding to, echoing or explicitly referring to stories,
poems, songs or other kinds of text. How do these echoes, allusions,
references function? How do they enrich or complicate the text?
What are their effects?
Ask yourself: What is the most striking, memorable or significant
aspect of this story? Your answer may have to do with its overall
impact on you, its ‘single effect’ as Poe called it; or it may have to
do with something much more peripheral or micrological (a parti-
cularly powerful image or situation or idea or word or phrase,
for example). Either way, you should think about a way of
incorporating this, when writing about the story.
What is the time? Or, in more precise terms, what is the temporal
perspective of the story? Does it locate itself historically, for
example? Is the narrator looking back on something that happened
long before, or very recently? (It may even be that the story is
being narrated in the present tense.) How much time is covered
in the course of the narrative? In what ways does the story play
with time – dealing, for example, with events over many months
or years in a single paragraph, but elsewhere devoting an extended
passage to what happens one afternoon or even at one moment?
Who’s talking? Consider the importance of the figure of the
narrator, narrative voice and narrative perspective. Is this a
third-, first- or even second-person narrative? Is it omniscient,
telepathic, unreliable, involved, detached, and so on? And what
about dialogue in the story? In what ways do verbal exchanges
between characters deepen our sense of them as characters, but
also contribute to the action and atmosphere of the story?
Further reading
Some of the more general aspects of the short story are covered in
the further reading section for the chapter on the novel (above).
Specifically on the short story, however, Adrian Hunter’s The
Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English (2007) is a
good place to start for a consideration of the short story tradition
and of how short stories work. Some of the most influential studies
of the short story have been written by practitioners themselves.
An excellent anthology of such material is Charles E. May The New
Short Story Theories (1994). It is also worth looking at Frank
O’Connor’s now-classic book on the topic The Lonely Voice: A
Study of the Short Story (1963). Since in the English-speaking world,
the American short story is arguably the most sophisticated and
well-developed tradition, Martin Scofield’s The Cambridge Intro-
duction to the American Short Story (2006) is also very helpful. For
recent studies of the British and Irish short story, see Cheryl Alexander
Malcolm and David Malcolm, A Companion to the British and
Irish Short Story (2008), Heather Ingman, A History of the Irish
Short Story (2009), and Andrew Maunder et al., The British Short
Story (2011).
5 Reading a play
How can you read a play? What sort of question is that? What sense
does it make to talk about reading in the context of a play? Surely
you go to a play to watch and listen, not read? We will attempt to
explore these questions in relation to one of the most famous plays
of all time, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (first published in
1597). But before we do so, a brief prologue is called for.
Prologue to reading Shakespeare

To study a play by Shakespeare is inevitably to find yourself turning
for help to other sources. You shouldn’t feel bad about this. Everyone
does it – from actors and theatre directors to Shakespeare editors
and other scholars. Glosses and editorial commentary, online or
other ‘study guides’ that give you information about character, plot
and theme, the setting of the play, its performance history and its
publishing history – all of these are helpful. An edition of the play
that provides detailed commentary and notes is a must: the Arden,
the New Cambridge and the Oxford Shakespeare editions are all
excellent in this regard. (In the following pages we will rely on the
Oxford World’s Classics edition of Romeo and Juliet: see Shakespeare
2000.) If you can, you should get to a performance of the play. A play
is for watching (and listening to) – its happening on the stage is
decisive – even if, as we hope to show in this chapter, it also has a
separate and equally important existence on the page.
If you cannot find a performance of Romeo and Juliet going on in
your local town or city, you are either unlucky (like Romeo and
Juliet) or not looking hard enough. In truth, Shakespeare’s play
64 Reading a play
usually is being performed somewhere not very far away – even if in

an amateur production, say, or a local school. The value of seeing the
play performed cannot be overstated. So much of a play by Shakespeare
(or indeed by anyone else) will become suddenly much clearer when
you actually see it being acted. A live performance has an immediacy
and vitality that film versions cannot produce. But you can always
watch a film version if needs be. We would suggest that, in the first
instance, you avoid contemporary remakes or other modern dramati-
zations. Film versions of Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli (1968)
or Baz Luhmann (1996) are brilliant in all sorts of ways, but take you
quite a long way from the play Shakespeare wrote. It is easy enough
to get hold of the BBC version with Patrick Ryecart, Rebecca Saire,
John Gielgud and others (1978, dir. Alvin Rakoff), for example, in
order to see a performance that is more faithful to the text.
Watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet encourages you to
think about how the script is being interpreted, about what the
director and actors are doing with it. This involves numerous
aspects that are not necessarily specified in the text (or in the stage
directions) and that require intelligence and imagination on the part
of the theatre group staging the event. These include:
1 Location. The play is set in Verona, but every scene entails different
questions about exactly how and where – a street? A bedroom?
A banqueting hall? A graveyard?
2 Time. The play would appear to take place in the late-medieval
period, although it also has obvious hallmarks of the more
contemporary, that is English Elizabethan.
3 Facial gestures and other movements of the body. The performance
will raise questions of how actors move and speak or remain silent,
how they interact with one another and with the audience.
4 The physical space between characters on the stage. Sometimes
they are as far apart as possible, sometimes unnervingly close,
literally nose to nose or lips upon lips.
5 The use of props. Stage furniture can take on a life of its own – a
balcony, a bed, a tomb, as well as smaller objects such as a sword
or shield, a letter or phial of poison.
It is probably only after you have watched a production that sticks

quite closely to Shakespeare’s text that you can start working out
Reading a play 65
what to make of the play. This is because part of the pleasure of

reading a play by Shakespeare is in imagining it being staged.
Imagine yourself as the director and as the actor in question.
When Juliet exclaims, ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou
Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name … ’, and Romeo
responds in an aside (i.e. talking to himself) ‘Shall I hear more, or shall
I speak at this?’ (2.1.76–80), there are countless ways of delivering
these lines. Imagine how you would speak them, in the moonlit
beauty of this so-called balcony scene. No one is asking you to be a
director at the Old Vic or at Stratford, or a glamorous and dazzling
actor on the stage. Your vision of how the scene is staged and acted
may be thoroughly derivative: it might correspond very closely to
the way in which you remember it being performed on stage. But
still, that playing of the lines, in the private theatre of your head, is
a crucial prologue to writing about the play.
A good critical essay about Romeo and Juliet will convey a strong
sense of how the play works – what the characters are like, how the
plot unfolds, and other aspects of play-making and play-production
that we have mentioned. Above all it should convey knowledge and
curiosity about Shakespeare’s language. Nothing gives more pleasure
than a careful, articulate and thought-provoking reading of a short
extract from the play. The best critical writing invariably provides
in-depth commentary on one or more passages from the play,
showing how this fits in with the play’s larger concerns. Curiosity
and patience are often as important as knowledge and self-assurance.
So much of the richness of Shakespeare’s language depends on what
is ambiguous or uncertain. With Shakespeare, perhaps more than
with any other writer in English, it is often necessary to acknowl-
edge ignorance as well as demonstrate knowledge – to ‘remain’, as
John Keats once commented, in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’
(Keats 2005, 60).
But how do you read a play? This, in a sense, is a question the
play itself asks. For as we will see, Romeo and Juliet is very much a
play about reading – and about failing or being unable to read.
To the ancient feast

We are near the start of the play. Romeo is talking with his friend
Benvolio about being love-sick for a young maid called Rosaline.
66 Reading a play
Benvolio suggests (correctly, as it turns out) that Romeo only need

turn his gaze upon some other young beauty and he will be cured.
Romeo maintains that he is effectively beyond remedy, worse than
madly in love – at which point a Serving-man enters, bearing a
letter or paper:
BENVOLIO: Take thou some new infection to thy eye,

And the rank poison of the old will die. 50
ROMEO: Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.
BENVOLIO: For what, I pray thee?
ROMEO: For your broken shin.
BENVOLIO: Why, Romeo, art thou mad?
ROMEO: Not mad, but bound more than a madman is: 55
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipped and tormented, and – Good e’en, good
fellow.
SERVING-MAN: God gi’ good e’en. I pray, sir, can you read?
(1.2.49–58)
The opening of this passage illustrates why William Hazlitt, in his

‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’ (1817), suggested that ‘Romeo is
Hamlet in love’. Both characters seem, in Hazlitt’s phrase, ‘absent
and self-involved’ (Bate 1997, 521–22). Benvolio thinks his friend is
mad. ‘Your plantain leaf is excellent for that’ (l.51), Romeo remarks.
The obscurity of the word ‘that’ is compounded by the strange
rejoinder that it is excellent ‘For your broken shin’ (l.53). Romeo
seems to be saying that his sickness cannot be cured by some feeble
herb: a plantain leaf might soothe a grazed shin (‘broken’ here refers
to breaking the skin rather than the shin bone), but there is no such
cure for what is afflicting Romeo. Even so, Romeo is talking in a
frenzied way that invites comparison with the Shakespearean character
most notorious for acting mad, namely Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
If Hamlet feels that Denmark itself is ‘a prison’ and imagines himself
‘bounded in a nutshell’ (Hamlet, 2.2.253–56), Romeo is ‘bound
more than a madman’.
Evoking the conventional Elizabethan treatment of madness,
Romeo’s crazed self-description (‘Shut up in prison, kept without
my food, / Whipped and tormented, and … ’) is only stopped by the
entrance of the Serving-man. This interruption means that Romeo’s
Reading a play 67
outpouring here takes the rhetorical form of aposiopesis, an unfin-

ished statement. We can never know what Romeo might have gone
on to say. It is a fine example of the speed of the play, the rapidity
with which Shakespeare has one thing dissolve or switch into
another. Likewise it succinctly illustrates a more pervasive sense of
things being cut off in their prime, ended before they should. This
syncopation is linked to a consistent emphasis on the ‘untimely’, a
word used five times in the play – most notably in reference to the
‘untimely death’ (1.4.109 and 5.3.234) of both Romeo and Juliet.
This is a tragedy in which both of the eponymous lovers die before
their time, not only in the sense that they are too young to die, but
also in the fateful irony by which each mis-times death: Romeo kills
himself because he mistakenly believes that Juliet is already dead;
Juliet kills herself only after he has, on mistaken grounds, killed
himself.
Romeo answers the Serving-man’s question ‘I pray, sir, can you
read?’ and the scene unfolds as follows:
ROMEO: Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.

SERVING-MAN: Perhaps you have learned it without book. 60
But I pray, can you read anything you see?
ROMEO: Ay, if I know the letters and the language.
SERVING-MAN: Ye say honestly, rest you merry.
ROMEO: Stay, fellow, I can read.
He reads the letter.
‘Signor Martino and his wife and daughters; 65
County Anselme and his beauteous sisters;
The lady widow of Utruvio;
Signor Placentio and his lovely nieces;
Mercutio and his brother Valentine;
Mine uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters; 70
My fair niece Rosaline, and Livia;
Signor Valentio and his cousin Tybalt;
Lucio and the lively Helen.’
A fair assembly. Whither should they come?
SERVING-MAN: Up. 75
ROMEO: Whither to supper?
SERVING-MAN: To our house.
ROMEO: Whose house?
68 Reading a play
SERVING-MAN: My master’s.
ROMEO: Indeed, I should have asked you that before. 80
SERVING-MAN: Now I’ll tell you without asking. My master is the
great rich Capulet, and if you be not of the house of
Montagues, I pray come and crush a cup of wine. Rest
you merry. Exit
BENVOLIO: At this same ancient feast of Capulet’s 85
Sups the fair Rosaline, whom thou so loves,
With all the admirèd beauties of Verona.
Go thither, and with unattainted eye
Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
(1.2.58–90)
It is sheer chance: Romeo is, as the Prologue to the play has already
indicated, ‘misadventured’ (l.7). He will go to the ‘ancient feast’ and
fall in love with Capulet’s daughter, Juliet, only because he has
inadvertently read a letter of invitation that is specifically not
addressed to him (Romeo being, of course, ‘of the house of Mon-
tagues’). We know from the passage immediately preceding this
(1.2.34–44) that Juliet’s father, Capulet, has just given this paper to
a Serving-man, evidently forgetting (or perhaps unaware) that this
Serving-man cannot read. The man has been ordered to ‘trudge
about, / Through fair Verona’ and ‘find those persons … / Whose
names are written there’ (1.2.34–36). But Romeo is so ‘self-involved’
(to recall Hazlitt’s phrase) that he takes the Serving-man’s question as
an enquiry about his own inner being. ‘Can you read?’ he is asked.
‘Ay,’ he replies, ‘mine own fortune in my misery.’ His response
encapsulates something of the strangely double and divided tone of
Shakespeare’s play as a whole: Romeo is being at once witty and
grave, and this uncertain mixing of registers is further complicated
by the way that the language shifts between the literal and the
figurative.
When Romeo says ‘Ay, mine own fortune in my misery’, he is
speaking in the conventional mode of the unrequited lover, suggesting
that he can read his own fate in his unhappiness. The Serving-man
may be illiterate, but he is not stupid. He recognizes that Romeo is
talking figuratively and, indeed, offers a strikingly acute riposte:
‘Perhaps you have learned it without book’, that is to say, perhaps
Reading a play 69
Romeo has learnt to read his fortune by rote or by ear, not with the
physical aid of writing or a book. The Serving-man’s witticism
plays, once again, on the uncertainties of the literal and figurative,
relying on a notion of reading distinct from the physicality of written
words. At the same time, there is a more resonant and troubling
sense to be picked up in what he says, namely that being in love is a
mechanical exercise, as if learnt by rote: love sickness is something
that a young nobleman experiences because it is conventional to do
so. A young man’s feelings about the young woman with whom he
is in love are not unique or uniquely tied to her: his lovesickness is a
convention.
The Serving-man’s remark thus reinforces what Benvolio had
just, if in a more physically unpleasant metaphor, been suggesting:
‘Take thou some new infection to thy eye, / And the rank poison
of the old will die’ (ll.49–50). It is not a matter here of supposing
that the Serving-man overheard what Benvolio said, or indeed that
he is making a conscious and deliberate comment on the seemingly
mechanical nature of love. To engage in a close reading of Shake-
speare’s text it is necessary both to acknowledge and to keep a cri-
tical distance from the seductive idea that the characters are actual
people.
This idea warrants some further unpacking. Perhaps no one matches
Shakespeare when it comes to creating characters who seem alive and
singular, pulsing with an interior life, with thoughts and feelings of
their own. This is why the critic Harold Bloom identifies the plays
of Shakespeare with ‘the invention of the human’. Our sense of self,
of having an inner world of thoughts and feelings that we can articu-
late to ourselves, is difficult to imagine without Shakespeare, for in
important respects, Bloom suggests, he has ‘invented us’ (Bloom
1999, xviii). He has made us what we are by putting us, or putting
people like us, on stage. Indeed, more disquietingly, Bloom contends
that Shakespeare’s plays ‘read [us] better than [we] read them’ (xx).
In irresistible ways, the characters and the language of Shakespeare’s
plays watch over our culture. They define what we think and how
we can most critically and creatively appreciate the nature of desire,
evil, love, ambition, jealousy, laughter and suffering. As Bloom
summarizes it: ‘we are read by works we cannot resist. We need to
exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can,
while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still.
70 Reading a play
They read us definitively’ (xx). To read Shakespeare well is to realize

that he has ‘flooded [our] consciousness’ (xx), endlessly prompting
us to understand ourselves and others in new ways.
Bloom’s argument is based on the concept of identification. This
is why it is such a pleasure to read, to watch, to imagine a staging of,
or indeed to act in, a Shakespeare play: you get to be that illiterate
Serving-man and – even though it is just a one-liner – you get to
make that fleeting but profound remark about ‘learn[ing] without
book’. But it is also necessary to maintain a critical guard, for the
Serving-man is not real, any more than Romeo and Juliet are real.
They are all in crucial respects scripted people, made out of words.
The richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s writing requires that
we take account of this as well.
Shakespeare makes us imagine such hidden worlds. His language
produces people out of thin air. But the textures and densities of his
writing are even more intricate and seductive than this. For he not only
conjures the hallucinatory intensity of discrete, individual characters,
but weaves them together in an even larger and more captivating
web, which critics traditionally try to pin down with terms such as
‘theme’, ‘imagery’ and ‘motif’. Such terms, however, perhaps fail to
do justice to the profound weirdness of Shakespeare’s writing,
whereby one character’s words or lines are played on and over by
another’s.
So, for example, the Serving-man’s remark about learning love by
rote eerily prefigures something Friar Lawrence says in conversation
with Romeo, in Act 2 scene 3. It takes the Friar a long time to accept
that Romeo has not come to him to talk about the ‘fair Rosaline’ by
whom he was earlier so smitten, but instead to talk about another
young woman, called Juliet. As if finally understanding the nature of
this ‘young waverer’ Romeo, Friar Lawrence tells him: ‘O she knew
well / Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell’ (2.2.87–88). In
other words, Rosaline (the Friar supposes) did not return the interest
Romeo showed in her because she recognized that his love was
something learnt by rote, not based on true foundations.
Reading Shakespeare requires a careful attention to, and indeed
passion for, the uncanny twists and turns of his language. The
strange repetition of this image of ‘loving by rote’ underscores a
more persistent aspect of Romeo and Juliet, namely the impression
of love as a merely mechanical exercise. So quickly, indeed, does
Reading a play 71
Romeo transfer his affections from Rosaline to Juliet that it is dif-

ficult not to feel that erotic attachment here is merely substitutive: if
Juliet had not been present at the feast, some other attractive young
woman would have taken his fancy. There is something faintly
comical about this. It is difficult not to recall Byron’s withering
observation on Don Juan’s adolescent infatuation: ‘If you think ’twas
philosophy that this did, / I can’t help thinking puberty assisted’
(Don Juan, Canto 1, stanza 93; Byron 1986, 401). There is a similar
air of absurdity in Shakespeare’s play, but also something much
darker, the intimation of human desire as a sort of machine, love as
mere imitation and repetition.
Afterwards
Shakespeare makes the entire ‘star-crossed’ tragedy of Romeo and
Juliet turn on two chance incidents of reading that go wrong. In Act 1,
scene 2 the chain of events is set in motion by Romeo happening to
read a letter that is not addressed to him; and then, much later, the
deadly ending of the play is brought about by the fact that another
letter fails to reach its destination. Friar Lawrence’s letter (apprising
Romeo of the truth of Juliet’s being, not dead, but only drugged) is
‘stayed by accident’ (5.3.251), before being returned to sender. The
whole of the play is organized around two letters, the first of which
should not have been read (but is), the second of which should have
been read (but is not). To read or not to read: that is the question.
Romeo and Juliet is a dark but witty, tragic but also inter-
mittently very funny, monumentally ironic play in which everything
seems fated, destined for misfortune and death, seen in advance.
Thus the Prologue to the play speaks of how we will witness ‘A
pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ (l.6). Romeo and Juliet are
‘star-crossed’ from the start. And so, in an ominous, double sense,
they ‘take their life’: we will see how they conduct their lives, and
how they commit suicide. Despite the play’s relentless impression of
predetermination and fatefulness, however, Shakespeare also fore-
grounds randomness, the aleatory or mere chance. It can happen
that a letter gets read by someone to whom it is not addressed. It can
happen that a letter fails to arrive at its destination. Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet suggests that while there is always convention, as
well as passion and desire, in a reading, there is also the unforeseeable.
72 Reading a play
A good critical reading of a play will also invariably evoke something

of this sense of chance, the unplanned and the unanticipated.
Every play creates a world of its own. The world of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet is radically different from the world of Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex (c.430 BCE) or William Congreve’s The Way of the World
(1700) or Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) or Samuel Beckett’s
Endgame (1958) or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000). But here,
following on from what we have said about Romeo and Juliet, are
seven suggestions for reading a play and preparing to write about it:
1 Read the play itself. That is the first task. And remember: notes are
not just for nerds. The older a play is the more likely you are to
need an edition with extensive explanatory notes, but in general
it is always worth seeking out one with a good critical introduction
and notes. You should read as much criticism on the play as you
can, without losing sight of the importance of developing your
own reading. Reading a good critical essay on Beckett’s End-
game, for example, can be invaluable in providing you not only
with critical ideas to reflect upon, but also with a critical model,
a way of finding your own stance and voice. Arguably more than
any other kinds of literature, a play gives, in Hamlet’s words, ‘the
very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.23–24).
As we have seen, Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, but it is just as
much about the conventions of love and love poetry in Elizabethan
England. You cannot really begin to appreciate a play such as
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler without some historical knowledge of the
position of women in late nineteenth-century society, any more
than you can make sense of Endgame without historical awareness
of the Cold War and the ubiquitous threat of atomic holocaust.
A good critical edition, study guides and secondary criticism are
crucial to an understanding of a play both in detail (the meaning
of a phrase) and in general (historical context).
2 See the play. If you cannot see it on stage or on screen, stage it in
your head. Stage it in your head anyway, constantly, as you are
reading. Reading a play is not just about reading the characters’
words. It is also about the stage directions, props, lighting, costume,
gesture, movement, music and other sound-effects.
3 Attend to the language. If you are reading your own copy,
annotate. Bear in mind that, as with any literary text, close
Reading a play 73
reading is the key. Whether it is an Early Modern play (such as

