Arguing about Literature: A Guide and Reader

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More and more, first- year writing courses foreground skills of critical analysis and argumentation. In response, Arguing about Literature hones students’ analytical skills through instruction in close critical reading of texts, showing them how to turn their reading into well-supported and rhetorically effective argumentative writing. Two books in one, it combines a guide to reading literature and writing arguments with a compact thematic anthology of stories, poems, plays, essays, and arguments for analysis and research, from the authors of Making Literature Matter.

John Schilb (PhD, State University of New York—Binghamton) is a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he holds the Culbertson Chair in Writing. He has coedited Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, and with John Clifford, Writing Theory and Critical Theory. He is author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations.

John Clifford (PhD, New York University) is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Editor of The Experience of Reading: Louis Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Theory, he has published numerous scholarly articles on pedagogy, critical theory, and composition theory, most recently in College English; Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers; and in The Norton Book of Composition Studies.