Academic Writing in Literary Studies: From Close Reading to Scholarly Argument

Turn close reading into a clear, persuasive scholarly argument.

Academic Writing in Literary Studies: From Close Reading to Scholarly Argument helps university students develop the reading, research, and writing practices essential to literary scholarship. Using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby throughout, Michael Yasui shows how an observation about a passage can become a focused question, a defensible interpretation, and a sustained essay.

At the heart of the book is a question: how does the way a story is told shape what readers understand? Students examine how narrative voice, perspective, language, and structure produce meaning. They learn to distinguish evidence from inference, evaluate competing interpretations, and explain why the details of a text matter to an argument.

Twenty-seven chapters guide readers through three connected stages:

• Foundations of literary analysis: reading and note-taking, plot, conflict, characterization, setting, narrative voice, imagery, symbolism, and theme.

• Critical approaches: Historicism, New Criticism, reader-response criticism, Freud, Jung, Lacan, feminism, linguistics, semiotics, semantics, deconstruction, and New Historicism. Applications to Gatsby demonstrate how different approaches generate different questions—and why an interpretation must remain accountable to textual evidence.

• Research and scholarly writing: developing research questions and theses, finding and evaluating scholarship, building analytical paragraphs, integrating quotation and paraphrase, organizing an argument, using MLA documentation, and revising for clarity and precision.

Learning objectives, teaching panels, model analyses, and review checklists make the steps of scholarly reasoning visible. A comprehensive glossary and annotated guide to further reading support independent study and deeper engagement with literary criticism.

Designed for students developing confidence in scholarly English, the book also addresses the challenges of reading and writing across English and Japanese, with attention to translation, editions, and accurate attribution.

Whether used in a university course or for independent study, Academic Writing in Literary Studies provides a foundation for evidence-based literary essays and the more extensive research of a graduation thesis. Its goal is intellectual independence: helping students ask worthwhile questions, engage scholarship thoughtfully, and contribute an argument of their own.