Shakespeare’s) or a more contemporary work (such as Harold
Pinter’s), be alert to the mobilization of metaphor, simile, apos-
iopesis, repetition, ambiguity, and so on. Look out, also, for
misreadings (one character, for instance, failing to understand
another) and for instances of what seems unreadable, what
escapes or resists reading. Above all, perhaps, try to attune your
reading to a sense of irony. By this we mean not just ‘dramatic
irony’ (where one character knows, or the audience or reader
knows, something that another character doesn’t know), but
also the sort of self-reflexive irony that Shakespeare has in mind
when he has a character suggest that ‘All’s the world’s a stage’
(As You Like It, 2.7.139).
4 Every play tells us about the world beyond the stage – in the case
of Romeo and Juliet, about the nature of love, the deadly power
of names and the strangulating hold of family (‘O Romeo,
Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse
thy name … ’), the tragic potential for a message to be read by
the wrong person, or not to arrive at all, and so on. But every
play is also about playing. Every play has so-called metatheatrical
or metadramatic dimensions, in other words it has things to tell
us about the nature of theatre and acting. The most explicit
example of this is no doubt the ‘play within a play’ (such as the
performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, or ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet), but a play always con-
tains self-reflexive moments, moments in which the audience or
reader is prompted (to use that stagey word again) to reflect on
the nature of acting and ‘playing’.
5 Every play is about the nature of desire – starting with the
spectator’s or reader’s identification with a character or situation
and with seduction by the language of the text. Desire is never
reducible to theme: desire is in language itself. Words and phrases
(‘I want you’, ‘I love you’, and so on) can at once create and
articulate, generate and intensify desire. If you enjoy, admire or
love a play, this inevitably has to do not just with identification
(empathizing or identifying with a character), a desire or will-
ingness to imagine yourself in his or her role, but is also funda-
mentally bound up with the way that the language of the play
draws you in, with the poetic, desiring and desirable nature of
74 Reading a play
the words. Any strong reading of a play will always convey, and
will often explicitly seek to analyse, the dynamics of desire in the
play, in the play of language, as well as in and between the
bodies of characters. This is the case even if, as in Beckett’s
Endgame, two of the bodies are in dustbins or, as in Kane’s 4.48
Psychosis, it remains radically uncertain whether there are one or
more bodies on stage at all.
6 Don’t just read, act. Despite all the emphasis on conventions
(of love, gender, class, rituals of love and death) and on the fact
that, almost always, a play is scripted, the text, plot and
characters known in advance, to read a play is in some sense to
enact it. It is not for nothing that critics talk about an act of
reading. To pursue a reading has a certain theatricality, a
dramatic life of its own.
7 Think about chance, take chances. For all the scripting and
convention, plays are also, like other literary works, deeply
concerned with the nature of chance – with fate, coincidences,
good or bad timing, the untimely and the felicitous, the surprising
and unpredictable, with the randomness of life and love and
death. To read a play is to immerse oneself in a play of chance;
and your reading on this occasion will inevitably miss out some
features and hit on others. You should aim at a reading that, in
turn, has surprising and unpredictable qualities.
Further reading
Peter Brook’s The Empty Stage (1968) is perhaps the classic modern
work of criticism for thinking about the theatre. Jennifer Wallace’s
The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007) offers an excellent
overview of tragedy, both on and beyond the stage. In briefer mode,
Adrian Poole’s Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (2005) is also
highly engaging. The inaugural critical account of ‘metatheatre’ is
Lionel Abel’s study of that title, originally published in 1963, later
collected in a volume entitled Tragedy and Metatheatre (2004). For
a good collection of more recent essays on the topic, see Fischer and
Greiner’s The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-
Theatre and Self-Reflection (2007). Elinor Fuchs’s essay ‘EF’s Visit
to a Small Planet’ (2004) contains a rich array of questions and
ideas for thinking about the world of a play. Howard Barker’s
Reading a play 75
Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (2005) is a provocative,

aphoristic work about why reading a play might or should be
dangerous. For a brief but informative account of Shakespeare’s
own reading, see Leonard Barkan’s essay ‘What Did Shakespeare
Read?’ (2001). On the idea that Shakespeare effectively shapes the
nature of the modern self, see Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (1999).
For a remarkable and richly aphoristic exploration of Romeo and
Juliet in terms of the untimely, love, the name and irony, see Jacques
Derrida’s ‘Aphorism Countertime’ in his Acts of Literature (1992a).
William Storm’s Irony and the Modern Theatre (2011) provides an
expansive and helpful account of its topic in work ranging from
Henrik Ibsen to Tony Kushner.
Part II
Thinking
6 Thinking about literature
Literature is not what you think.

Everything in this book, we hope, would point in that direction.
Here are some thoughts about literature:
1. Thinking about literature involves thinking

about thinking.
Thinking about literature – what we are doing in writing this book,
what you are doing in reading it, and what one does in reading,
talking about and writing on poems, plays, novels – also involves
thinking about how literary texts think about thinking, the kinds
of thinking they do, and the kinds of thinking that one does in
reading and thinking about them.
2. Thinking about literature is thinking about everything

in the world.
There are no limits to what literature might be ‘about’; literature
can be about anything in the world. And it can be about what is not
in the world, what is outside it, and about other worlds or no
worlds. We’re not talking just about Terry Pratchett or ‘fantasy
fiction’ or sci-fi here but more generally about the so-called ‘world’
of imagination or invention, for example.
3. Thinking about literature allows you to think another

person’s thoughts.
Your mind is no longer only your own in reading a literary text.
Thinking about literature allows you to be taken over by another
mind, by alien thoughts. You have the exhilarating, extravagant,
liberating, enthralling possibility of being other to yourself, becoming

someone else, as well as being somewhere else, imagining yourself
thinking in previously unimagined places, and ways.
4. Thinking about literature can also entail not thinking.

The speaker in one of the most famous lyric poems in English, John
Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820), looks longingly, even
enviously, at an ancient Greek urn. The urn is so quietly, implacably
beautiful, and so mysterious, he thinks. And as he sighs, or complains,
or enthuses, it ‘tease[s] us out of thought’ (l.44). It overwhelms him.
We might understand Keats’s speaker to be representing not only a
person looking at an urn but also a person reading an artwork or
poem. In which case, here is a thought: when we read a poem, or
when we read a certain kind of poem, we are not so much thinking
as not thinking, being teased out of thought, as well as into it. In a
letter Keats calls this ‘negative capability’, the ability to remain in
‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason’ (Keats 2005, 60).
5. Thinking about literature teases us into thought.

The slightly wider context of Keats’s comment about being teased
out of thought might help to clarify it. The speaker in the poem is
not only contemplating but actually addressing the urn:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity …
What does this mean? Why is the speaker saying this? Perhaps we can
try to tease out the thought. The speaker says that the urn teases him
‘out of thought’ because it is ‘like’ eternity. ‘Dost’ and ‘doth’ were
archaic, and therefore poetic, forms of the word ‘does’, even in Keats’s
time, just as ‘thou’ is a poeticism for ‘you’. These archaisms under-
score a sense of ancientness, of extension across time. We might
surmise that the urn is like eternity because it has lasted a very long
time: it therefore seems ‘eternal’ by comparison with the relatively
brief life-span of a human being. But how does it ‘tease’ us? One way
to read the verb ‘tease’ is as a kind of mockery: we feel as if an ancient
work of art ‘mocks’ us because it reminds us of our mortality, of
Thinking about literature 81
the really very limited extent of our time on this earth – the several-
thousand-year life-span of the urn makes a mockery of our three-
score-years-and-ten. But we might say that the urn ‘teases’ the speaker
in another way. The OED notes that the original sense of ‘tease’ is ‘To
separate or pull asunder the fibres of; to comb or card (wool, flax, etc.)
in preparation for spinning; to open out by pulling asunder; to
shred’ (OED ‘tease’, v1: 1.a.). Like infinity, the concept of eternity
messes with your head, pulls it asunder. The novelist David Foster
Wallace published a primer on the mathematics of infinity in which
he stressed just this: thinking, really thinking, about infinity, you
can very quickly feel ‘a strain at the very root of yourself, the first
popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams’ (Wallace
2005, 24). So perhaps the speaker in Keats’s poem is teased ‘out of
thought’ because of the way that the urn makes him think about eter-
nity or the infinite. He is teased out of thought by being teased into it.
And perhaps novels and poems and plays are ‘teasing’ in that way
too, in the way that the urn is teasing to the speaker in Keats’s poem.
6. Thinking about literature is thinking about nothing.

Keats offers another intriguing and provocative thought about think-
ing in a short poem, a fourteen-line sonnet, known by its first line,
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ (written in 1818). The titular
first line of Keats’s sonnet announces the subject of the poem – a
person thinking about his own imminent death (as it happens, Keats
died only three years after writing these words, at the age of twenty-
five). When I think about dying, the speaker seems to be saying, and
when I think of dying before I have managed to write all the poems
in my ‘teeming brain’, or when I think that my death will mean that
I will never see my lover again, then I feel as though I am standing
alone on the metaphorical ‘shores’ of the world, thinking, just
thinking – thinking in what seems to be an abstract, empty way.
And when I think in this way, the speaker says, questions of fame
and love appear to ‘sink’ into nothingness, into oblivion.
Keats puts it better than we do, though (he is the famous poet,
after all):
When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, 5
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more, 10
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Keats uses the work ‘think’ twice in this sonnet, the first time rather
unremarkably in line 7 but the second time in a powerful instance
of enjambment in the penultimate line. With this final ‘think’ in
line 13, everything is suspended, up in the air. Despite the fact that
the line runs on to the next (there is no punctuation after ‘think’),
we are invited to think about ‘think’ as an end in itself. In this sense
the speaker seems not actually to be thinking about anything at all.
The thought here, the thinking, is empty. The thinking is empty,
but it puts the world into a different perspective, makes everything –
even love and fame – nothing. And that’s saying something, since
these are Keats’s greatest loves, really: he loves love and, like any
star-struck youth, he would love to have been famous. Which he
wasn’t – not until after his death, that is.
7. Thinking about literature is virtual thinking.

Literature is virtual, like online gaming or a movie. But in some sense,
indeed, it is even more ‘virtual’ than these because there are no sights
or sounds involved. Everything that takes place in the book takes
place inside your head. There is nothing to see, or hear. Even the
particular configuration of the words on the page, how the words
look, is, for most texts most of the time, quite incidental, quite separate
from their existence as poems or novels. For the most part, a poem
or novel can be printed in Times New Roman, or Bernard MT Condensed,
or Vladimir Script, and can be recited or remembered ‘by heart’, but it
will make no essential difference to the poem as a poem or novel as
a novel. In this sense, poems or novels (unlike paintings, say, or

ancient Greek urns, which seem to lose something intrinsic to their
status as works of art when copied) are infinitely reproducible.
There are, of course, important exceptions to that rule, and those
exceptions might give us pause with regard to any literary text, in
fact. We are thinking in particular of the way that the so-called ‘con-
crete’ or ‘visual’ works of such poets as George Herbert (1593–1633)
or Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) powerfully foreground the materiality
of writing itself. Below is an example of a ‘visual’ poem by Herbert,
‘Easter-Wings’, where the shape of the poem on the page mirrors its
title and topic, wings (wings figuring metonymically as flight). In
this poem, the poet talks about ‘imping’ (grafting or implanting) his
wings on those of Christ, and the shape of the stanzas on the page
mimic a bird’s wings (a lark’s, for example) as if the page, like the
poet himself, might take flight with the resurrected Christ at Easter:
LORD, who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victorie,
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
(Herbert 2007, 147)
Figure 6.1 George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private
Ejaculations (Cambridge, 1633), pp.34–35).
In its first publication in The Temple (1633), in fact, the lines were
printed vertically to bring out the wing-shaped materiality of the
printed page more powerfully. The effect is to draw the reader’s
attention to the sheer shape of the words on the page and indeed to
obstruct the act of reading (in effect you have to turn the book to
read the words; see Figure 6.1).
8. Thinking about literature is like thinking about

silent film.
The 2011 Michel Hazanavicius film The Artist reminded those who
had forgotten or who had never seen them, that watching early
twentieth-century silent films does not so much involve a loss of
something (sound-effects, speech) as the gain of a different kind of
experience. Most people, on watching the early twenty-first-century
(mostly) silent film The Artist, seem quite quickly to get over their
initial disappointment on finding that the words that the actors speak
to each other cannot be heard because they soon become engrossed,
involved in the visual spectacle of the film. As they watch the film,
audiences feel not so much that speech and sound are withheld but
that they are involved in a wholly different way of experiencing a
narrative. The plot of The Artist is all about this feature of silent
movies, in fact, based as it is on the historical resistance to the
‘talkies’ – films with sounds – in the late 1920s and early 1930s
(strange as it may seem today, the ‘talkies’ were seen by many as a
degraded, hybrid, populist form, technologically flash-in-the-pan
and aesthetically preposterous). Something similar is at work when
we read literary texts. Once you have put away the TV, the computer
game, the hyperlinked hand-held reading device, the internet, it is
possible to be absorbed by the alternative pleasures of reading –
pleasures that are in fact limitless, that are constrained only by the
limits of your imagination. The events described in books exist in
one’s head and in ways that are infinitely richer than those offered
by other, apparently more immediate forms of representation.
9. Thinking about literature should be rigorous, exacting,

disciplined, hard.
Talking and writing about literature is not just a question of
expressing yourself or your ideas: it calls for structure, control and
critical precision. There are certain broadly accepted if never
entirely uncontested protocols or ‘rules’ of reading and criticism.
Here are a few of the most important and least controversial ones:
the speaker in a lyric poem or first-person novel should never be

taken naively, unthinkingly, for the author him- or herself;
the way that something is expressed in a poem or novel is a
fundamental part of what it means;
your reading of a text is never simply, unproblematically
yours, yours alone (it should always be justifiable, explain-
able, based on evidence from the text that can be shared with
others);
what a text ‘really means’ is not what the author ‘really means’
by it;
literary texts cannot be reduced to unified or univocal, identifiable,
extractable meanings;
literary texts relate to each other as well as to the world of
which they are a part;
literary texts are historical documents, even while they can be

read in different ways at different times in different contexts;
literary texts prompt us to think about philosophical questions,
such as: What is love? What is the value of revenge? How far
and in what ways does language determine our lives? What’s in a
name?
10. Thinking about literature is not thinking about

any old thing.
There is no ‘thing’ that is literature. This is not to say that there are
no poems, plays, stories or novels (why would you say that?) but
that there is no stable, coherent, identifiable single object that one
can point to or name when one talks about ‘literature’. This thing
called literature is very strange – ghostly, elusive, at once more and
less than a thing.
11. Thinking about literature prompts you to think

ultimate thoughts.
Thinking can be a problem in the sense that – outside hunger, vio-
lence, poverty, environmental destruction – human trouble begins in
thoughts. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes
it so’, as the self-torturingly philosophical, over-thinking Hamlet
comments to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Hamlet 2.2.251–52).
But then not thinking or not being able to think is also a problem.
Philip Larkin dwells on the prospect of the end of thinking in one of
his late poems, ‘Aubade’ (1977), a poem about the fear of never think-
ing again because one is dead (Larkin 2012, 115–16). Traditionally, an
‘aubade’ is a poem about two lovers parting in the morning. More
generally, it names a poem set in the morning, at day-break, and in
particular one that dwells on a parting. The speaker in Larkin’s
poem talks about waking at four in the morning and seeing ‘what’s
really always there’: ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’ (ll.4–5).
Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ is a morning poem about the inevitability that
one will eventually part from life itself. For Larkin, or for the
speaker in this poem at least, this thought of the inevitability of
death is almost unbearable. The anticipation of death makes ‘all
thought impossible’ (l.6) except the blank, content-less, unanswerable
thought of death itself: ‘The mind blanks at the glare’, he says, there
is ‘nothing more terrible, nothing more true’ (ll.11, 20). Neither
religion (with its ‘pretence’ that ‘we never die’ (l.24)) nor reason
(with the argument that you cannot logically fear what you will not
feel) can offer him consolation. Indeed it is precisely the thought of
being nothing, of not experiencing anything, that terrifies the speaker.
What he fears is precisely that there will be:
… no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
(ll.27–30)
In a terrible irony, then, it is thinking that brings the speaker to

this point at four in the morning, but it is the prospect of not
thinking that he fears. Where else would you be brought to think
about this thinking, this kind of thinking, if not in a literary text?
Where else would the rhyme of ‘think with’ and ‘link with’ work so
forcefully and poignantly to connect thinking with the way that we
link, or fail to link, with others? And where else, indeed, can you
think so richly and so movingly about death and about the fear of
dying? What other space would there be for such thoughts? Not a
doctor’s surgery, certainly – too clinical, professional, medical.
Not a morgue – too odoriferous, impersonal, refrigerated. Not a
crematorium – too heart-rending, mournful, grief-ridden. Not a
church or mosque or synagogue – too spiritual, dogmatic, theo-
logical. Not a philosophy seminar – too cerebral, theoretical, abstract.
Not an analyst’s couch – too personal, individual, expensive. Not
even on TV or in a film, we would suggest, since these are too
visual, momentary, immediate.
12. Thinking about literature is not an order.

