For Thursday, you will read an article on Ellison’s novel, now that you’ve finished Invisible Man. Thus begins our real work of the semester, which is to go “under the hood” and figure out how criticism works. Here, we’ll read an excellent example of literary critical scholarship, one that chooses a very specific and “weird” angle on the text and applies a particular methodology to explore it.

In order to best analyze not just Blair’s argument, but the enterprise of literary criticism in general, we’re going to read the article together. We will do this via the hypothes.is annotation tool, a free and open tool (i.e., it costs nothing and it doesn’t profit from you in any way). Sign up via this link: log in if you have an account already; click the LOG IN link and then a) log in if you have an account or b) click SIGN UP if you don’t and follow the prompts:

Now you should be able to click the arrow on the upper right-hand corner of the Blair article page, pop out the sidebar with the hypothes.is tools, and log in:

From there, you can highlight text to create new annotations, make general comments using “page annotations,” and (most important) respond to others’ annotations. I say “most important” because I’ve posed questions and made comments throughout the article that I’d like you to respond to. Note that you will be part of an ENGL 252 private group, so your comments will be viewable only by members of the class.

I don’t have a set number of comments each student should make, but I do want to see evidence of every single student spending time with the article and my questions on it.

Questions? Feel free to ask me via email.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.