In a makerspace, the focus is on creating, so students read what they write and write what they read as often as possible. Emulation is at the heart of the creative process. For most students, that means essay-writing, with poetry and short fiction occasionally.
Most other literature, especially the novel, is difficult to emulate. It takes a lot of time and a particular passion, like the it did for the first Pareto Project highlighted in 2017-2018. It isn’t for everyone.
Instead, literature is the primary tool for building a better human being:
The first section of that post pitches reading as a tool for understanding ourselves and our world. As the video, “What Is Literature For?” puts it:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
So literature is the most effective tool in the Humanities. That doesn’t address literary analysis. When do we analyze the symbolism, leitmotifs, imagery, etc., of a work of literature? When do we write essays of literary analysis?
Well, as much as Paul Graham seems to be right about how that subtype of essay-writing is “three steps removed from real work,” he’s not right to call it pointless. All analysis has a point:
Comedians deconstruct jokes; musicians deconstruct songs; writers deconstruct writing. Literature is slightly different, because it can teach us how to write well, even if we’re not interested in writing novels ourselves. There’s a reason that Hunter S. Thompson copied literature to learn how to write. Good writing is good writing.
Probably no student should copy Fitzgerald’s fiction verbatim (Hunter S. Thompson was special), but we can apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature, just like we would to nonfiction essays.
Emulation Through Analysis (ETA)
We’re going to use a series of questions adapted from The Language of Composition, a textbook on college-level argument and rhetoric, to apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature. From Chapter 2:
When we talk about diction, we might look for interesting or powerful vocabulary, but we also consider figures of speech like metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole. When we consider syntax, we want to notice interesting constructions like parallelism, juxtaposition, and antithesis, along with sentence types such as compound, complex, periodic, cumulative, and imperative, among others. We also might look at the pacing of a piece of work: Does the writer reveal details quickly or slowly? How does he or she build suspense?
The bolded terms here probably are worth memorizing, because they are the easiest to vary in your own work.
Use the following questions to analyze diction:
- What type of words draw your attention? Do they tend to be a particular part of speech, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs? Is the language general and abstract or specific and concrete?
- Is the language formal, informal, colloquial, or slang?
- Are some words nonliteral or figurative, creating figures of speech such as metaphors?
- Are there words with strong connotations? Words with a particular emotional punch?
Use the following questions to analyze syntax:
- What is the order of the parts of a sentence? Is it the usual order (subject-verb-object), or is it inverted (object-subject-verb, or any other pattern that is out of the ordinary)?
- What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (beginning with an important idea and then adding details)?
- Are many of the sentences simple? Complex? Compound? Are the sentences on the long side, or are they short?
- How does the writer connect words, phrases, and clauses?
If you are able to load the original textbook chapter through Google Classroom, you’ll note that the fourth question in the second set (“Does the writer ask questions?”) has been dropped. It’s a good question for certain texts, but it doesn’t have universal usefulness across different modes of writing.