We are not saying: think about literature! We are not ordering you
to do so. We are not trying to emulate Samuel Beckett’s Pozzo.
‘Think, pig!’, cries Pozzo to a slave-like and truly unlucky
character called Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). Pozzo
orders him about and holds him by a leash around the neck, like a
dog or a performing bear. He boasts to Vladimir and Estragon that

Lucky can perform a dance and that he can also perform ‘thinking
aloud’: ‘Think!’, Pozzo orders, and then again, ‘Think!’. And out
comes a five-minute philosophico-religious disquisition, a jumble of
words and a word-like jumble of sounds, from the mouth of Lucky
(Beckett 2006, 41–43). But whether or not Lucky can be said to be
thinking is unclear. Can one think to order? Would that not simply
be an enactment of thinking? If you merely perform thinking are
you in fact thinking, really thinking, at all? One of the thoughts that
the scene seems to prompt is that thinking cannot be forced, that
you cannot order someone to think. Given the right implements or
tools, or drugs, or electrodes, or given enough social and political
power, or money, or enough film directors and actors, you can no
doubt force someone to believe and say certain things or to believe
or speak in certain ways. Totalitarian states, with their usually
rather well-paid secret police, have some success at this, as do
religious organizations, advertising agencies, and some teachers and
parents. Global capitalism, that vague, but hauntingly pervasive
web-like phenomenon, is monumentally, world-historically effective
at making people think certain thoughts – that you should buy
things ‘because you’re worth it’, for example, or that ‘freedom’
means the freedom to pursue personal happiness unencumbered
by consideration for the starving, for the oppressed or indeed for
the planet.
But there is a question of whether the person who has been
forced or persuaded to ‘think’ in certain ways is actually thinking at
all – as opposed simply to repeating certain patterns of thought, or
certain phrases and ideas. People often talk scathingly about the
‘thought police’ or about ‘brainwashing’ in this context. George
Orwell famously dramatized just this question of thinking in his
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which depicts a totali-
tarian society dominated by the ‘Thought Police’, whose job it is to
punish ‘thoughtcrime’ committed by ‘thought-criminals’. To make
people think, to make them really think, however, would be a different
matter entirely. It would constitute something of a paradox or
double bind – like the order ‘Think for yourself!’, which is impossible
to obey, if you think about it. If you obey the order to think for
yourself, then you are not thinking for yourself and therefore not
obeying the order. (Did you just think that? Or did we? Or was it
the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who coined the term

‘double bind’ in the 1950s (see Bateson 1973 178–79)?) In a brief
war-time essay called ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’ (1941)
(Orwell 1968, 123–26), Orwell argued that while literature is poli-
tical, it should not simply constitute a branch of the propaganda
machine, that it should not, and properly speaking does not, say:
think this! Or even ‘Think, pig!’, or ‘Think!’ Rather, literature says
something like: here is a thing (a person, an event, an object, a
story, a poem, a scene, an image, an idea, an arrangement of words,
a metaphor), what do you think about it?
Further reading
Thinking is itself a lively topic of recent work in literary criticism.
In Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (2012),
Vanessa Lyndal Ryan has produced a fascinating examination of the
question of Victorian writers’ engagements with and representations
of the emerging physiology and neurology of the unconscious, while
Gregory Tate’s The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian
Poetry, 1830–1870 (2012) focuses on the emerging field of psychology
as it is reflected in poetry of the period. For some rigorous and
challenging but ultimately rewarding thinking about thinking in
literature, see Anthony Uhlmann’s Thinking in Literature: Joyce,
Woolf, Nabokov (2011), and Sharon Cameron’s Thinking in Henry
James (2009). Although we do not focus on it specifically in this
chapter, cognitive science has recently had a significant impact on
literary studies (sometimes referred to as the ‘cognitive turn’). A
good place to start is Lisa Zunshine’s collection of essays on various
aspects of the topic by some of the leading practitioners, Introduc-
tion to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010). On the other hand, if you
take Avital Ronell’s point that literary language has to do with the
‘failure of cognition’, then her fascinating and inventive, if also
demanding book Stupidity (2002) might be of interest – as might
Stathis Gourgouris’s also not un-challenging study Does Literature
Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (2003), with
its brilliant recognition that ‘the way that literature thinks casts into
all sorts of turbulence the status of the act of thinking’.
7 Thinking critically
What does it mean to think critically? How is such thinking at the

heart of literary studies? What do you do with what other people
think, in other words with the critical or theoretical material you
read, also known as ‘secondary sources’? These are some of the
questions we will explore in the following pages.
The words ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’ both come from the ancient
Greek verb krinein, to judge, to discern, to cut. The word ‘critical’
has to do with making judgements and decisions: all literary criticism
worthy of the name is in crisis and always has been. No wonder
students sometimes talk about having an essay crisis. But while the
critical may be about cutting off, discerning and delivering judgements,
‘thinking’ appears, on the contrary, to have no end. Are there limits?
When or how can you stop thinking? The idea that thinking is
interminable can be a source of immense pleasure and reassurance:
‘Whatever happens, I can always go on thinking – no one can take
that away from me’, you may think to yourself. And the fact that
you can think this to yourself and that no one else can know may be
a great solace. But thinking can also be disturbing, even terrifying.
This is what T.S. Eliot dramatizes at one moment in The Waste
Land, when he has a voice (usually taken to be female) say: ‘What
are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what
you are thinking. Think’ (Eliot 1963, 57). It is the lover’s perennial
question, the eternal desire, to know what your lover is thinking
(about you). But there is also the double bind that we encountered
at the end of the last chapter: think. No one likes being told what to
think, even if we are quite accustomed to encountering such mes-
sages in everyday life (‘Think of the consequences’, ‘Think for
Thinking critically 91
yourself’ or, in more negative mode, ‘Don’t even think about it’).
But Eliot’s lines carry out a sort of thinning out and wearing down
(‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?’) that makes the
concluding imperative, ‘Think’, resound with a certain madness.
When you start thinking about thinking, then, it can become
dizzying. You may want to stop. But the thought of thinking
coming to a complete stop is itself disturbing. Elizabeth Bowen
evokes such a stopping of thought in the marvellous opening
sentences of her first novel, The Hotel (1927):
Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she
stood still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding
sunshine and picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was
frightened by an interior quietness and by the thought that
she had for once in her life stopped thinking and might never
begin again.
(Bowen 1943, 5)
Happily, you are not Miss Fitzgerald: she is a character in a

work of fiction. And what particularly marks out these sentences as
fiction, of course, is the fact that what we are being given here
is ‘the thought’ of a fictional being. One of the distinguishing
features of novels is that they offer us what Dorrit Cohn calls
‘transparent minds’ (Cohn 1978), the thoughts or ‘interior quietness’
of other people. And to think critically about a novel is, as we have
argued in ‘Reading a novel’, to acknowledge the ways in which
thinking in a novel, characters thinking, is a fabrication, a pretence,
a fiction.
So when it comes to thinking and writing critically, it is a matter
of trying to keep thinking open, of seeing how in truth you cannot
be Miss Fitzgerald even if (for some bizarre reason) you wanted to
be: you cannot stop thinking. Even the fear of having ‘stopped
thinking’ is still, as Bowen emphasizes, itself a thought. Thinking
critically entails being attentive to the ways in which thinking
cannot end: any good critical essay (or indeed good seminar discus-
sion) makes this clear. It makes you think, leaves you thinking. At
the same time, when you are reading or taking notes or actually in
the process of writing an essay, you have to deal with the con-
straints and frameworks you are given, and therefore impose cuts,
make decisions, pass judgement. In order to sum up these tensions

we might consider a remark by Franz Kafka:
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of

methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is
apparently at issue.
(Kafka 1994, 3)
In the context of literary studies, this sentence is perhaps especially

valuable when you need to organize your thoughts and start writing.
Be patient. Be methodical. Beware the deceptiveness of appearances.
Kafka’s repetition here (‘apparent’, ‘apparently’) alerts us to the
necessarily tentative or provisional nature of all thinking, critical or
otherwise.
Kafka’s sentence is an example of an aphorism, that is to say, a
resonant statement that seems to convey the truth in an arresting
and memorable way. An aphorism is literally a fencing-in, a cutting
off of the horizon (from the ancient Greek apo, ‘from’, and horos,
‘limit’ or ‘horizon’). As Gabriel Josipovici puts it, aphorisms give us
‘in lapidary form what everyone knows but few have been clear-
sighted and skilful enough to express’ (in Kafka 1994, vi). Or, more
aphoristically, they give us ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well
expressed’, to recall Alexander Pope’s celebrated definition of wit
from 1711 (‘An Essay on Criticism’, l.298 (Pope 2006, 27)). Aphorism,
then, is a distilled form of critical thinking. Many major authors are
also brilliant aphorists. We might think of Blaise Pascal, Alexander
Pope, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Wallace
Stevens, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Jacques Derrida. While ‘thinking
critically’ is not the same as ‘thinking aphoristically’, it is not a bad
idea to try, at some point in your reading or writing about a text or
author, to come up with an aphorism of your own, a way of saying
what is, for you, most striking, important, thought-provoking,
strange or amusing about the text or author you are working on.
If you are able to come up with such a statement, this can prove
invaluable for drawing your ideas together and enabling you to see
how your reading or essay-writing might be structured and
organized. The aphorism you arrive at may be especially useful in
getting you started on an essay or in providing you with a conclu-
sion, or both. Assembling your critical thinking in the form of an
aphorism is also a short sharp lesson in self-expression: it forces

you to come to some sort of judgement, to put the point in a way
that matters to you.
But no one gets to be as witty as Pope, as smart as Wittgenstein, as
funny as Wilde or as haunting as Kafka overnight. Thinking critically
is something that comes, first and foremost, from engaging with the
critical thinking of others. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(1921), Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Everything that can be thought at all
can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can
be put clearly’ (Wittgenstein 1961, 4.116). Reading philosophical,
theoretical or indeed critical texts is crucial to developing an ability to
think critically, to clarifying what and how you think. In a panicked
sense that there is nothing new to say, one might overlook secondary
sources (critical essays, works of philosophy or theory). But this
would be a mistake. Some of the best critical thinking comes from
picking up and bouncing off what other critics or writers, philoso-
phers or theorists have written. Engaging with the critical thinking
of others is the quickest way of realizing that you are not alone and
of clearing a space for self-discovery, of finding out what you think.
In this context, we might consider an aphorism from Oscar
Wilde’s heart-rending account of homosexual love, his trial and
imprisonment, in De Profundis (written in Reading Gaol in 1897):
‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s
opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation’ (Wilde
2013, 118). The first sentence here is deceptively light. It might
initially seem obvious, even a kind of tautology: people are not me,
they are other people. But Wilde’s second sentence comes to modify
this: more playfully but also perhaps more profoundly, he is sug-
gesting that most people are not themselves, they are other to
themselves, other people. There is something archetypally Wildean
in this paradox (‘What the paradox was to me in the sphere of
thought’, the queer Wilde remarks in the same text, ‘perversity
became to me in the sphere of passion’ (101)). For Wilde, most
people do not have their own thoughts, they merely imitate others.
Even their most intense experiences or ‘passions’ are ‘a quotation’.
Wilde’s formulation may highlight the feeling that, as the Bible says,
‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes, 1.9), but it gives
an added twist in accentuating the extent to which this is bound up
with language itself (‘opinions’ and ‘quotation’). There is something
witty and ironic, too, about Wilde’s phrasing: is he here expressing

what he himself really thinks? Or is this aphorism not also an opinion,
the eminently quotable expression of a passion, as if it were indeed
‘someone else’s’? (It echoes Arthur Rimbaud’s renowned aphorism,
Je est un autre – ‘I is another’ (Rimbaud 1966, 305).) Are you different
from ‘most people’ or not? We might rephrase this paradox: if you
want to think critically, you need to think for yourself, and the best
way of doing this is by reading other people.
If literature is, at least in principle, the space in which it is possible
to say anything in any way, critical thinking and critical writing
should seek to reckon with this. Critical writing, like the writing of
fiction, drama or poetry, should be an adventure of thought. At
least when you write the first draft of an essay you should be willing
to make horrible mistakes, to lurch off in unexpected directions that
may in the end prove quite fruitless. As the philosopher Martin
Heidegger rather grandly posits: ‘He who thinks greatly must err
greatly’ (Heidegger 1975, 9). Or as Alexander Pope epigrammatically
puts it in his ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (a poem largely about errors and
erring): ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’ (l.525) (Pope 2006, 33).
Take it from us: there is comfort in these thoughts. Thinking critically
emerges at least in part from taking paths you perhaps did not even
realize existed before you started writing. Again we might recall a
critical observation made by Elizabeth Bowen: ‘To write is to be
captured – captured by some experience to which one may have
hardly given a thought’ (Bowen 1986, 125). So along with the focus
on what other people say and with how you find what they say
valuable, evocative, problematic, only partially helpful, rich, eloquent,
memorable, original, contentious, hyperbolic, insufficient, illumi-
nating, and so on, and along with the critical ideas and perspectives
that you have noted with regard to the primary text or texts that
you are writing about, do not be afraid to veer off into something
quite unexpected – some experience or idea that you had not even
dreamed of at the start.
In spite of all his apparent fondness for the aphoristic, in the
Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not believe that philosophy is essentially
about formulating propositions. He writes: ‘Philosophy does not
result in “philosophical propositions”, but rather in the clarification
of propositions.’ Philosophy, for him, is ‘not a body of doctrine but an
activity’ (Wittgenstein 1961, 4.112). What Wittgenstein says about
philosophy can also be said of literary criticism: it is an activity. A

good essay will convey a strong impression of activity, above all the
activity of thinking critically. It will give off the scent of freshness
and surprise, of discovery and the unexpected. It should not feel
completely random, as if the writer really has no clue what s/he is
going to say next or how one paragraph connects with another, but
when critical writing really works it is because the reader is able to
share something of the adventure of thinking out of which it emerges.
Your first draft of an essay will inevitably bear various kinds of
unnecessary evidence of this adventure. It is crucial, then, to go
back over it, to tweak and re-jig, revise and rewrite, rework and
reshape your essay, so that it does not seem merely haphazard,
arbitrary or contingent. It needs to read like a thoughtful explora-
tion, a controlled activity, not a mad, chaotic helter-skelter – even if
that is how it came about. It needs to sound as if you know what
you think – and that you really think it.
It is important to engage with current critical thinking – with
what engages, excites and challenges contemporary scholars, critics
and theorists. The really interesting, really good critics are those who
have learned from and elaborated on what other critics have already
said. Looking at some of the most recent critical work on an author
or text is therefore invaluable. But developing and deepening an
appreciation of the most influential critical thinking from the past is
indispensable as well. You might try reading some of the classics –
Samuel Johnson, S.T. Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater,
A.C. Bradley, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis and William Empson. They are
worth reading not just for what they tell us about a particular text,
but also for the sharpness and originality of their critical thinking,
and indeed for the quality and distinctiveness of their writing. Each
of these critics provides a critical model that in turn compels our
admiration and impels our critical thinking.
We want to give just one example of strong contemporary criti-
cism in action. Maud Ellmann’s The Nets of Modernism: Henry
James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (2010) is a
valuable recent book about how the figure of nets – networks and
interconnections – helps us to think about the nature of literature
and culture in the early twentieth century. The second chapter of
Ellmann’s book is, intriguingly, provocatively, called ‘The Modernist
Rat’, and it begins as follows:
There is a legend that intertwined rats’ tails can fuse together,

producing a many-headed monster known as a rat-king. The
largest mummified specimen of this phenomenon, whose tails
are probably tied together after death, is displayed in the
science museum in Altenberg, Germany. As a collective fantasy,
the rat-king provides an apt analogy for the tangle of cultural
anxieties represented by the rat in modernism. This chapter
attempts to unravel these strands while stressing their knot-
ted interdependence. Foremost among them is the notion of
excess, whether negatively figured in the form of waste, or
positively in the form of plenty. Other strands connect the
atavistic to the futuristic, the savage to the citified, the bestial
to the human, the mechanical to the organic, the polluted to the
sterilized, the superstitious to the scientific, the foreign to the
inbred, the heterogeneous to the homogenized, the chaotic to
the systematic.
(Ellmann 2010, 14)
There are many reasons for seeing Ellmann’s work as an excellent

illustration of ‘thinking critically’. To begin with, we might note the
importance of surprise, a sense of freshness and the unexpected in this
opening paragraph. Even the title to the chapter is striking. ‘The
Modernist Rat’ is hardly a conventional phrase. It juxtaposes two
quite different realms – a twentieth-century literary or art movement
and non-human animals – in a way that might make you think, or
start to think. There is an air of incongruity and intrigue: what is a
‘modernist rat’? Does Ellmann mean ‘rat’ in some metaphorical
sense? What does a rat have to do with ‘the nets of modernism’?
The chapter-title is arresting, it draws us in: we want to know what
it is about, what it means.
And then the opening paragraph does not satisfy us exactly, but
does something perhaps more interesting than this: Ellmann starts
at a tangent, with a detail, a story (‘a legend’) about rats and
monstrousness. If this image of the ‘many-headed monster’ called ‘a
rat-king’ is strangely, disgustingly compelling in itself, it also
quickly becomes clear that it is a figure or metaphor with, as it
were, more twisted significance. It is interwoven with what Ellmann
goes on to describe as a ‘tangle of cultural anxieties’ and forms of
‘knotted interdependence’. Her opening paragraph makes deft use of
literary techniques: her ‘There is a legend … ’ is very close, after all,

to a ‘Once upon a time … ’; and her language demonstrates a fine
attunement to the power and pleasure of figurative language (the ‘apt
analogy’, the ‘tangle’ of anxieties, the image of writing as a way to
‘unravel these strands’) and even to the sounds of words (the ‘atavistic’
opposing, yet almost rhyming with, the ‘futuristic’, the sibilance of the
‘savage’ and the ‘citified’). These linguistic effects are not overplayed,
but rich and suggestive.
At the same time, Ellmann’s opening paragraph is clear and
reassuringly explicit in telling us what her essay is going to be about
and what ‘strands’ in particular she proposes to explore in the pages
that follow. She wears her learning lightly: Freud is there in the
book’s sub-title, and the attention here to ‘collective fantasy’ and
‘cultural anxieties’ intimates the importance of psychoanalysis for
understanding modernism and indeed, in more general respects, for
thinking critically. There may be one or two unfamiliar words in this
paragraph (the ‘atavistic’ or ‘heterogeneous’, for example), but the
deployment of these terms in a series of binary oppositions (waste/
plenty, atavistic/futuristic, heterogeneous/homogenized) makes it easy
enough to infer their significance. And while Ellmann does not spe-
cifically single out the oppositions of ‘literal/figurative’ or ‘reality/
fantasy’, the reader is invited to think about the sense and movements
of the ‘rat’ of the title in these respects too. More broadly, Ellmann
foregrounds two of the fundamental techniques of critical thinking,
first by nimbly moving from a detail (the story of the rat-king) to the
general, and second by illuminating the way that conceptual oppositions
operate in the text. Such oppositions are everywhere – black/white,
good/evil, male/female, human/non-human animal, body/soul, life/
death. Critical thinking can often begin in thinking critically about
how oppositions work – or fail to work.
‘The Modernist Rat’ suggests the value of reflecting on concep-
tual oppositions: to note the oppositions in a sentence or passage of
writing is a neat way of beginning to orient one’s critical thinking.
But the discovery or articulation of such oppositions is never suffi-
cient in itself: it is a matter of thinking critically about them, of
questioning and even altering the ways in which we think about
them. It is a matter of thinking about how such oppositions are not
only in tension with, but also dependent on, one another. This
indeed, for Ellmann, is what the rat signifies. After evoking this
knotty series of oppositions (savage/citified, bestial/human,

mechanical/organic, polluted/sterilized, superstitious/scientific, etc.),
she begins a new paragraph:
The modernist rat provokes such oppositions only to confound

them. Popping up irrepressibly in modernist texts, the rat
signals the breakdown of boundaries, at once calamitous and
liberating. Traditionally feared as a parasite on literature, a
bibliophagous menace to the authority of the book, the rat
represents the forces of decomposition endemic to the work of
composition. As we shall see, the recurrence of the rat in mod-
ernist texts intimates that writing is riddled with erasure, and
that literature is a self-gnawing artefact.
(Ellmann 2010, 14)
This is agile, energetic writing. (We would say ‘rat-like’, but that
might give the wrong impression.) Ellmann advances here, then, on
what she set up in the preceding paragraph. It is now evident that
we are being presented with nothing less than a re-thinking of
modernist literature in terms of the figure of the rat. The rat chews
through those oppositions she had earlier set up.
In language that is lucid, playful and inventive (the rat ‘popping
up’, literature as ‘self-gnawing’, the ‘bibliophagous’), Ellmann’s
writing conveys an exciting mixture of adventure and control. As
we might hope from the opening page of a critical essay, the author
gives us a clear sense of where her thinking has led her, of where
the essay is going to take us. This is especially evident in her use of
prolepsis, the rhetorical device by which she tells the reader what
lies ahead: ‘This chapter attempts … ’ (in the first paragraph); and
‘As we shall see … ’ (in the second). As a ‘parasite’, as a figure that
overturns or ‘confound[s]’ oppositions, the rat has a menacing and
disruptive character. It ‘signals the breakdown of boundaries’. The
rat alerts us to the ways in which literature is ‘riddled with erasure’:
the literary work always has bits missing, things unspoken, gaps or
silences that are crucial to how we read. Ellmann’s opening para-
graph gives a powerful sense of activity (to recall Wittgenstein’s
word): it is not just the rat, but her own writing that gives us a
sharp impression that it is at work. It is active, up to stuff, doing
things with words.
The opening paragraphs of Ellmann’s essay suggest that thinking

and writing critically should entail (so to speak) being attentive to
some of the following:
Connections, tensions and oppositions – some of which may be

odd or surprising.
Historical context – in this case, the early twentieth century.
The strange nature of literary language – the power of rhetorical
figures and tropes, such as storytelling, metaphorical language,
and so on.
The dynamic possibilities of writing itself as an act or activity,
an appreciation of ‘how to do things with words’ (Austin 1962).
Maud Ellmann’s work highlights vital developments in contemporary

critical thinking. Her study of nets and networks, connections and
dependencies, is exemplary of what is happening more generally in
literary studies and the humanities. (Timothy Morton has recently
named this phenomenon ‘the ecological thought’: in his book of that
title he spells out the ways in which ‘the ecological thought is the
thinking of interconnectedness’ (Morton 2010, 7).) Henry James’s
remark (in 1907) that ‘Really … relations stop nowhere’ (quoted in
Ellmann 2010, 1) takes on a new, unprecedented critical force.
Thinking critically involves close reading – a careful attention to a
specific text and, more narrowly, what is going on in a particular
paragraph or sentence, even a certain word or phrase – but it also
requires us to keep a focus on interconnectedness. We live in a net-
worked world, that is to say in a world in which we confront
urgent questions of justice and inequality, democracy and world-
wide human rights, climate change and ecological transformation
(in which frightening numbers of plants and non-human animal
species are being wiped out every day). Engaging with these questions
is a fundamental part of what ‘thinking critically’ means. As Maud
Ellmann intimates, nowhere is interconnectedness more persistently
and provokingly articulated than in works of literature.
Further reading
On critical thinking and criticism in general, Marjorie Garber’s A
Manifesto for Literary Studies (2003) is a good, polemical place to
start. Rather differently, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory

and Criticism (Groden and Kreiswirth 2005) is a useful reference
work, as is the multi-volume Cambridge History of Literary Criti-
cism (9 vols, 1990–2013) which contains a wealth of material on the
history of the discipline. Thinking has, for at least a couple of millen-
nia, tended to be associated with philosophy. Besides Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations (especially paragraphs 327–90), you
might also like to explore the writings of Martin Heidegger in this
context, including What Is Called Thinking? (1968), Early Greek
Thinking (1976) and Poetry, Language, Thought (1975). But it is
hardly the case that poets, novelists and dramatists have shown no
interest in this topic. If you carry out a quick search of appearances
of ‘think’ (and its cognates) in, say, Shakespeare’s plays, the poetry
of Wordsworth or the novels of Samuel Beckett, you will soon find
yourself in fascinating places. Especially in the context of poetry,
see the special issue of Textual Practice entitled Thinking Poetry
(2010), ed. Peter Boxall, which includes J.H. Prynne’s compact but
compelling essay, ‘Poetic Thought’. For a provoking exploration of
the relation between thinking and environmentalism, see Timothy
Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010). For a brilliant discussion
of what it might mean to talk about a ‘university of Thought’, see
Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996).
Part III
Writing
8 Writing an essay
Rather than writing an essay on how to write an essay, which

sounds like an oddly circular enterprise, we propose instead to offer
a series of fuses that might help ignite your essay, or reignite your
thoughts once you have written a draft of it.
You need help. We do not mean this in a medical or psychiatric

sense. We are not recommending the use of pharmaceutical sub-
stances to enhance your performance. But one of the first things to
realize is that a good essay involves making use of what others have
said and thought. There is sometimes a tendency to suppose that
you need to be original, to push others to one side, in order to have
‘your own voice’. ‘Originality’ is, after all, one of the usual criteria
for a first-class essay or dissertation. But originality (if there is such
a thing) does not come from cutting yourself off and imagining you
can work alone, like a solitary genius without books on a desert
island. In the words of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, ‘There ain’t
half been some clever bastards’. If you want to write good essays,
read some of the classics, by such critics as Samuel Johnson,
S.T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin,
Walter Pater, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Empson and
Lionel Trilling. Brilliant, compelling, often wonderfully perceptive
but also on occasion woefully wrong, they all have a great deal to
give, both in terms of literary knowledge and insight and in terms
of the art of essay-writing. Have a look at the work of perhaps the
most original essay-writer who ever lived, Michel de Montaigne
(1533–92). One of the most immediately striking features of
Montaigne’s essays is how consistently they draw on other writers
104 Writing an essay
and thinkers. They are packed with quotations from what others
have said and thought. Montaigne himself reflects on this process,
in his essay ‘On Educating Children’:
Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make
their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme
or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings;
he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely
his: namely, his judgement, the forming of which is the only
aim of his toil, his study and his education.
(Montaigne 2003, 171)
Montaigne is not making a plea for plagiarism, but rather suggesting

that a distinctive poetic or critical voice is inevitably composed of the
thoughts, arguments and inspiration of others. For the essay-writer it
is imperative to acknowledge clearly what is being borrowed or
cited, whether it is the particular words and phrases, or just the
ideas or line of argument, of another critic. But the way in which
you make use of what others have said and thought can be ‘entirely
[your own]’. Writers are bees, quotations are flowers and the essay is
honey. Montaigne implies here that the primary purpose of education
is to become truly critical – to read, think and write critically.
For a twentieth-century formulation of this idea we might ransack
T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Philip Massinger’ (1920), in which he contends
that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface
what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at
least something different’ (Eliot 1975, 153).
Take notes as you read. It is crucial to annotate as you go.
Intriguing, brilliant or wonderful as you might find an image or
phrase or passage in Jane Austen or Ralph Ellison, in Edmund Spenser
or August Strindberg, you just won’t remember effectively without
making a note of it. If it is your own book, make pencil notes in the
margins or at the back; or you can keep a running list going on a
separate piece of paper. (Annotate the book in pencil, first because
you just might change your mind about what you want and don’t
want to preserve in the margins, and second because you might want
to lend, sell or give away the book someday and there are few things
sadder or more irritating than an old book with another person’s
inked defacements.) Marking up your text makes it simple to locate
Writing an essay 105
those moments that you consider to be of particular interest or

importance: an especially striking description of place or character,
a significant revelation or turn in the unfolding of the plot, some-
thing you find notably sad, funny, imaginative, moving or strange. It
might be the phrasing of a sentence or passage, or indeed just a single
word that strikes you as interesting or notable. You may also find it
helpful to keep track of particular recurrent features, such as the
repetition of certain words or images, or the insistence of certain
themes or ideas. Think of your annotations as your own personal
index to the book you are reading. You can return to your annotations
when it comes to essay-writing time: they are there to remind you
of what you found exciting, intriguing, brilliant, and so on. They
speed up the process of re-establishing your overall impression of
the book and help you clarify what you might want to say about it.
Write a letter. People are always writing, sending or receiving
letters in literature. So-called ‘epistolary novels’, for example, are
explicitly in the form of a series of letters; and poems are often, if
only implicitly, in the form of some kind of letter. (Almost all of
the eighty-eight poems in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) are
addressed to Sylvia Plath, for instance, while her poem ‘Daddy’
(1962), like a letter, is addressed to her father.) When E.M. Forster
gives advice on novel-writing, he says: ‘Not a bad plan to think a
novel’s going to be a letter’ (Forster 1976, 162). Not a bad plan,
either, to think of your essay as a kind of letter – but with a clear
introduction, middle and conclusion. Thinking of your essay as a
letter helps you to keep in mind the importance of the reader, and
of writing in a lucid and appealing way. Montaigne’s essay ‘On
Educating Children’ was itself originally written as a letter to
Madame Diane de Foix, regarding the education of her young son.
Answer the question (and keep answering it). Sometimes you
might have an essay in which the question has been specified in
advance; other times you may be expected to devise your own essay
question. Whichever it is, you need to answer the question. In your
first paragraph you should briefly make it clear, first and foremost,
how you are going to be answering the question. (Sounds a bit
obvious, doesn’t it? But it is remarkable how many essay-openings
fail to do it.) Of course, ‘answering the question’ in literary studies
is often far from straightforward. In a sense – as we have been
trying to make clear throughout this book – literature only ever
answers questions with more questions (or with silence). That is

what makes literary texts so endlessly fascinating, compelling,
exasperating, enigmatic, exhilarating and liberating to write about.
In your essay you should try to do justice to the uncertainties and
ambiguities, to the questioning power of the text you are studying,
as well as to provide an articulate response to the specific question
or topic you are addressing.
Say ‘I’. Some people seem to think that there is a veto or taboo
regarding the use of the first person singular in academic writing.
(Admittedly we never do it, but that is because there are two of us:
our book is written in the ‘Bennett-and-Royle we’.) Following such
a veto or taboo can turn the essay into an awkward exercise in self-
defence, pervaded by impersonal and non-idiomatic formulations
such as ‘In the essay it will be argued that … ’, ‘Having focused
on … the essay will now … ’, ‘In the preceding pages it has been
demonstrated … ’, and so on. We hereby confirm that there is
nothing at all wrong with using ‘I’ in your essay-writing. The only
thing you need to ensure is that you deploy your ‘I’ in a critical and
judicious way. Why should anyone be interested in your personal
and private response to the text? What matters is your ability to
convince people that your reading is interesting, intriguing, forceful
or illuminating. As in so much else, in essay-writing as in so-called
real life, balance is crucial. You don’t want to overdo it: ‘I’ this, ‘I’
that, ‘I’ the next thing, over and over again, like any other repeated
formulation, tends to become dreary. Occasional use of a more
objective-sounding form (‘It may be helpful to … ’), the passive
(‘Particular attention will be given to … ’) or indeed a first person
plural form (‘As we have seen … ’) creates a greater sense of variety,
depth and linguistic assurance.
Set things up in your opening. The opening paragraph or two
should not only make it transparent and obvious that you are going
to be answering the question, but also make it clear how, why and
with what consequences. In your introduction, in other words, you
should indicate in a direct and straightforward fashion what the
question involves, what complexities or challenges it entails, and how
you propose to go about dealing with these issues. A high-quality
essay will often also explicitly acknowledge and say something in its
opening paragraph about the singularity and power of the literary
work itself. Bear in mind that, however long your essay is supposed
to be, you are never going to be able to say everything there is to

say about the text/s or writer/s you are discussing. A good essay,
then, tends to establish its parameters in the opening paragraph: it
describes and defines its territory and often tries to indicate at the
outset what will be excluded.
Connect your middle bits. Your middle paragraphs need to
follow a clear path towards the conclusion that you will have
already indicated in your introduction. You probably will not know
exactly what your conclusion is, while you are writing the first draft
of your essay. (Don’t worry: this is perfectly normal, as a doctor
might say.) But when you are producing your final version of the
essay it needs to be evident where you are going, as you go. You
should not treat your reader as a simpleton, but you should clearly
signal what is happening from one paragraph to the next in terms
of the development of your response to the question. If you are
looking for a way of getting structure into your middle paragraphs,
draw up a list of the quotations you find most obviously relevant, as
well as (from your own point of view as a reader) most rich and
illuminating for your topic. There is no hard-and-fast rule about
this, of course, but for a 2,000-word essay this might mean half a
dozen quotations, of varying length; twelve or fifteen quotations for a
4,000-word essay; and so on. These quotations can operate as goals
or focal points to drive your argument forward from one paragraph
to the next. Always bear in mind the importance of close reading:
spending time trying to do justice to a particular word, line or passage
from the text under consideration is crucial to a good essay. But
remember, too, that close reading needs to be relevant: you need to
relate your reading of the quotation to the essay topic.
Your concluding paragraph should worry you. The problem with
conclusions is that they can be a bit boring, since they tend to make
it explicit that you have done what you said you were going to do
in your opening paragraph. A strong ending usually involves at least
two ingredients: (1) it performs a sort of valedictory handshake
with the essay question: recapping on how the question has indeed
been the subject of the preceding pages; (2) it does not simply feel
like box-ticking: think of putting an extra squeeze into that hand-
shake, add a final clinching quotation and critical comment, and/or
note some way in which, given the opportunity, the topic might be
explored further or in slightly different ways. In order to remain
loyal to the principle of close reading and to a sense of respect for

the richness and complexity of the text you have been writing
about, it is often neat to end with something from the text under
consideration and especially something concerned with the ending
of that text.
Get close, but go far. Quotation and close reading are crucial.
Quotations make an essay’s world go round. But at the same time
do not forget about breadth. Your essay might require you to focus
in detail on a play by Harold Pinter, but do not be afraid to draw
briefly on your knowledge of, say, Beckett or Shakespeare when
commenting on a Pinter quotation. You will invariably be admired
for wearing your knowledge lightly, while nevertheless showing that
you have in fact read Waiting for Godot or King Lear and realized
that it has a specific resonance or connection with what Pinter’s
play is up to.
What if you are asked to devise your own question? If you are
expected to work out your own essay topic, make sure you word it
clearly and simply. Do not set yourself a question that encourages a
straightforward ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘Not really’ answer. Think of a
question or statement that is provoking and intriguing, but that also
gives you room for manoeuvre – an opportunity to take the topic
and run with it somewhere that you will find interesting and
rewarding. Remember that an essay-title does not need to be in the
form of an explicit question, and it is often best if it is short and
snappy, rather than wordy and overly explanatory. An essay-title
such as, say, ‘Waste in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’ or ‘Beckett’s
“Molloy” and the Labour of Writing’ can work quite well. On the
other hand, it is often helpful to have a question or essay-title that
involves reacting to (or starting out from) a quotation, either from
the author about whose work you are supposed to be writing or
from a critic (who may be named or may be anonymous and indeed
even imaginary). You might consider quoting a sentence, a phrase
or just a word or two from, say, Keats or Woolf or Joyce, then
inserting a colon, and following this with the topic and author/text.
For example: ‘“To Cease Upon the Midnight with No Pain”: Death
in Keats’s Poetry’ or ‘“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow”: Write
an essay on affirmation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’ or ‘“What
Birds Were They?”: Figures of Flight in Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man’. Alternatively, you might use a succinct
sentence, phrase or just a word or two by another critic, to set up

your chosen topic. Whichever way you do it, try to make the title
punchy and intriguing, while also ensuring that it is grammatically
complete.
Act like a lawyer. When it comes to essay-writing there are
numerous parallels and similarities between a literary critic writing
an essay and a lawyer in a court-case. An essay is a kind of trial,
not just in the funny sense of being trying. The word ‘essay’, after
all, is itself from the old French verb essayer, to try or to examine,
and people still use (if a little comically or pompously) the verb
‘essay’ (or ‘assay’). With an essay, as with a trial in court, there is
always an element of the unpredictable. Nothing is assured in
advance. As a lawyer, it may seem to you a no-brainer that the
woman poisoned her husband because he couldn’t find the winning
lottery-ticket, but you still have to make a case and persuade the jury.
In the same way, an essay involves making a case, and persuading
your reader. What is your case? Outline the case in your opening
paragraph. Then in the following paragraphs and pages of the
essay, make your case and persuade your reader. Just as, in a trial
scene, the lawyer needs evidence, so in your essay you need to offer
evidence for what you are saying. The lawyer will provide evidence
of the fact that the man was poisoned, that there really was a lottery-
ticket, and so on; in your case, the evidence is the text. You need to
supply quotations from the text (or at least the precise references) in
order to support and substantiate what you are saying. Where
appropriate you may want to bring in further witnesses (another
critic or critics) who back up your view. But the real evidence is the
text itself. And, as a rule of thumb, you should never make an
assertion without providing evidence. It is not enough, however,
simply to quote the text. This would be like the lawyer simply
holding up a dark brown bottle and not explaining what it is or
where it comes from or why it matters. You need to make it clear
why you have quoted the phrase or line or passage that you have
quoted. How does this quotation illustrate or substantiate your point?
Comment, describe, question, analyse and elucidate. Remember
also, however, that a good lawyer not only knows how to be plain
and direct, but also likes to surprise the court. If you have a really
lovely bit of evidence, think about how and when you want to
introduce it, in order to produce a strong effect. Sometimes you may
want to hold back certain details, or conversely, you might want to

dangle a certain item in front of your reader as a way of saying: I shall
explain this later. Always bear in mind the importance and power of
persuasion. Nice turns of phrase, resonant or memorable ways of
expressing an idea, the occasional unexpected metaphor or vivid use
of an everyday idiom: these are all potentially valuable effects. But
don’t strain to be clever or complicated for the sake of it. Remember
what Montaigne says in his essay on education: ‘When eloquence
draws attention to itself it does wrong’ (Montaigne 2003, 194).
Simple is elegant.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Remember that, as we have said,
the word ‘essay’, like ‘trial’, has to do with experimenting. The final
version of your essay needs to read as if you knew in advance what
it was you wanted to write about and as if you knew how you were
going to go about it. But everyone knows that that is not what
writing is like. It is not how people actually proceed when they
write a first draft.
Writing is discovering. When writing is going well, it is not
necessarily because you are ‘in control’ of where it is going. On the
contrary, it is often because you have, in some sense, let go: you
have let the writing take you wherever it is going. A remark by the
poet Geoffrey Hill captures this nicely: ‘I write / to astonish myself’
(Hill 2002, 23). Of course it is very often the case, if you are writing
an essay in literary studies, that you are led on not so much by your
own words as by the words of the writer whose work you are dis-
cussing. Some of the most pleasurable and exciting moments in
writing come when you have quoted something and then start to
discover things about the quotation (and connections with other
quotations or other observations in your essay) as you are in the
very process of writing.
Write early. You don’t need to wait until you have read every-
thing there is to read on the topic you want to write about. (This is
in any case impossible: there is, strictly speaking, no end to reading,
no limit to ‘establishing a context’.) Reading around the subject and
taking notes is an important part of the process, but you need not
be entirely clear about the focus of your essay when you start
writing. Researching your topic and writing should not be seen as
entirely separate activities, but can often proceed simultaneously or
in overlapping fashion.
What are you saying? Ask yourself this question. Try to come up
with an answer in the form of a single sentence. (And not a really
long sentence: keep it as clear and simple as possible.) This is your
‘thesis statement’, as it is sometimes called. You can ask yourself
this before you start your reading and preparation for the essay:
‘What am I going to say?’ or ‘What do I think I am going to say?’ or
‘What do I think I would like to say?’ It is quite probable that you do
not have the faintest idea. After all, you have not yet begun reading
and researching. But it is still, we think, helpful to do it, because it
becomes absolutely crucial in the later stages of composition. Ask
the question again at the point when you have completed a first
draft. And then ask yourself again (if you still have not managed to
compose a single-sentence response) when you have a second or
third or final draft. A good essay can always be summed up in terms
of a single sentence. Think of your reader or examiner, who may
have dozens of essays to grade: s/he will probably jot down some-
where in his or her notes what your essay is about. If the examiner
can encapsulate your essay in a sentence, so can you. Finding (or
making up) that sentence is a bit like finding gold. Having a pithy
single-sentence version of what your essay is about will then provide
you with a way of refashioning or otherwise revising your draft so
that it becomes quite clear and straightforward how each of your
paragraphs relates to this core sentence or idea. Every paragraph, in
other words, should contain traces of that gold.
Your opening sentence might be your undoing. There is an odd
little book called The Exam Secret by a man called Dennis Jackson,
first published in 1954 but still in print. No doubt a principal reason
for its popularity is the word ‘secret’ in its title. But Jackson’s book
is hopelessly out of date in all sorts of ways and we would not
recommend it as a guide, let alone as the godsend its title might
appear to promise. But at the heart of The Exam Secret is a very
canny and, we think, valuable bit of advice, namely to start your
essay with a strong opening sentence. Make sure it is clear and, if
possible, refreshing and distinctive. Then try to make sure the same
is true of your second sentence, and your third, and so on. We
would like to offer you our own exam secret: your examiner is a
tired and probably rather irritable person who is looking out for a
reason not to read or, at least, who is in danger of thinking your
essay is just a continuation of the same old same old (i.e. the essay
s/he was reading before s/he picked your one up). The truth is that
the reader’s judgement of the quality of your essay may be quite
heavily influenced by your opening sentence and, beyond that, your
opening paragraph. While Bennett and Royle have never encoun-
tered such a thing closer to home, they have been reliably informed
of a case, at a prestigious university on the eastern seaboard of
the United States, of a student in Geology who submitted a fifteen-
page essay and received a perfectly respectable grade for his work:
the first couple of pages and the last couple of pages were written as
a standard sort of response on the topic, the eleven or twelve pages
in the middle simply ran: ‘rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks,
rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks … ’. (But don’t try this at
home, or in a public exam.)
If in doubt, cut it out. Nowadays most people write their essays
on a computer. It is a doddle compared with how it used to be,
when an essay had to be written by hand, then revised and written
out afresh. But the ease of writing, cutting and pasting on a screen
comes with difficulties of another kind. In particular, writing onto a
computer screen seems to encourage a sort of glazen-eyed sense that
everything is ok and everything is more or less worth keeping. You
might bear in mind the inverse of this idea. It is neatly captured,
once again, in a brief but pointed remark from Montaigne: ‘The
world is nothing but chatter: I have never met a man who does not
say more than he should rather than less. Yet half of our life is spent
on that’ (Montaigne 2003, 189). A good essay is a work of concision,
economy and compactness, and you should fully expect that there
will be bits (sometimes quite good or interesting bits) that do not
make it to the final draft. Always keep your eye on the main chance,
in other words the importance of answering the question, developing
your response, sticking to the topic. It is helpful to have a separate
document for supplementary material when you are working on
your essay, another file into which you can drop anything that you
are not quite sure about. If you need further encouragement on this
front, think of the incisive words of the contemporary French writer
and critic Hélène Cixous, in her essay ‘Writing Blind’: ‘Breaking.
Cutting. Letting go. Cutting is an art I have acquired. Nothing is
more natural and more necessary. All living beings, mammal or
vegetable, know that one must cut and trim to relaunch life. Nip the
quick. Harm to help’ (Cixous 1998, 144).
Every sentence counts. You should proceed on the basis that

every sentence is significant and should add something to your
account. Every sentence should have sharpness and clarity. One of
the unfortunate consequences of writing on a computer screen is that
people very often do not think ahead to the end of the sentence but
go on (as in the case, alas, of the present sentence) writing in the
hope that, in the end, it will all come around and, with luck, show
itself to have been worthwhile as a further contribution, however
minimal, to the essay topic that has been assigned. The previous
sentence is a case in point: it is long and unwieldy, repetitious and
awkward. Writing on a computer seems to encourage this tendency.
When you revise, look out for over-long sentence-structures. If you
see one, sort it out. Either rework it into two sentences, or find a way
of breaking it up: sometimes (as here) you can do it with a colon. (Be
wary of the semi-colon; it is no substitute for a well-placed comma,
colon or full stop. ‘How hideous is the semi-colon’, as Samuel
Beckett’s Watt has it (Beckett 2009, 135). Only rarely is it useful, for
example in the compilation of a lengthy or complex list.) This is not
to say that long sentences are innately bad. We ourselves, you may
have noticed, are not averse to the occasional extended sentence-
structure. But we also like a pithy sentence. Check it out. Deliberately
varying the length of your sentences has several potential benefits:
(1) it tends to be more enjoyable, unpredictable or surprising for
your reader; (2) it brings rhythm (a sense of voice) more sharply
into the body of your writing; and (3) it is a way of learning more
about how language works, about what words can do and how
syntax (the word-order and structure of a sentence) can affect or
indeed entirely alter what you are saying. Silly as it may sound,
reading your essay out loud is one of the most effective ways of
tidying or tightening up your writing. Do it, if you can, with a
friend or even, if need be, your dog or, perhaps, your friend’s dog.
Hearing your sentences as you read them aloud can be the quickest
way of discovering whether or not they work. Are you satisfied
with each sentence? Is it comfortable, even pleasurable, to read out
loud? Could this or that sentence be somehow honed or otherwise
sharpened up? Hone it. Sharpen it up. And remember our motto: if
in doubt, cut it out.
Quote or perish. Remember the rough rule of thumb that your
comment on a quotation should be about as long as what you have
quoted. If you quote ten lines from D.H. Lawrence, you should
expect to spend ten lines commenting on it. (Of course in the case of
your becoming fascinated with a single sentence, or with a single
line of poetry, do not be surprised if you have to break the rule
because you have so much you want to say.) Try to do the quota-
tion justice: why have you chosen it? What is especially interesting,
relevant, strange, thought-provoking, elegant or perhaps beautiful
about it? Describe this.
Once you have a first draft of your essay, stop! Have a cup of tea, go
for a run or watch a movie (or even all three, though perhaps not at
the same time): ‘unwind yourself’, as the snake in Disney’s Jungle
Book puts it. You need to forget – or at least put at a distance –
what it was you were doing. We all have some familiarity, perhaps,
with the strange experience of coming across something we wrote in
the past (it might be a diary, or a letter, or just an email) and
thinking: ‘Did I write that? Weird!’ Getting some distance on the
essay that you are writing is essential. You can then return to it
with a slightly different eye and ear, reading it a little more as if you
were a stranger, rather than its anxious, possessive creator. It is a
matter of trying to read as if you do not already know – as if you
have truly forgotten – what you have said and why.
Keep revising. Make sure you revise your work more than once.
Much of what we have said above has to do with this process of
revision, which should be seen as an integral part of essay-writing
rather than as a bolt-on that you will do if you have the time or if
you can be bothered. Sometimes the most interesting or exciting
discoveries about your essay come only as you are reading through
it for what you expect or fear or hope will be the last time. Late
additions or modifications can crucially clarify and enhance the
overall sharpness of your argument. Conversely, you might also see,
at the very end, pleasing ways in which you can omit and tighten.
Have you finished? Look over your essay and ask yourself: is it
absolutely clear that I have answered the question? Is it absolutely
clear that this is the case in the very first paragraph and also in the
final paragraph? Is it clear how each of the paragraphs in between
the introduction and conclusion constitutes an explicit development
of my response to the question? Is it clear how each paragraph follows
on from the last and leads on to the next? If the answer to any of
these questions is ‘no’ or ‘dunno’, you need to go back to the
relevant paragraph and revise it in such a way that it becomes

absolutely clear how it relates to the essay question or essay topic.
If you cannot see how it relates, or how to make it relate, then you
need to delete the paragraph.
Enjoy yourself, if you possibly can. A good essay gives pleasure.
When you enjoy writing about the text/s or writer/s you are focusing
on in your essay, this is likely to be something your reader comes to
share. Thinking may be hard, expressing and structuring your ideas
may be challenging and even frustrating (is anyone ever entirely
satisfied with an essay they have written?), but your writing should
also convey a sense of the exhilaration and playfulness of language,
as well as the love of words, evident in all great works of literature.
Further reading
David Kennedy’s online Royal Literary Fund Essay Guide at: www.
rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/writing/essayguide.cfm provides lots of
good practical advice. Fabb and Durant’s How to Write Essays and
Dissertations (2005) is another excellent guide. On issues of spelling,
punctuation and grammar, in particular, we would recommend
Peck and Coyle’s The Student’s Guide to Writing: Spelling, Punc-
tuation and Grammar (2012). For a sense of the richness of the art
of essay-writing, perhaps the obvious place to start is the work of
Montaigne. The best and fullest English version is The Complete
Essays, translated by M.A. Screech (2003). For a good selective
range of contemporary critics whose work is of value, not only for
the adventurous nature of their arguments or ideas, but also for the
lucid and distinctive nature of their writing, see Harold Bloom’s Yeats
(1970), Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983; 2009), Christopher Ricks’s
The Force of Poetry (1995), Paul Fry’s A Defense of Poetry (1995),
Laura Marcus’s The Tenth Muse (2007) and Stephen Greenblatt’s The
Swerve (2011). For a dense but remarkable series of reflections on
the importance and potential of ‘the essay as form’, see Adorno’s
essay of that title. Another indispensable writer in this context is
Walter Benjamin. The essays collected in Illuminations, for example,
include such brilliant and influential pieces as ‘The Storyteller’ and
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. On the
relation between essay-writing and the unforeseeable, see Hélène
Cixous’s extraordinary little text, ‘Writing Blind’.
9 Creative writing
The impossible
The expansion of creative writing courses has been one of the most
dramatic developments in the recent history of ‘English’ as a discipline.
In the following pages, we move on to questions about how to think
about ‘creative writing’ – about what exactly it is, how it relates to
studying literature and why it might matter. In the chapter after this,
we talk about how you might go about actually producing some
creative writing (specifically a work of short fiction). Even if you are
not interested in pursuing creative writing yourself, we hope that
these pages might help to clarify the ways in which it has, for better
or worse, changed the nature of literary studies. If climate change is
the term for what is happening to the world’s weather, creative
writing is producing ‘discipline change’ in literary studies.
One of the persistent questions about creative writing is ‘Can it be
taught?’ or ‘Can you learn it?’ In our view, teaching creative writing
is impossible. But this need not mean that it is not worth trying, or
that valuable and productive things cannot flow from the attempt.
Sigmund Freud says that there are three impossible professions:
government, psychoanalysis and teaching (see Freud 2002, 203). If
teaching is an impossible profession, what difference does ‘creative
writing’ make to the mix?
People talk about ‘mission impossible’ or being in an ‘impossible
situation’, but what is the impossible, in truth? An initial thought
might be that lots of things are impossible: travelling back in time;
travelling forward in time; knowing what happens when you die or
returning from the dead; inhabiting someone else’s mind, thoughts
and feelings; discovering overnight that you have turned into an
enormous insect. All of these examples are drawn from literature
Creative writing 117
and offer indeed a sort of condensed illustration of what literature

is. Creative writing (whether poetry, fiction, drama or another form
altogether) is the space in which these impossible things can occur.
Here are some examples:
1 Time-travel is possible. Not just H.G. Wells’s The Time

Machine, but every work of fiction, and perhaps even every
poem and play, invites us to construe it – and join in with it – as
an experience of time-travel. Literary texts can transport us
across decades or lifetimes, pitch us into the future or drag
us back in time.
2 The dead can return. Not just in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,
but all literary works are made of voices and words that come to
us from the dead. All literary works have to do with forms of
cultural memory that stretch back from before we were born,
with senses of loss and ghostly repetitions or revivals. Sooner or
later all authors will be dead and are indeed, in a spooky but
telling sense, already dead, insofar as their texts have a capacity
to live on after them.
3 Inhabiting someone else’s mind, sharing their thoughts and
feelings, happens all the time in literature. Sometimes matter-
of-factly, sometimes comically, sometimes uncannily, literature
is where the hidden world of what others are thinking and
feeling is revealed. It is where what philosophers refer to as ‘the
problem of other minds’ is temporarily, strangely, impossibly
solved.
4 Finding oneself transformed into a gigantic insect is what happens
in Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’, but metamorphosis –
whereby one person or creature changes into some other person
or creature, into someone else, or into some thing else – is far
more widely present in works of literature than you might think.
Indeed, one of the most influential works in Western literature
is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem in Latin that recounts the
history of the world through a series of stories about transfor-
mations or metamorphoses of the human, animal or divine that
have given rise to the modern (Roman) world. Poets, in parti-
cular, have a striking, if in some ways enigmatic tendency to
identify with, or project themselves into non-human animals or
118 Creative writing
objects. We might think, for instance, of George Herbert’s

‘Affliction (I)’ in which the poet laments: ‘I reade, and sigh, and
wish I were a tree’ (Herbert 2007, 163), or Ted Hughes’s ‘Hawk
Roosting’, in which the ‘I’ sits in ‘the top of the wood’ and ‘in
sleep rehearse[s] perfect kills and eat[s]’ (Hughes 2003, 68–69). And
fiction-writers and dramatists, in particular, have a constitutional
commitment to turning themselves into other people. (Even if
those other people bear a marked resemblance to themselves – as
in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man or Saul Bellow’s Herzog.) That is their
job, in a nutshell, the first line of their job-description: Become
some other person or creature. Neither the first-person narrator
nor any of the characters in a work of fiction is simply identical
with the author. Only the most naive, uncritical readers or
spectators would take it into their head that the protagonist
or other character in a play is actually the playwright. Luigi
Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), for
instance, with its wonderfully chaotic staging of characters
(Mother, Father, Stepdaughter, and so on) and the actors who
are supposed to ‘be’ or ‘become’ them, together with ‘the pro-
ducer’ – and all of them in search of an author (an author who
does not appear on stage but is said to sit ‘in his gloomy study’, as
‘shadows … fill the room’, refusing to grant ‘life’ to his characters
(Pirandello 1985, 124–25)) – makes the comic naivety of that kind
of thinking explicit. Forms of metamorphosis may be discerned
in every poem or play or work of fiction – even, or perhaps above
all, in the way that the author disappears into his or her text.
In all of these instances, then, we could say that creative writing has
a remarkable, even unique significance in relation to thinking about
the impossible. Doubtless we are drawn to reading literary works
(just as we may also be drawn to watching movies or gaming)
because they enable us, in some sense, to depart from reality and
enter impossible worlds. But creative writing is different because it
is concerned not just with creating those worlds oneself but, in
principle at least, with preserving them in writing for others. The
pursuit of creative writing, the creative writing workshop, the phe-
nomenon of creative writing as a part of literary studies – all of
these have to do with you personally, on your own. You, with just
your pen and piece of paper, or blank computer screen, negotiating

the impossible in the present.
There is something rather terrifying about this scenario. (No
wonder people talk about ‘writer’s block’.) We might ask indeed
whose bright idea it was to introduce such an unnerving situation
into the university classroom. Of course, the fact that you are in a
building for educational purposes, that a tutor or lecturer is present
in the room, the fact that what you are doing, or supposed to be
doing, is ultimately connected to some form of assessment, and so
on, all help to convey a sense that you can, and should, ‘keep calm
and carry on’. But in truth there is something quite mad about a
creative writing class. King Lear’s frenzied words, ‘O that way
madness lies; let me shun that; / No more of that’ (3.4.21–22), might
readily echo down the centuries into the silence of your mind as you
sit in that classroom faced with the task of writing something now,
this very minute – something that will constitute an encounter with
the impossible and prove worthy of the name ‘creative writing’.
Indeed, far from wanting to offer a comforting or anodyne,
merely ‘institutionalized’ conception of creative writing here, we
would like to stress that it is a potentially disruptive activity –
disruptive not only to oneself but also to the institution in which it
takes place. By the same token, it might also be fruitful and trans-
formative in ways that go beyond the merely individual concerns of
the creative writing student. Any creative writing class worthy of
the name calls for a sustained critical reflection on what ‘creative
writing’ is or might be. There is, we suggest, no truly creative
writing without critical thinking – including thinking about
the purpose and value of the university, and about how creative
writing addresses and engages with social, ethical and political
issues beyond the university.
At this point we might recall those three impossible professions
to which Freud referred – government, psychoanalysis and teaching
itself – and say something about creative writing’s role in relation to
each of them.
Government. To reflect critically on creative writing inevitably
entails an engagement with the nature of authority and control –
with questions of ‘self-control’, hence ‘self-government’, as well as
‘whose words are these that I am writing?’, ‘is my language my
own?’, ‘according to whose authority, how and why, am I going to
be judged and assessed?’, ‘what is authority, anyway?’, and so on.

You don’t have to suffer from paranoid delusions of being watched
by the government to realize that ‘creative writing’ (‘go on, be
creative, write something creative!’) confronts you with yourself,
with fundamental questions not just about who you think you are,
but about what drives you, about who or what is guiding, mana-
ging, constraining but also perhaps liberating what you are writing
or what you dream of writing.
To pursue creative writing in a thoughtful and critical manner is
necessarily to engage with broader questions: about self and com-
munity, about the value and purpose of working with others, about
the relations between the creative writing classroom and the world,
writing and what is sometimes called the ‘real’. Who knows what is
going to come into your head next or where it will have come from?
What distinguishes creative writing from other university subjects is
that it pivots on a specific crisis of the present. Poised in the now,
the writer is immersed in a certain experience of anarchy. This
moment is governed, if it is governed at all, by a sense of promise, a
dream of the future. And this sense of promise or dream is not
simply about you, but about the fact that a creative writing class or
workshop is a group event. The reason you have chosen to study or
take a course in creative writing has something to do with the
nature of being and working with others, of reliance on others. It is
about you, but not all about you.
Psychoanalysis. More than any other area of the discipline of literary
studies, creative writing conducts you to a strange interior world. In
this it has strong affinities with psychoanalysis. Unlike studying,
say, the Romantic lyric, or the postmodern novel, you have no
model or example on which to focus. Rather, it is all in your head.
As we have been intimating, madness is, if you think about it, never
far away. (And if you don’t think about it, madness is perhaps even
closer … ) More than any other subject in the humanities, creative
writing invites you to look within, to reflect on who or what you
are, on what you desire, on how you think, and on how your
desires and thinking might be most effectively realized in words.
But, let us say it again: it is not all about you. At least it is not
necessarily about a ‘you’ that you would be likely to recognize.
This calls for some further elucidation. Like psychoanalysis,
creative writing is profoundly concerned not only with the nature of
language and the self, but also with what Havelock Ellis called ‘the
world of dreams’ (Ellis 1911). Freud once wrote a little essay about
‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) – an essay that writers
often refer to in a sniffy or dismissive way, on the basis that the
founder of psychoanalysis characterizes creative writing in an overly
simple and reductive fashion. In particular, Freud seeks to categorize
creative writing as more or less equivalent to daydreaming. The
creative writer by this account emerges as a complacent, egocentric
person inspired only by a desire to fulfil their fantasies in writing. In
the process, Freud deliberately restricts himself to ‘the less pretentious
authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless
have the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes’
(Freud 1985, 137). Reading Freud’s essay today, it is difficult not to
think about how much we would need to modify or rework what
he says, in order to try to take into account more complex kinds of
creative writing. What if Freud had focused his attention not on a
simple ‘daydream’ model, but on the work of Shakespeare, for
example, or Dostoevsky? Literary works such as Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream or Dostoevsky’s The Double, for
example, are not just dreams or daydreams, but have a reflexive or
analytic dimension of their own – they are about dreaming, they
refer to themselves as fictions, they have in some ways as much to
tell us about psychoanalysis, as psychoanalysis might have to tell us
about them.
At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that
‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ is a little masterpiece of sorts.
It calls for what we have described as creative reading. It contains
numerous brilliant insights and observations about the nature of
creative writing, while also exhibiting something of the dreamy
reality of its purported subject. When Freud describes the creative
writer as a ‘strange being’ about whom we are ‘intensely curious’
(131), he is in part describing himself. He begins with a sort of
theatrical exasperation, as he exclaims: ‘If we could at least discover
in ourselves or in people like ourselves an activity which was in
some way akin to creative writing!’ (Freud 1985, 131). A vague air
of hopelessness, however, rapidly gives way to a characteristically
bold flourish of rhetorical questions: ‘Should we not look for the
first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The
child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his [or her]
play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves
like a creative writer … ?’ (131). This prompts a crucial insight:
every creative writing class is full of phantom children (and phantom
parents). As Adam Phillips comments, ‘Freud encourages us to read
as we dream, according to our desire, surprised by what may strike
us, and unable to predict what will haunt us’ (Phillips 2006, xv).
Reading Freud is one of the best ways in which to enrich one’s sense
of what a creative writer is – polymorphously perverse, scarcely
articulate, surrounded by ‘imagined objects and situations’ (132).
Teaching. As will perhaps be evident from the preceding para-
graphs, these three ‘impossible professions’ are intimately linked to
one another. Just as psychoanalysis began with Freud analysing
himself, and just as his strange science came to be known as ‘the
talking cure’, so creative writing might be conceived as a peculiar sort
of auto-analysis. It is also a form of self-teaching that has to do with
what is ‘other’ to the self. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
remark seems especially apposite in this context: ‘My own words
take me by surprise and teach me what to think’ (Merleau-Ponty
1964, 88; our translation). It is not simply a matter of becoming a
sort of empty screen and watching and learning from the writing that
wafts up in front of you, as if it has been written by someone else or
by some magical agency. But there is a bit of that, for this is one of
the disarming things about creative writing: it is never entirely per-
sonal, fully calculated and completely foreseen. The writer is always
dicing with the unforeseeable. You have to be ready.
Get ready now.
Further reading
For a complex and richly informative account of ‘the rise of creative
writing’, especially in the context of modern American fiction, see
Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of
Creative Writing (2009). Of related interest, especially in the context of
recent fiction, see Lisa McNally’s Reading Theories in Contemporary
Fiction (2013). In their Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide
(2014) Stephen Benson and Clare Connors provide a good selection
of work that explores, questions and unsettles the distinctions
between creative and critical writing. For an excellent collection of
Freud’s work in relation to creative writing, see his Writings on Art
and Literature (1997). Patrick J. Mahony’s Freud as a Writer (1987)

offers a fine overview of the rhetorical crafting of Freud’s own texts,
while Mark Edmundson’s Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in
Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson and Sigmund Freud (1990) and Perry
Meisel’s The Literary Freud (2007) explore the rich terrain of the
literary in Freud. Jeremy Tambling’s Literature and Psychoanalysis
(2012) is a lucid and very readable introduction to its Janus-headed
subject.
10 Writing short fiction
Not everyone studying literature wants to do creative writing, and

short fiction is only one kind among others. But creative writing has
become an increasingly significant feature of literary studies and
indeed the humanities in general. Even if you plan never to write
short stories or produce any other sort of creative writing as long as
you live, this chapter may nevertheless be of some interest. In parti-
cular, we hope that it might stimulate and provoke further thinking
about the nature of fiction, its purposes and possibilities. Every writer
has a different way of going about his or her business. What Bennett
and Royle have to say about how to write a work of short fiction
may be, at least in certain respects, quite different from what others
might say. Take us, if you like, with a pinch of salt. What follows is
a polemical A–Z for writing short fiction.
a. Think in advance about what kind of writing might be worth the

effort. If it isn’t going to be about the world, if it isn’t based on
some sort of critically thoughtful response to something real (a dead
mouse you found in the cupboard, the enormity of the geopolitics of
North Korea, Syria or Palestine, an accident in Peru, a waterfall in
New Zealand), it isn’t worth doing. The world doesn’t need fiction
that merely passes the time. There is too much to respond to, to be
responsible to, and even responsible for. Fiction has to respond, and
you need to be clear what you are trying to respond to.
b. Manuals of creative writing tend to harp on about ‘writing
from your own experience’, but this often opens up a can of worms.
Hardly anyone – your mother or father or lover, if you’re lucky – is
really interested in Your Own Experience. What is ‘your own
Writing short fiction 125
experience’ anyway? Does it refer only to what you’ve actually seen,

witnessed, participated in, firsthand? Does that include what you’ve
read? And the actual experience of writing? Or is it supposed to exclude
those? Your own experience is indelibly marked, affected, inflected
by language. What happens to you may be singular and unprecedented,
but needs to be framed with a certain critical detachment – think
Dickens, Woolf, Mansfield, Joyce or Philip Roth.
c. What is important is often what is difficult or painful. Even
writing devoted to dispassionate observation of an individual or a
landscape, say, bears testament to what is real, to mortality and
transience. The best writing tends to draw on something traumatic,
whether it is the experience of happiness (joy can be traumatic) or
physical injury or psychological loss. It might be productive to
consider writing about something that is in some sense impossible
for you to write about because it is traumatic. The word ‘traumatic’
comes from the ancient Greek ‘trauma’, meaning ‘wound’. Creative
writing originates in something wounding. In his marvellous book
about photography, Camera Lucida (1982), Roland Barthes argues
that a powerful image always contains some sort of punctum – a small
detail that punches, punctures, moves the viewer in an unexpected and
enigmatic way. Think about the possibilities of an equivalent of the
punctum in the context of short fiction.
d. What spurs your writing need not be named as such. You might
write about it by writing around the trauma, making the trauma a sort
of hidden or oblique presence perhaps. You do not need to spell out
the wound or point at it and say Look, here is the trauma. In the
end the wound matters not because it is yours but because it is not
yours: it is not your personal property, its power and interest lie in
the ways that it can be shared (with your reader), relinquished to
language (the world of fiction).
e. Humour is something else. Not everyone expresses it in equal
measure or has the same sense of it. And like language itself,
humour is not something that anyone can own. It is a gift, as well
as a riddle. As Freud makes clear in his essay ‘Humour’ (1927), it is
strangely ‘liberating and elevating’ (Freud 1985, 432). At the same
time, it can be anarchic and subversive. As Freud puts it: ‘Humour
is not resigned; it is rebellious’ (429). Moreover, it is never simply
opposed to what is serious. As Freud’s essay also suggests, the classic
and most essential kind, after all, is so-called ‘gallows humour’. His
example is of the criminal being led out to the gallows on a Monday

morning and remarking, ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely.’
f. Death is the only real authority for a piece of creative writing.
This is Walter Benjamin’s point in his great essay ‘The Storyteller’. He
writes: ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell.
He has borrowed his authority from death’ (Benjamin 1969, 94). All
narratives are ultimately impelled by a sense of mortality, fragility and
transience. Nothing lasts. The greatest works of short fiction – Anton
Chekhov’s, for example, or Katherine Mansfield’s – show this most
clearly. They are works of gentleness, sometimes shockingly so, but,
like their tubercular authors, they are never far from death.
g. It is often said that you should show, not tell. This is not bad
advice, as writing comes alive when an idea or a place or a scene or
a person is not just described but put into play, set in action. You
don’t have to explain everything. Don’t dillydally with your scene-
setting: don’t, whatever you do, try to be Henry James. Don’t get
stuck in an overly long description of what is going on in a character’s
mind or body. It is best to keep things moving along, without being
unduly (tiresomely) snappy.
h. Remember Ernest Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory’ (seven-eighths of
the story should be hidden) or what Bennett and Royle are tempted to
call the holey text. Say more by saying less. Let the text breathe: in
order to breathe, a work of fiction needs holes, unspoken gaps,
missing corners.
i. The traumatic always goes beyond speech, beyond writing,
even if it is something seemingly tiny or banal (the cruelty of
something a sibling says or does, a bunch of flowers smashed by the
rain). That’s one of the ways in which creative writing, writing a
piece of fiction, engages with the impossible.
j. The impossible in creative writing: this might be a good place
to pop in a word about deconstruction. ‘The least bad definition of
deconstruction’, according to Jacques Derrida, is: ‘the experience of
the impossible’ (Derrida 1992b, 200). Deconstruction, then, has a
special place when it comes to thinking about literature (or creative
writing). Literature is slippery, ghostly, without essence: this is what
deconstruction helps us understand. It is about how literary works
open up, or open us up, to experiencing the impossible.
k. You should write on your nerve, as D.H. Lawrence would say,
write as often and as much as you can. Once you have started, keep
going. (Think of Kafka who would remain at his desk writing all
day, all night, till the story was done.)
l. It can be like dreaming – if you move on waking, you’ll
start to forget it. When you write, once you are underway, try to
stay underway, keep it flowing, keep it going, until you have a first
draft. The thought of writing here might be compared to Keats’s
image of Adam’s dream: ‘he awoke and found it truth’ (Keats
2005, 54).
m. Once you have a first draft you are in paradise. It is a fool’s
paradise of course, but take a break, enjoy the exhilaration of
having completed that first draft. You have only just begun.
n. For then comes the second draft, and the second draft is very
often more a matter of cutting than of adding. See how much you
can take away or take out. Think, once again, of Hemingway. His
‘iceberg theory’ emerged out of writing a story called ‘Out of
Season’ in 1923. In a later memoir, A Moveable Feast, he recalled
that he had cut out the ‘real end’ of the story, in which the old man
hangs himself: ‘This was omitted on my new theory that you could
omit anything’, Hemingway commented, ‘and the omitted part
would strengthen the story and make people feel something more
than they understood’ (Hemingway 2011, 71).
o. If you say something or have a character say something in ten
words rather than twenty, or in five rather than ten, you are making
progress. What goes for critical writing goes for creative writing: if
in doubt, cut it out. Once you have a second draft, read it aloud,
preferably to another human (but a hamster may also suffice).
Reading your piece of writing aloud is a crucial ploy for catching
unnecessary words or phrases, dull patches, sloppy punctuation,
unnecessary slowings in pace, too much information.
p. Dialogue is especially challenging in writing fiction. It is good
to have it: it offers more voices, other voices. Bear in mind Elizabeth
Bowen’s insight that ‘speech is what characters do to each other’
(Bowen 1962, 253). Dialogue needs to do as well as say. And you
need to show how characters are doing things to each other by
speaking. Everything a character says should do something. This
might take the form of: (1) a performative utterance (saying something
that is some kind of promise, or threat, or challenge, or confession, or
naming, or revealing); (2) moving the narrative on; (3) deepening
our knowledge and appreciation of the character or interlocutor
(an instance of pretence, betrayal, evasion, something notably painful

or humorous or ironic, and so on).
q. Critics often talk about epiphanies in short stories (as we have
done in ‘Reading a short story’, above). In other words, a passage,
sentence, clause or even a single word can function as a moment of
revelation for the text as a whole. You do not need to have selected
and crafted an epiphany for your text, but a careful reader is likely
to be alert to it in any case, even if only unconsciously. ‘Epiphany’
is not the only term for this. An alternative name might be the black
box of the text, the point where everything is gathered together,
analysis of which yields a crucial understanding of the structure,
flight and fate of the writing. At some point in the writing process
(perhaps not until it is all over), you might find it helpful to ask
yourself: is there a black box and, if so, where is it? It may take you,
not to mention your reader, some time to find the box. Sometimes, for
example in the short fiction of Kafka or Beckett, you discover it is
in fact less a question of a box than of something like a black hole,
something that emits no light, and sucks all into its abyssal darkness.
r. And then there is the turn, or turning-point, for which one
name would be Aristotle’s peripeteia (‘reversal’, ‘sudden change of
fortune’). Elizabeth Bowen claims that ‘a story, to be a story, must
have a turning-point’ (Bowen 1986, 122). The story is going along in
one way, and perhaps everything seems tickety-boo, routine, flowing
along, but then there is a turn: something untoward happens. There is
a change of perspective (narrative or temporal), things transpire to
be other than they seemed, and so on. (A striking recent example
would be the suicide at the centre of David Vann’s short fiction
series, Legend of a Suicide (2008).) A story without a turning-point
is like a story without hope. But don’t make it into a complete
mad-house. When people start out writing short fiction they often
imagine it is ok to have all sorts of characters, shifts in time, strings
of events, and so on. That is, almost always, an error.
s. As with everything else involving a specific craft or skill – being
a carpenter, a lawyer or a teacher – you may expect to need thou-
sands of hours of ‘work experience’ before you really know your
way around. But here is a tip for one short cut: don’t try to cram
too much in. You’re not writing The Odyssey. There are reasons
why it is a work of short fiction, not a novella or a novel. The
whole beauty (and, as we might say, the hole beauty) of the thing is,
as Edgar Allan Poe recognized, that you can read the piece ‘at one
sitting’, and that it all comes down to the production of ‘a certain
unique or single effect’ (Poe 1965, 106–8). Think small. Have as few
characters as is necessary for the narrative (but be wary of having
only one, above all on account of the risks of self-indulgence,
self-centredness and a sort of suffocating monopoly).
t. The title: at some point in the proceedings you are going to
have to attend to this. It may come to you only at the end, or you
might have the title before you start. A good title is a ticket to
pleasure, a kind of promise of what is to come. Of course you can
plump for a downbeat, prosaic sort of title, as V.S. Pritchett tends to do:
‘The Sailor’, ‘Citizen’, ‘The Speech’. Or you can veer in the opposite
direction, towards the explicitly strange or dramatic, as in Poe: ‘The
Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, ‘The Balloon
Hoax’. But there is no harm in aiming for something in between, a
title that has a faint sense of intrigue or oddness, of danger or allure.
Eudora Welty’s stories, for instance, include ‘The Worn Path’, ‘At the
Landing’ and ‘The Whole World Knows’ – titles that might easily
prompt you to wonder ‘what path and why worn?’, ‘what landing
and what happens there?’ and ‘the whole world knows what?’ A good
title might be short, such as Raymond Carver’s provocative ‘Fat’, or it
might be long, as in his poignant ‘What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love’, but it is always worth trying to come up with a
title that tickles you, a word or phrase that may in turn intrigue and
delight your reader.
u. Sometimes a title can actually function as a piece of wisdom
for writing short stories, as in Grace Paley’s witty and provoking
‘Enormous Changes at the Last Minute’. Remember the enormous
change that Hemingway made by omitting the suicide of the old
man in ‘Out of Season’. You shouldn’t necessarily expect to make
enormous changes at the last minute, but it can happen that, when
you are reading over your piece in what you hope is its final draft,
you see something you could alter that would be comparatively
small in the scheme of things but would make a great difference to
the quality of your work. It might be a matter of cutting something
out, or changing something a character says, or adding some telling
final detail. Enormous change is, of course, relative. What strikes
you at the time as enormous might seem tiny to someone else. (It is
like the character in Poe’s story, ‘The Sphinx’, who, with a sense of
horror, watches a monster making its way from the horizon down
the hillside towards the house, until he realizes it is an insect on the
windowpane.)
v. In the end, however, you should feel that your piece is as good
as you can make it. You need to be able to let go. Shakespeare
could let go. There comes a point when you have to say goodbye.
The point at which to let go is when you have all your ducks in a
line, every word is doing the work you want it to do, every item of
punctuation is right. Raymond Carver memorably describes knowing
when you have finished with a story, in his brief essay ‘On Writing’:
‘Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short
story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas
and then going through the story again and putting commas back in
the same places’ (Carver 1986, 24).
w. Never forget what Frank Kermode called ‘the sense of an ending’
(Kermode 1966) or the importance of what Peter Brooks so richly
explores under the heading, ‘reading for the plot’ (Brooks 1984).
However captivated your reader might be by your subject-matter,
your voice or style, your characters and dialogue, your descriptions
of places, events, feelings, the intellectual or philosophical richness of
your writing, you also need to tell a story. And a story has to have an
ending. Your readers will be looking for a narrative. Indeed they will
seek to impose narrative coherence on your work even if you do
not. (Robert Coover’s ‘The Baby-Sitter’ (1969) is a classic example
of a story that seeks, with doubtless only limited success, to subvert or
destroy these readerly presuppositions and desires.) Readers, of
course, do not necessarily – and indeed often do not at all – just
want a rudimentary linear narrative. Readers can take pleasure in
being held up, sent off in odd directions, they can enjoy a feeling of
veering, a sudden change or turn, an undoing of expectations – so
long as you will have told a story in the end. Readers always read
with ‘the sense of an ending’.
x. But don’t strain yourself with the need to end with a bang. Rather
than fret about having an ending that is sufficiently ‘dramatic’, ‘reve-
latory’, ‘final’, and so on, you might think about ending in a more
low-key, unexpected way. Some of the most powerful endings to
short stories are endings that do not really end – so-called ‘open
endings’, or endings that turn away from the principal action and
concerns of the story and invite the reader (perhaps in an annoying
or disquieting way) to focus on something else. Kafka’s great story

‘A Hunger Artist’, for example, closes not with the emaciated figure
with whom we have been concerned from the beginning, now
finally starved to death and lying in the straw of his cage, but with
an image of the ‘leaping’, ‘noble body’ (Kafka 1992, 277) of a panther,
the creature that has replaced him and that now compels everyone’s
attention.
y. It is notable that Kafka should have ended his work with the
image of a non-human animal. The rapport between the literary work
and animals is perhaps strongest in poetry; but it is not an entirely
stupid idea to consider the short story, also, as especially liable to
figure – and figure as – some sort of animal. The short story would
be a strange creature. It might seem to come from nowhere and
soon enough it will disappear again. It should have an unexpected,
otherworldly quality, like the moose in Elizabeth Bishop. ‘The
Moose’ (Bishop 1991, 169–73) is not a short story but a narrative
poem. It is about a bus full of people travelling inland from the sea, at
night in the fog, until the driver ‘stops with a jolt’ because a moose has
emerged from ‘the impenetrable wood’ and has halted before them.
‘Taking her time, / she looks the bus over, / grand, otherworldly’:
the creature produces a ‘sweet / sensation of joy’ in all who look at
her. Then the bus moves on.
z. Poems can also tell stories, then, and provide a last thought here.
‘In poetry,’ writes Wallace Stevens, ‘you must love the words, the
ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything
at all’ (Stevens 1997, 902). The same goes for writing a short story. If
it is worth doing at all, writing fiction demands your body and soul,
heart and mind. You should love and care for every word, every
sentence of the strange object you have made. You cannot be sure
what your reader might think or feel, or even if your work will ever
be read, but that love and care for what you have written is perhaps
finally what most matters.
Further reading
The best further reading for writing short fiction is undoubtedly
short fiction itself – as produced, for example, by any or all of the
following: Heinrich von Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant,
Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Joseph Conrad,

Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence,
Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway,
Elizabeth Bowen, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Clarice
Lispector, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Raymond Carver, David
Foster Wallace, Richard Ford, Jackie Kay and Alice Munro. Among
the most stimulating critical essays by such writers, see Carver’s
brief but brilliant ‘On Writing’. Although focused on the longer
form of the novel, Bowen’s ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (in Bowen
1986) is also full of fascinating perceptions and insights. Walter
Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ is a profound meditation on the art of
fiction, long and short.
Appendix
The wordbook
‘Wordbook’ might be a good name for a novel or a play or a collection

of poems. As it happens, however, it is another name for a dictionary,
a lexicon. The three words ‘dictionary’, ‘lexicon’, ‘wordbook’, are
interchangeable, but each has a slightly different resonance. Whatever
you call it, the wordbook is an essential tool for studying literature.
You are spoilt for choice in this area, with a number of excellent
dictionaries – The Chambers Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of
English, Collins English Dictionary as well as the American-English
version, Merriam-Webster’s American English Dictionary. Then
there is the Daddy of all English dictionaries (indeed, the Daddy of
all dictionaries in any language), the Oxford English Dictionary,
usually known as the ‘OED’ and first completed in 1928 – of which
more in a moment.
Consulting a good dictionary can be one of the chief delights of
reading and writing: it enables you to take a pause without losing
the plot. It is also a way of slowly but surely expanding your mind.
As far as a single-volume dictionary is concerned, the go-to option
for Bennett and Royle is Chambers. The Chambers Dictionary is
particularly rich in the range of its literary references. It is also at
times surprisingly witty. Here are just a couple of definitions: to
‘bugger off’ is decorously construed as to ‘go away quickly’; and a
‘leaf’ is initially defined in rather ponderously scientific terms as
‘one of the lateral organs developed from the stem or axis of a plant
below its growing-point’ but then (as if the editor at Chambers is
giving up and just pointing): ‘one of those flat green structures … ’.
All good dictionaries offer a wealth of information. Although
most people turn to a dictionary to check the meaning or the spelling
134 Appendix
of a word, all the information is potentially useful. Dictionaries

usually explain:
How the word is spelled, including any variations in spelling

Its pronunciation: for example, pro--nun-si-a-’shǝn in Chambers,
or the more technical transcription of the word in the OED as
/prəˌnʌnsIˈeIʃn/
The grammatical name for the word in question (noun (‘n.’),
adjective (‘adj.’), adverb (‘adv.’), etc.)
What the word means
Its etymology – where or how the word in question originates.
To return to the Daddy, the OED is massive – twenty large volumes

in the print version of the 1989 second edition, but now, in electronic
form, even larger. Any half-decent library should have a print copy
and also offer access to the online version. The reason why the OED
is so much bigger than your average wordbook is not just because it
defines more words but because it is a historical dictionary. This
means that, in addition to the current senses of words, it offers
information about when the words entered the language and how
their usage has changed over time. And it gives examples of usage
so you can see the word in action for yourself.
The way that words change over time is particularly important
for a historical discipline such as literary studies. And for this
reason the OED is a crucial resource. The senses of words alter and
shift over time, acquiring and losing nuances; words evolve new and
separate meanings, they drop out of the language and become
‘obsolete’. It is easy to be misled by the modern sense of a word
when it is used in an older text and easy to overlook the multiple
senses of a word that a text might be exploiting.
In his famous ‘To be or not to be’ speech, for example, Hamlet
uses the word ‘conscience’: ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of
us all’ he says (Hamlet, 3.1.85). He is lamenting the fact that he has
argued himself out of committing suicide – it is the ‘dread’ of the
unknown that stops us killing ourselves, he concludes, and that
makes us ‘bear those ills we have’ rather than ‘fly[ing] to others that
we know not of’ (ll. 83–84). Most critics agree that Hamlet is here
referring not only to the modern sense of the ‘conscience’ as a per-
sonal ethical code that guides one’s actions, but to a separate sense
Appendix 135
of the word, one that lacks this ethical dimension and that has largely
fallen into disuse: Hamlet’s ‘conscience’ is, in effect, ‘consciousness’,
one’s ‘internal conviction, personal awareness’, as the OED puts it
(OED, ‘conscience’, n.7a). It is ambiguous: it is not just about ethics
but also a question of awareness: not knowing what happens after
death means that we fear it. Similarly, in reading Hamlet, it would
be easy to be baffled by the modern English sense of ‘quoted’ as
meaning to ‘reproduce or repeat a passage from a book’ (OED,
‘quoted’, v, I.2.a) when Polonius says that he regrets that he has not
better ‘quoted’ Hamlet (2.1.109). What he means, however, is that
he wishes he had better ‘noticed’, ‘observed’ or ‘scrutinized’ the
anguished prince (OED, ’quote’, v, II.5.a). These distinctions
matter. It is in such differences, in these nuances or implications or
connotations of words, that literary texts most richly and profoundly
cast their verbal spell.
Glossary
Alienation effect: concept and strategy originally introduced by the

German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). A
piece of theatre should not reassure or console the spectator
with easy, recognizable characters and psychology. The dramatic
work should on the contrary seek to disturb and alter the
audience’s (bourgeois or other unreflective or indoctrinated)
assumptions and beliefs through a deliberate effect or effects of
alienating the audience. (Also known as the A-effect.)
Alliteration: repeated consonant sounds, particularly at the begin-
ning of words, for example ‘kiddies’ clobber’, ‘mountains of
moonstone’. (See also assonance.)
Allusion: a reference, often only implicit or indirect, to another
work of literature or art, person, event, and so on; sometimes
referred to as ‘echo’. (See also intertextuality.)
Analepsis: the literary critical term for ‘flashback’ in film: the
rhetorical figure that describes a shift in temporal perspective in
a narrative back to something that happened earlier in the story.
Anaphora: the rhetorical figure for the repetition of a word or
phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, clauses or lines
of verse.
Aphorism: a concise sentence or statement purporting to formulate
a truth, phrased in a thought-provoking, arresting and some-
times witty manner. An aphorism is similar to a proverb but is
distinguished by the fact that it is not anonymous. Celebrated
Glossary 137
authors of aphorisms include Blaise Pascal, William Blake,

Oscar Wilde and Franz Kafka.
Aporia: from the ancient Greek word for something that is impassable
(literally a blockage in a road or passage), aporia is a rhetorical
figure for doubt. Especially associated with deconstructive
thinking, an aporia may arise when the reader encounters two
or more incompatible codes, meanings or ‘messages’.
Aposiopesis: the rhetorical term for a sentence or statement that
breaks off in mid-stream, an unfinished … (An ellipsis or three
dots are often used to represent such moments.)
Assonance: correspondence or ‘rhyming’ of vowel sounds, for
example eat, sleep; ooze, droop.
Bibliophagy, bibliophagous: book-devouring. Literal in the case of
rats and worms, figurative in the case of those who love to read
books.
Close reading: a method or practice of reading particularly associated
with the so-called New Critics of the mid-twentieth century that
emphasizes careful attention to ‘the words on the page’ rather
than to historical and ideological contexts, the biography or
intentions of the author, readers’ responses, and so on. In fact,
however, close reading may be considered to be the funda-
mental skill or technique that is developed in the academic
study of literature, and in recent decades it has been combined
with or integrated into approaches that focus on more general
thematic, political, cultural and ideological considerations in
the interpretation of literary texts.
Context: literally, that which accompanies or surrounds a text. To
quote (a line from Stevie Smith, for instance) is always to take
that line out of its context. A careful critical reading invariably
seeks to take account of the text in which the quoted line,
phrase, sentence or passage occurs. More generally, ‘context’
refers to the setting or framing, which might therefore entail
the historical context, the geographical context, the cultural or
political context, and so on, in which a text is written or read.
It is easy enough to see that ‘context’ is a bottomless can of
worms. As Jacques Derrida consistently argues, nothing can be
138 Glossary
determined out of context, but no context can be limited or

exhaustively accounted for.
Creative reading: in the sense particularly developed by Bennett and
Royle, creative reading is a mode of reading that seeks to be
careful, faithful and accurate in its response to the text and its
contexts and, at the same time, to lead on to new, even
unthought-of perspectives, emphases and concerns.
Criticism: in this context, ‘criticism’ refers to the formal analysis,
interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. ‘Criticism’ in this
sense should not be confused simply with ‘fault-finding’ or the
‘passing of unfavourable judgments’ (OED), both of which are, if
present at all, distinctly minor aspects of the work of the
literary critic.
Death drive: concept elaborated by Sigmund Freud, initially in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud argues that there
are two principles that may be conventionally understood to
govern life: the ‘pleasure principle’, which involves the desire to
eat, drink, touch, have sex with, possess or otherwise have
what you want; and the ‘reality principle’, which regulates and
keeps the pleasure principle in check (no, you must not shoot
the president, have sex with a ferret, etc.). Besides or beyond
these principles, however, Freud speculates on the furtive and
uncanny existence of something darker – the workings of the
death drive or ‘Thanatos’, a (mostly silent or unconscious) self-
destructiveness in the individual. In his later work Freud opens
the concept up in other ways too, inviting us to consider it as an
energy or impulse that (however inadvertently or surreptitiously)
drives the behaviour of nation-states and even humanity in
general. He also comes to associate the death drive, in various
ways, with sadism and the desire for mastery. (Sometimes
‘death instinct’; also plural, ‘death instincts’.)
Deconstruction: a word made famous by Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004), sometimes still used in the sense it acquired in the 1980s,
namely as a philosophical and political approach to thinking
about culture, history, literature and everything else you might
care to think of. In particular, it was associated with looking at
texts with an eye or ear for incongruities, contradictions and
Glossary 139
aporias, or for the importance of the seemingly marginal, excluded

or unsaid. Nowadays the word ‘deconstruction’ is often used quite
loosely as a synonym for ‘dismantling’, ‘demystifying’, ‘expo-
sing the hidden prejudices or contradictions of’ or even just
criticizing something – a text, a system, a person, and so on. In
its more radical form, ‘deconstruction’ retains a crucial link
with other motifs explored by Derrida such as the undecidable
and the experience of the impossible. (See also undecidable and
impossible.)
Double bind: a double bind involves the kind of double or contra-
dictory statement or order which deconstructive criticism tends
to focus on. For example, the sentence ‘This sentence is not true’
is both true and not true at the same time (if it’s true then it’s not
true and if it’s not true then it’s true). Rather differently, the
sentence ‘Do not read this sentence’ involves an order which
can only be obeyed if it is disobeyed (we have to read the sentence
in order to know that we should not read it).
Ekphrasis; ekphrastic: from the Greek for ‘description’, ekphrasis
denotes the attempt by a work in one medium to represent a
work in another; often used to refer to a poem that describes a
picture or other artwork such as John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’, W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, or John Ashbery’s
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Elegy: (Gk. ‘lament’) a poem of mourning for an individual or a
lament for a tragic event; the adjective ‘elegiac’ may be used
to describe a sense of mourning or loss encountered in any
text – poem or prose.
Enjambment: the phenomenon whereby one line of poetry carries
over into the next line without a syntactical pause or punctuation.
Epiphany: a moment of special illumination or sudden revelation.
Originally a religious term referring to the manifestation of
Christ to the Wise Men, it was adapted by James Joyce in more
secular mode in his early novel Stephen Hero (1904–6).
Epistolary: adjective, to do with letters and letter-writing; novels
written entirely in the form of letters are called ‘epistolary novels’,
a particularly common form in eighteenth-century literature.
140 Glossary
Essentialism: refers to ways of conceiving people, cultures, and so

on as having certain innate, natural or universal characteristics.
Essentialism is strongly contested in most contemporary literary
theory. The following three statements are all examples of
essentialist thinking: (1) ‘I have a personality, an individuality,
which is completely unaffected by anything out there in the
“real” world, such as language, economics, education, nation-
ality, and so on’; (2) ‘Women are more intelligent, caring and
sensitive than men’; and (3) ‘At bottom, you are either white or
black, and that is all there is to it.’
Focalization: term used to refer to the way in which a narrative is
told from the perspective or point of view of one or more
characters: events are ‘seen’ or imagined through the mind of
certain individuals.
Free indirect speech (or free indirect discourse): refers to narrative
written in the third person (from an apparently external point
of view, describing what ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ do) but carrying with it
knowledge or apparent knowledge of what ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ are
thinking, feeling or perceiving. The narrative moves unmarked
from the perspective of the third-person narrator into the minds
or perspective of the character. Closely related to notions of
magical thinking, omniscient narrator and telepathy.
Hermeneutic: a term formerly used to designate attempts to estab-
lish a set of rules governing the interpretation of the Bible in
the nineteenth century; in the context of contemporary criti-
cism, the term refers to acts or theories of interpretation more
generally.
Impossible: in some contexts associated with what is futile or
pointless, the word ‘impossible’ can also be a trigger for action,
transformation or revolution. When Freud says that there are
three ‘impossible professions’ (government, psychoanalysis and
teaching), he does not mean we should consider them all useless
and just give up. In its most radical form the affirmative or
transformative sense of the impossible comes in Jacques Derrida’s
notion of deconstruction as ‘a certain experience of the impos-
sible’. Even or especially if something is impossible (justice, for
example, or unconditional hospitality or forgiveness), this does
Glossary 141
not mean we cannot or should not desire it, dream of it, try to
make it happen.
Intertextuality: a term coined by Julia Kristeva to refer to the fact
that texts are constituted by what Roland Barthes calls a ‘tissue
of citations’, that every word of every text refers to other texts
and so on, limitlessly. Often used in an imprecise or weak sense
to talk about echoes or allusions.
Irony: a rhetorical figure referring to the sense that there is a dis-
crepancy between words and their meanings, between actions
and their results, or between appearance and reality: most
simply, saying one thing and meaning another.
Lacuna (plural, lacunae): a hiatus in the text, a moment where
something appears to be missing.
Literary theory: ‘the field of study concerned with inquiry into the
evaluation, analysis, and understanding of literary works and
(now also) other texts … often incorporating concepts from other
disciplines, such as philosophy, politics, or sociology’ (OED).
Literary theory is often associated with certain important schools
of thought from the second half of the twentieth- and the early
twenty-first centuries, including formalism, structuralism, decon-
struction, poststructuralism, new historicism, feminism, queer
theory, postcolonialism, trauma theory, ecocriticism, and so on.
Magical thinking: a term used by psychiatrists and psychologists to
refer to the delusions, firmly held superstitious or paranoid beliefs
that an individual might maintain. Such a person hears imaginary
voices, believes that his/her own thoughts can be overheard, is
convinced that in order to be safe s/he must perform certain
actions over and over again, and so on. While such beliefs can
be an element in frightening and debilitating psychiatric condi-
tions, in milder forms magical thinking is extremely common in
everyday life and is indeed the very oxygen of literature. There
is no novel or short story that does not depend on telling the
reader what a character is thinking or feeling, and on other
forms of magical thinking.
Meta-: (from the Greek ‘meta’, meaning ‘with’, ‘beside’) this prefix
has proved helpful in a range of critical terms. The following
142 Glossary
instances are especially common: metalinguistic refers to language

about language; metatheatrical (also, metadramatic) refers to
the way in which a play or some aspect of a play (a speech, for
example, or simply an image) explicitly alerts the reader or
audience to the fact that s/he is reading or watching a play;
metafiction refers to a work of fiction that explicitly highlights
its own status as a story; metapoetic refers to the way in which
a poem refers to its own status as a poem, and so on. (See also
self-reflexivity.)
Mimesis: (Gk. ‘imitation’) the idea that literature attempts to
represent ‘life’ or ‘the world’ more or less accurately, as it
‘actually’ is. (See also realism.)
Mind-reading: a term that can be used to describe what a narrator
or narrative does, especially when the text makes the reader a
party to what different characters are thinking and feeling, to
their pasts or futures, and so on. The term also, however,
applies to the way that literary texts affect readers: readers are
in turn drawn into games of mind-reading (trying to calculate
or surmise what motivates a particular character’s actions or
desires, or to understand the meaning, causes and consequences
of a particular event or experience, and so on).
Narrator: the person or persona (as distinguished from the author)
who is telling a story. Narrators can be variously categorized: a
so-called omniscient narrator appears to know everything, an
intrusive narrator gives his or her own comments and opinions
on the story, an unreliable narrator cannot be trusted for some
reason (e.g. he or she is prejudiced, exaggerating, lying), a first-
person narrator presents himself or herself in the story as ‘I’, a
third-person narrator speaks of his or her characters as ‘she’,
‘he’, and so on.
Omniscient narrator: term used where a narrative is related by an
apparently God-like being, an all-knowing narrator who is able
to divulge any detail of a character’s inner thoughts and feelings,
who knows everything that has happened and is going to
happen, and so on. ‘Omniscient’ was originally a word reserved
for the Judaeo-Christian deity. Any narration (even Biblical
narrative) is necessarily partial, restricted, framed and thus
Glossary 143
limited. Omniscience is a critical fiction that tends to promote

or protect a religiously inflected approach to literary works. It is
perhaps more accurate to talk in terms of telepathic narration,
mind-reading and magical thinking.
Paraphrase: noun and verb referring to the attempt (often helpful,
sometimes unavoidable but never entirely satisfactory or suffi-
cient) to put something in other words, to use ‘your own
words’ to sum up what a given phrase, sentence, passage or
text is saying.
Paratext: term referring to any kind of text that is next to or beside
(Gk. para) the main text. Examples of paratext would include
the title of a work, a preface or foreword, the acknowl-
edgements and any so-called end-matter such as an appendix
(‘The wordbook’, for instance) or this glossary. The notion of
paratext always raises questions of borders and framing: is the
present glossary, for example, a part of or apart from the main
text that precedes it?
Performative: pertaining generally to performance and, in the context
of drama, to the active, dynamic effects of theatre. In the context
of speech-act theory and the analysis of literary texts, however,
‘performative’ is an adjective referring to the capacity that
statements have for doing as well as saying things. A promise
or an act of naming, for example, is a performative. A poem or
novel not only means but does something: it moves you, for
example, or brings something new into the world.
Philology: literally, the love of words (Gk. philein to love, logos word);
more formally the science of language, especially concerned with
its historical development.
Primary text: the literary text that is being discussed, rather than the
critical text or texts (including your own essay) that discusses
that text.
Prolepsis: the rhetorical term to describe the way that a narrative or
other text (including a critical essay) looks ahead, anticipates,
tells you something or tells you about something that is going to
happen later. Prolepsis is a rough equivalent of what film-goers
call the ‘flashforward’.
144 Glossary
Prosody: the study and analysis of versification, focusing in parti-

cular on questions of metre, rhythm, rhyme and other elements
of the sound-patterning of a poem.
Realism: a descriptive term, particularly associated with the
nineteenth-century novel, to refer to the idea that texts appear
to represent ‘the world’ ‘as it really is’. For Bennett and Royle it
is more precisely about the way that novels provoke thinking
by letting us see how such representations of ‘the world’ ‘as it
really is’ are fabrications in language. Far from offering us the
innocent transparency of a ‘window on the world’, a realist
novel or short story invariably has things to tell us about the
power of fiction to make worlds and about the strange, some-
times uncanny borders or distinctions between the real and the
fictive. (See also referential.)
Referential, referentiality: language is said to be functioning in a
referential way when it refers in an apparently unequivocal way
to its objects. An international newspaper headline might run:
‘Huge explosion in central Cairo.’ The reader may wonder
what kind of explosion and what ‘huge’ entails and where-
abouts exactly in Cairo, but the way in which such journalistic
language functions is held to be referential. The reader makes
referential assumptions: the newspaper is referring to some
actual explosion (a bomb or such like), not to an ‘explosion of
interest’; ‘Cairo’ is the capital of Egypt, not an imaginary place
or, say, a small town somewhere in the United States. Certain
writers work very hard to maintain a sense of referential
language, to avoid ambiguities, metaphors, exaggerations and
so on. (See also realism.)
Rhetorical trope: a trope (from the ancient Greek word meaning
‘turn’) is an example of language working in a figurative or
non-literal manner. Examples of trope include metaphor,
metonymy, hyperbole, litotes and catachresis.
Satire: the humorous presentation of human folly or vice in such a
way as to make it look ridiculous, for example Jonathan Swift’s
A Modest Proposal (1729). Conventionally, satire is not merely
an attempt to ridicule but to change people’s understanding and
behaviour. Swift’s proposal that small children in Ireland be
Glossary 145
sold, killed and eaten is powerful satire in part because it

articulates a passionate sense of outrage at poverty in Ireland
and English attitudes to that poverty at the time in question.
Secondary text, secondary criticism: terms used to refer to texts or
writings about another text, in particular critical books, articles
or essays about a literary work.
Self-reflexivity: the phenomenon whereby a piece of writing refers
to or reflects on itself. Often used interchangeably with
‘self-referentiality’. (See also meta-.)
Simulacrum: an imitation, image or likeness.
Singularity: term used to refer to something that is unique or special,
in some sense without precedent or parallel. To attend to the
singularity of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for
example, would be to try to respond and do justice to what
makes this novel different from any and every other novel.
Soliloquy: speech (usually in the context of drama) in which a
character can be heard ‘thinking aloud’. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not
to be’ speech is probably the most often quoted soliloquy in
English literature.
Tautology: term for when something is described or defined in
terms of what it is, in other words a repetition of something
already evident in the same statement. A celebrated example is
Gertrude Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ – along with Virginia
Woolf’s nicely unsettling reply: ‘Is it?’
Telepathy, telepathic narration: useful terms for the description of
how literary works are structured, referring to the ways
in which the discourse of a novel, for example, is predicated on
the idea that we can know what is going on in the minds of
different characters. Narration is telepathic in that it tells
us what a given character is perceiving, thinking or feeling. It
draws the reader into a kind of telepathic world. (See also
mind-reading and magical thinking.)
Uncanny: an adjective made especially rich for literary studies by
Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), ‘uncanny’ means not simply
weird, spooky or strange, but entails some disturbance of our
146 Glossary
sense of what is familiar and unfamiliar. It has to do with a

suggestion (but not conviction) of something supernatural
going on.
Undecidability, undecidable: the phenomenon or experience of being
unable to come to a decision when faced with two or more
possible readings or interpretations. In a weak and imprecise
sense, used interchangeably with ‘indeterminacy’. ‘Indeterminacy’
is a negative term, however, implying that a decision (about
being unable to determine a reading or interpretation) has
already been reached. ‘Undecidability’, on the other hand,
stresses the active, continuing challenge to decide.
Verisimilitude: life-likeness; the appearance of being real or true.
‘Verisimilitude’ is often used in the context of discussions of
reality effects, realism, and so on.
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Index
adaptation (TV and film) 49, 64 Bloom, Harold 69–70

alienation effect 49, 136 Bolaño, Roberto: 2666 11
anaphora 33, 136 Bowen, Elizabeth 53–54, 61, 94,
animals 117–18, 131 127, 128; The Hotel 91; The
aphorism 92–94, 136–37 Little Girls 37–38
aposiopesis 67, 137 Brecht, Bertolt 49
Aristotle: Poetics 32–33, 43, 128 Brontë, Charlotte: Villette 118
Atwood, Margaret 13 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights,
Auden, W.H.: ‘1 September 1939’ 117
29; ‘Funeral Blues’ 28, 29; ‘In Brooks, Cleanth 30
Memory of W.B. Yeats’ 10; Brooks, Peter 130
‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ 24–35; Brueghel, Pieter: Landscape with
‘Stop all the clocks’ 28, 29 the Fall of Icarus 27–28, 33
Austen, Jane 45–46; Persuasion Byron, George Gordon: Don Juan 71
46–47; Pride and Prejudice 31
Austin, J.L. 99 Carroll, Lewis: Alice in
authorship 31, 118 Wonderland 6
Carver, Raymond 129; ‘On
Barthes, Roland 14, 141; Camera Writing’ 130
Lucida 125 chance 5, 26, 68, 71–72, 74
Bateson, Gregory 88–89 character 69–70
Beckett, Samuel 8; Company 8; Chekhov, Anton 126
Endgame 72, 74; ‘Stirrings Still’ Cixous, Hélène: ‘Writing Blind’ 112
8; The Unnamable 8; Waiting close reading 24, 33–35, 72–73,
for Godot 87–88; Watt 113 99, 107
Bellow, Saul: Herzog 118 Cohn, Dorrit 44, 91
Benjamin, Walter: ‘The Storyteller’ coincidence 5, 71–72, 74
126 conclusions 107–8
Bible 57–58, 59, 93 Connell, Evan 130
Bishop, Elizabeth: ‘The Moose’ 131 Coover, Robert: ‘The Baby-Sitter’
Blanchot, Maurice: The Space of 130
Literature 7 creative reading 16–19, 29, 121, 138
158 Index
death 12–13, 86–87, 126 formalism 9–10
deconstruction 126, 138–39; Forster, E.M.: Aspects of the
see also Jacques Derrida Novel 105
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders 40, Four Weddings and a Funeral 28
41–42; Robinson Crusoe 40–42 free indirect discourse 47, 140
DeLillo, Don: Point Omega 4–5; Freud, Sigmund 97, 116, 119;
The Body Artist 117 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 3,
Derrida, Jacques 11, 32, 92, 126, 138; ‘Creative Writing and Day-
137, 138–39, 140 Dreaming’ 121–22; ‘Humour’
desire 73–74 125–26
Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist 2,
3–4 Gordimer, Nadine 56
Dickinson, Emily: ‘I’m Nobody! Goya, Francisco: ‘Disasters of
Who are you?’ 2, 4 War’ 28
dictionaries 133–35 Green, Eddie 57–58
double bind 88–89, 139 Greenblatt, Stephen 13
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Double
121 Hazanavicius, Michael: The Artist
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of 84–85
the Life of Frederick Douglass 42 Hazlitt, William: ‘Characters of
dreams 9 Shakespeare’s Plays’ 66
Dury, Ian 103 Heidegger, Martin 94
Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to
ekphrasis 26, 29, 139 Arms 15–16; A Moveable Feast
elegy 28–29, 139 126, 127, 129
Eliot, T.S.: ‘Philip Massinger’ 104; Herbert, George: ‘Affliction (I)’
The Waste Land 90–91 118; ‘Easter Wings’ 83–84
Ellis, Bret Easton: American Hill, Geoffrey 110
Psycho 11 Hughes, Ted: Birthday Letters 105;
Ellis, Havelock 121 ‘Hawk Roosting’ 118
Ellmann, Maud: The Nets of humour 125–26
Modernism 95–99 Hunter, Adrian 53
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: ‘The Huxley, Aldous: Brave New
American Scholar’ 18, 19 World 39
endings 130–31
epiphany 54, 56, 128, 139 imagination 8
epistolary 38, 105, 139 intentionality 31
essay questions 105–6, 108–9 interiority 43–44, 69, 91
exemplarity 32–33 interpretation 32
irony 31, 73, 141
Faulkner, William: Absalom, Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go
Absalom! 11 42–43, 48–49
fiction 5–6, 39–43
Fitzgerald, Edward: Rubáiyát of Jackson, Dennis: The Exam Secret
Omar Khayyám 12 111
focalization 50, 140 James, Henry 99, 126
Forbes, Peter 15 Jordan, Julia 5
Index 159
Josipovici, Gabriel 92 Morris, Pam 39–40
Joyce, James: Stephen Hero 54, 56; Morton, Timothy 99
A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man 118 Nabokov, Vladimir: Speak,
Memory 15
Kafka, Franz 92, 127; ‘The Hunger narcissism 29, 44
Artist’ 131; ‘The narrators 47–49, 62, 142
Metamorphosis’ 117 New Criticism 9–10
Kane, Sarah: 4.48 74 Newell, Mike see Four Weddings
Keats, John: Letters 4, 65, 80, 127; and a Funeral
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 80–81; Nietzsche, Friedrich: Daybreak 24
‘When I have fears that I may note taking 104–5
cease to be’ 81–82
Kermode, Frank 34, 130 Obama, Barack 10
King, Martin Luther 10 O’Connor, Flannery: ‘A Good
Man is Hard to Find’ 57–60, 61
Langland, William: Piers Plowman 9 omniscient narrator 47, 142–43
Larkin, Philip: ‘Aubade’ 86–87; oppositions 97–98
‘This be the Verse’ 56 ordinary 14–16, 25, 34
Lawrence, D.H. 126; ‘Why the originality 103
Novel Matters’ 12 Orwell, George: ‘The Frontiers of
life 12–13 Art and Propaganda’ 89;
literary criticism 95 Nineteen Eighty-Four 88
literary studies 6–7, 116, 124 Ovid: Metamorphoses 27–28, 117
literary theory 33, 93, 141 Oxford English Dictionary
literature: definition of 1–2, 126 133–35
love 70–71, 131
lyric poetry 43 Paley, Grace 129
paradox 93
McDonald’s 11 paraphrase 30, 33, 143
Macherey, Pierre 40 paratexts 40–41, 143
MacLeish, Archibald: ‘Ars Poetica’ Pascal, Blaise: Pensées 24
30 performativity 16, 31, 127, 143
magical thinking 13–14, 141 peripeteia 128
Mansfield, Katherine 126 Phillips, Adam 122
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels: philosophy 94–95
Communist Manifesto 10 Piers Plowman see Langland,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 122 William
Milton, John: ‘Lycidas’ 28 Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in
mimesis 15, 142 Search of an Author 118
mind reading 44–49, 91, 117, 142 plagiarism 104
modernism 98 Plath, Sylvia: ‘Daddy’ 105
Montaigne, Michel de 103–4; pleasure 14, 43, 65, 70, 85, 90, 115,
‘On Educating Children’ 104, 129, 130
105, 110, 112 Poe, Edgar Allan 53, 61, 129; ‘The
Morgan, Edwin 83 Sphinx’ 129–30
160 Index
politics 9–12, 88–89 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy
Pope, Alexander: ‘An Essay on 19
Criticism’ 92, 94 Stevens, Wallace 131: The Necessary
Pound, Ezra 8 Angel 8
Pritchett, V.S. 53, 56, 129
probability 43 telepathic narration 47, 145
prolepsis 98, 143 Tennyson, Alfred: In Memoriam
psychoanalysis 120–22; see also 28–29
Sigmund Freud terrorism 11
thesis statement 111
quotations in essays 107, 108–9, titles 129
113–14 trauma 125, 126
TV 14, 49, 85, 87
Readings, Bill 30
reality effect 14–16 university, purpose and value of 119
realism 15, 39–43, 144
religion, religious belief 11, 12, 18, Vann, David: Legend of a Suicide
57, 60, 87, 88 128
revising essays 112, 113, 114–15 voice 13, 17, 23, 30, 31
rhyme 25–26, 30
Rimbaud, Arthur 94 Walcott, Derek: The Bounty 29
Wallace, David Foster 49, 56, 81;
semi-colons 113 ‘Suicide as a Sort of Present’
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 8; ‘Adonais’ 54–57; The Pale King 5
28 Waugh, Evelyn: A Handful of Dust
Shakespeare, William: As You Like 18
It 9, 11, 73; Hamlet 2, 3, 5, 66, Wells, H. G. 117
72, 86, 117, 134–35; Julius Welty, Eudora 129
Caesar 9; King Lear 119; A Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis 93–94
Midsummer Night’s Dream 121; Williams, Raymond 1–2
Othello 43–44; Romeo and Wittgenstein, Ludwig 93, 94–95
Juliet 63–74 Wordsworth, William: ‘The
simulacrum 15 Thorn’ 15–16
singularity 32, 145 writer’s block 118–19
Situationists 10
soliloquy 43–44, 145 Yeats, W.B. 56

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‘A very shrewd, lively, and at times irreverent introduction to literary

study, which explains that thinking about literature is thinking about

‘Clear, fair-minded, and patiently elaborating, this is an invaluable ﬁeld

‘The seasoned authorial duo of Bennett and Royle has pulled it oﬀ

‘Reports on the so-called “death of literature” – its increasing irre-

‘Literature, it turns out in Bennett and Royle’s invigorating intro-

‘This Thing Called Literature is another triumph by Andrew Bennett

Andrew Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Bristol, UK.

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK.

Andrew Bennett and

ISBN: 978-1-138-01925-6 (hbk)

4 Reading a short story 53

6 Thinking about literature 79

8 Writing an essay 103

9 Creative writing: the impossible 116

10 Writing short ﬁction 124

Appendix: the wordbook 133

2.1 Pieter Brueghel (c.1527–69), Landscape with the Fall of

In this book we hope to give a sense of why and how literature

What is this thing called literature?

question. It is possible to provide numerous cogent but ultimately

these is a simple question or, indeed, simply a question. Let us

text and continue to provoke questions. What does it mean, how is

DeLillo’s novel makes reference to Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitch-

What’s the point of studying literature?

the study of literature interesting. Unlike more or less every other

The sky is not the limit

disturbing, menacing, even terrifying. We ﬁnd ourselves drawn into

Literature and other worlds

that revolutionary changes in the world always entail a literary

Politics of literature, literature of politics

In each case, words do not simply describe, but actually do things:

of contemporary literature. This is not by chance. Literature has to

Life and death

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

Lawrence, however, has no time for such notions. As he puts it in

Literature and magical thinking

a similar dream-like or unreal air to a poem, even if it is a poem

The ordinary and the everyday

great Russian novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov makes

There is a thorn; it looks so old,

Or consider the opening sentences of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that

Such openings might readily be compared with the life-like qualities of

treacherous. Annotation (including underlining or side-lining) is

striking phrases, arresting metaphors, unusual wordings;

Getting absorbed, even mildly obsessed by the play and meaning

The term ‘creative reading’ is hardly recent. As the great essayist

Creative reading is bound up with a critical appreciation of that

Reading might seem as easy as A, B, C, or might seem to be something

activity of reading. In particular, we want to explore the idea of

About suﬀering they were never wrong,

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

The language of Auden’s poem seems very straightforward, indeed

work. Although it is easy to miss, the poem does mostly rhyme: in

2004, 147). While Brueghel’s painting does indeed build on Ovid’s

asks in In Memoriam (1850) ‘How dare we keep our Christmas-eve[?]’,

merely an example. It points beyond itself. Indeed we could say that

error would be a problem. When art critics make generalizations

First, there are questions of voice and authorship: Who is speaking?

H arip g been caft o» Shore by Shipwreck, w here